Five Possible Reasons Many Adopted People are Broke
I know not every adopted person feels like they don’t have enough money. But I do know many who say they can’t be in one of my groups or attend a retreat because they don’t have enough money. I do know many who say they can’t live the lives they would like to because they are broke.
(I know kept people also struggle with money, but I’m not one of those people, and so I’m writing about adopted people because I am one of them.)
I co-led a year-long group with Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao on adopted people and money. I have been thinking (and by thinking I mean worrrying) about money ever since I can remember having thoughts. All of this is to say I have been researching this topic for years and years.
For six decades, I believed that my life would finally be mine when I had enough money to catch my breath and relax. Then my dad died and left me some money. I had enough to catch my breath and relax.
If anything, I felt emptier. I had lost my center—the thing around which I spun my life: money worries.
It was like believing all your life that everything would go your way if you could only have false teeth, and then you get a perfect set of white chompers and you have the terrible, sinking, gut-sick realization that you are the same person with the same basic concerns. Only now you have perfectly straight white teeth (that you can take out at parties and be that person) and so you can’t use your teeth as a locus for your anxieties. You have to start obsessing about your ears and researching lobe-lifting surgery or something.
What I’m saying is that I found worrying about money was like a binkie for me. When I didn’t need to worry about it any more it was like someone took my batteries out. Anxiety, fear, and even terror had been powerful sources of energy for me. I got up every morning and hustled because I had to—there was no money. It was hustle or die.
Hustling to stay alive means you’ll take whatever you can get. It means you are living a life based on survival rather than a life based on what would I like to do with my time on this planet, with this body, with this mind. Hustling to stay alive means you aren’t able to focus on who am I and what do I want. It means you, perhaps, feel both broke and broken.
I don’t know if any of these things are true for other people, but see how these resonate with you:
Five Reasons Many Adopted People Are Broke:
If you feel poor internally because you believe your mother relinquished you because you were somehow not enough, your outer world will likely reflect this poverty mindset. Having money in the bank could actually feel uncomfortable and wrong.
You believe you are broken. You believe you have a hole in your heart. You believe relinquishment is a wound that cannot be healed. You believe some part of you died when you were relinquished. See #1.
If money feeds us, would it not make sense that our brains might confuse a mother’s love with the power money gives us. Might it not make sense that if we could not have her love, then we also can not have the milk and honey lifestyle money could afford us?
Money is seen as power. If you have a lot of money, you are powerful. You can pay people to do what you don’t want to do, perhaps. People will be nice to you because they hope you will float them a gift. Stuff like that. If you don't like your face, you can pay to sculpt a new one. If you don’t like your neighbor, you can sell your house and move, or pay them to move. If you didn’t have enough power to keep your mother around, how could you keep a dollar?
Enough is an issue for many adopted people. Our first mothers didn’t have enough money to keep us, perhaps. Our adoptive parents had enough money to pay for us and call us their own. If we didn’t have enough money to own our bodies from the start, how is there ever going to be enough? We might as well not even have it because it’s never going to be enough.
