“Your thoughts create your reality” never really worked for my neurodivergent experience of the world.
It invites in a lot of shame, really, when I think about it. I spent years in programs that preached the law of attraction as the only means to true financial freedom, and all that work I did to ‘rewire my brain’ didn’t improve my financial situation. In fact, my finances got worse during that time, due to factors outside of my control (aka big financial trauma), and the shame was unbearably heavy. If my thoughts created my reality, then my thoughts must have brought me to rock bottom, which must mean there’s something deeply wrong with my thoughts, and by proxy, something deeply wrong with me.
It honestly kept me in a cycle of self-sabotage longer, this shame. The worthiness wound is something I think about a lot in relation to money-related trauma, because shame is such an effective weapon in this sense. If you don’t believe that you’re worthy of a better experience, if you don’t even find yourself worthy of hard work or earnestly trying at something, the chances of self-sabotage go up while the chances of making true positive change go way down. Like a seesaw. Thus, when the financial trauma or self-sabotage occurs, it reinforces the idea that you are not worthy of prosperity, because if you were, you would have figured out how to think better thoughts and your reality wouldn’t look the way it looks right now. At least that’s what the voice in my head told me.
It was devastating when I realized how much shame and feeling unworthy were effectively derailing my finances and really, my life. It was hard not to shame-spiral about how much I had given shame control over my life. It was extremely sobering. The only option was to invite in compassion, because shame clearly wasn’t even getting me closer to the goals I so craved. Simply put, it became clear to me that shaming myself into prosperity was a poor strategy and should probably be abandoned. It wasn’t serving me anymore, as the kids say.
Money is such an emotionally fraught subject. It’s really no wonder so many people are caught in shame spirals or cycles of self-sabotage with their finances. Money is just one of those things, as a neurodivergent person who didn’t realize I was neurodivergent until my late 20s, that I assumed everyone just “figured out” at some point and I had missed the boat. Money management was a skill I never developed, and every attempt I made at developing that skill always had the same result: further embarrassment and frustration as I snapped back to my sabotaging ways like a rubber band.
One of the things that compounded my shame and frustration about money and my financial trauma was the fact that I was always told, by the manifestation “experts” and life coaches and self-help podcasts I surrounded myself with, that the reason these things kept happening to devastate my financial life and my stability was because of my own thoughts. I hadn’t fixed my thinking. I hadn’t rewired my brain properly yet because I wasn’t saying my affirmations in the mirror every morning while getting evicted, or my attitude wasn’t “attracting abundance” while I lost job after job due to my undiagnosed neurodivergence. Being told to “focus on the positives” when my car, which was my sole source of income at the time, broke down every 2 weeks and eventually stopped working altogether, did not inspire feelings of adequacy or competence for me. It was quite the opposite. Not only was I bad at making, keeping, and spending money, I was also bad at thinking because I couldn’t maintain a gratitude journal while my life kept falling apart over and over again.
If you relate to any part of this, I first want to say I’m sorry, and I’m proud of you. There’s nothing wrong with your thoughts. They aren’t representative of who you are and they don’t determine what you deserve. If the manifestation industrial complex has left you feeling more ashamed and less empowered than you were before, your experience is not terminally unique. It is possible to change your financial situation and heal from your money trauma without conforming to ableist and tone-deaf dogmas about manifesting your destiny. It is possible to not only co-exist with money, but co-create with it. Money is not an energy, but it is a story, and you can rewrite your story in a way that leaves you empowered and safe.
