🟣 Money Jealousy to Contentment: Advice from a Therapist.
🎙️ 10 minutes with financial psychotherapist, Vicky Reynal.
⏱️ The plan for your 10 minutes of financial self-care:
The difference between envy and ambition;
When is your financial envy “too much”;
How to find the root causes of your envy.
What to do if you feel overwhelmed by envy.
Three tips to finding financial contentment.
Hello there 💜
And welcome to everyone who joined the Money Feelings community last week.
🌎 Looks like we're spread across 8 US states and 23 countries. Incredible!We’re in luck today because I’m giving the floor to someone who will be perfect for our multicultural group.
Vicky Reynal lived in nine different countries across three continents.
She has years of experience as a psychotherapist in the private and public sectors, including the British NHS, where she worked with people from the financial services, public sector, and creative professions.
She runs a private practice that specializes in financial psychotherapy.
She is the author of Money on Your Mind, which recently won Best Book at The Money Awareness and Inclusion Awards.
She’s been interviewed by the Guardian, the Financial Times, and the Telegraph.
Today, we have 10 minutes “alone” with her.
I asked her to guide us in understanding one of today’s biggest financial psychology challenges.
Money envy.
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🟣 Hi Vicky!
What makes it important to recognize and address financial envy?
How might it affect our mental health and financial stability?It’s important to recognise financial envy because if we don’t, we are at risk of acting it out.
I have seen envy get acted out in all sorts of ways: we might get the friend that we envy who we envy a terrible present, or spend too much money on their gift trying to show to them that ‘we too’ have abundant resources.
We might steal or ‘play dirty’ in financial dealings with someone we envy (siblings, business partners) or lie about money in order to make ourselves look better or hide shameful realities of our financial situation.
All these actions put our relationships at risk and can be the result of uncontained envy.
Envy is an ordinary feeling, and many of us haven’t been taught that we can just sit with it and try to manage it.
Being told that it’s a ‘bad feeling,’ we suppress it, fail to recognise it and name it and that’s how it sometimes ends up getting acted out.
🟣 How do you distinguish between healthy aspiration and unhealthy financial envy in your patients?
When does a feeling of financial envy or jealousy becomes "too much"?I think the distinction between envy and jealousy is an important one to make.
Envy can be summed up as ‘I want what you have,’ whereas jealousy can be summed up as ‘I want what you have with them.’
Envy requires is a two-person dynamic, whereas jealousy is a three-person dynamic in which two are in competition for the third.
Ambition and envy are different too.
Ambition is borne internally, out of an inner desire for something (an achievement, a possession); it involves the gathering up of resources to direct towards an objective.
Envy, being a two-person dynamic, is a response to what the other has: yes, we might want it, but this is less about our desire and more about our annoyance, resentment even bitterness at the idea that the other has it and we don’t.
It gets too much when we can’t sit with our feelings, manage them internally, let them dissipate.
They overtake us, meaning that we either begin to obsess about it, focusing a lot of our attention on how much ‘the other’ has.
Or we act out, meaning that we might take an action we later regret or that isn’t fully reasonable because we are expressing our envy rather than making a thoughtful choice.
🟣 Can you share an example of financial envy you have encountered in your professional practice?
How did you help this person manage this feeling?In my book Money on Your Mind, I give the example of a client who kept a big financial secret—becoming a millionaire—from his friends out of fear of their financial envy.
He was so afraid that friends would either exploit him or stop speaking to him, therefore acting out their envy, terrified this man to such an extent that he couldn’t enjoy his newfound financial freedom.
But there are plenty of cases in which clients express their envy unknowingly.
A case comes to mind of a woman, Clare, who spoke very sarcastically about one particular friend, Lauren. There was always anger in her tone when she spoke about her and as time went by it was clear that anything the friend spoke about (the new bag, or flat, or dinnerware) was an irritant to Clare.
I asked her whether alongside the contempt about her friends’ flamboyant spending there was envy too. Clare initially denied this – as if admitting it to me would somehow give the friend the satisfaction of knowing that she has evoked Clare’s envy.
I was curious about why it was so hard to accept that she envied Lauren’s possessions.
It later emerged that Clare’s friendship with Lauren had a complicated history. Clare had felt betrayed by her friend – they were best friends for a long time until Lauren entered a serious relationship with her now husband and took a big step back in the friendship – something that hurt Clare deeply.
She held on to a great deal of anger about this and struggled to work through her feelings. And this is why I always insist that it’s worthwhile checking what the financial envy could be about beyond the financial.
Maybe Clare did envy Lauren’s financial resources and new acquisitions, but this got mixed up with the anger and potentially with the other things Lauren now had (a loving relationship, a partner to go on holidays with, etc.).
It was only until all these feelings were disentangled and given room, that the envy could dissipate.
🟣 What exercise would you recommend to someone who feels overwhelmed or consumed by financial envy to manage and mitigate it?💡 The rest of this episode is available to subscribers only. To keep reading, you can:
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