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A divorce. A house fire. A serious accident or illness. The death of a family member. Caring for elderly parents. Life events like these are some of the hardest, most emotionally draining challenges we can face. Just to make things worse, they also require us to deal with finances and make significant and complex money decisions.
How do you manage both?
One tool is to compartmentalize. A client whose spouse died suddenly told me, “I’ve learned that if I have to meet with the attorney or deal with the insurance company, I can set my feelings aside for a while so I can focus.”
In the moment, this is a necessary strategy to help you deal with the immediate concerns. Whether you are dealing with a devastating loss, supporting a loved one through a serious illness, or caring for an elderly parent, the person or situation in front of you requires you to be present. This is not the time to be processing your own emotional stuff.
What is also necessary sooner or later, though, is to pick up those painful emotions that you set aside.
Rose Zealand, an end-of-life doula and certified financial planner in Colorado, describes this process with a relatable analogy. When it’s essential that you be present and you don’t have the space to process your own emotions, you put them into a box and stash it somewhere. Every unprocessed emotion around every hard task you have to take care of goes into a box.
If you don’t go back later to open these boxes, they get stored. Early on, the boxes fit into a closet or the trunk of the car. Keep going without attending to them, and that space fills up. Then you start filling up the garage, the basement, and the attic. Eventually you’re renting offsite storage units.
That’s what burnout and compassion fatigue look like. You have not stopped caring; you simply have no room left for all the emotions in those stacks of boxes.
The longer the boxes stay sealed, the more they cost. Caregivers who burn out miss work, neglect their own physical and financial health, make impulsive decisions under stress, and sometimes end up needing care themselves far sooner than they should.
The remedy, according to Rose, depends on how much stuff you’ve stored. For a closet full of emotional boxes, some journaling or open conversation with a trusted friend might be enough. If you have filled up the garage, the attic, and a couple of storage units, you may need deeper work with the help of a therapist. If it took a lifetime to accumulate, it’s going to take time to clear out.
Rose’s own approach includes long-term therapy, paying attention to physical health, helping clients practice self-forgiveness, and what she calls thought hygiene. This last includes paying attention to and reworking the unconscious beliefs running in the background. Among these are the money scripts that affect every financial decision and also shape the emotions that we set aside.
Just as with other forms of self-care, this is not “one and done” but is a continuous practice. The willingness to keep returning to those stored-away emotions and bringing them into the open is how we heal.
The ability to set our feelings aside and do what has to be done takes strength and courage. Going back and processing those emotions takes the same strength and even more courage. There is also a secondary reason to do our own work. It helps restore and support our ability to deal with the stressful responsibilities we face and be present for the people who need us.
Related: The Saver-Spender Trap: Why Couples Keep Fighting About Money