In my experience, prioritizing money over healing and being a healthy person is a golden ticket to suffering.
In Twelve Step Recovery, there's an actual warning in Tradition Six that encourages us not to allow "problems of money, property or prestige to divert us from our primary purpose." What's our primary purpose? To heal our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual insecurities held in the mind that are a primary influencing force toward being at peace and friendly with ourselves.
Why would it say that? Because we can spend a lot of time obsessing about the number in our checking account, 100% distracted from working on ourselves, chasing money more than our recovery. This can lead to ugly and inconsistent results. An unhealthy relationship with money can be a symptom of addiction, a trigger toward suffering, because we associate it with our sense of security, worthiness and power, giving it too much sway over our moods and daily experience.
I've been that person who at times allowed an unhealthy mental relationship with craving for money, power and prestige as a form of ego soothing to get overwhlemed and shutdown. This nearly led me away from healing. I've known many addicts who misprioritized and ended up relapsing, willing to throw their recovery and mental health overboard to chase money, ending up in jail, dead, or as my friend Brenden says "Another zombie walking the dead zone."
By the way, I'm not saying to avoid having resources. I'm saying that overvaluing them over what is most important is usually an unwise trade-off. It can be so fleeting and arbitrary.
That said, I've seen recovering addicts who are beautiful stewards of resources--people who don't allow themselves to be diverted from healing. They know how to prioritize in a way that meets their needs while still working on themselves. They also help others transform unhealthy relationships with money and power that provide false identity.
Woe to thee who cannot admit we have struggles in specific areas and don’t want to own the fact that we need support. It’s a fact that people who know what they’re doing can in fact sometimes help us restore areas of our lives to sanity. Having mentors can help properly harmonize priorities and gain perspective. We don't have to see only two extremes. With guidance, we can make empowered choices that don't feed into fear-based obsessions over control. As long as we stay anchored to our healing path, we can also attract resources to live and thrive authentically.
In closing, I invite people to remember, two things when it comes to recovery. One… Healing is a jigsaw puzzle. It’s taking seperate and individual pieces and putting them together to create a “Complete” picture. There are no one trick methods that cure our mind. Two, if we don't improve our healthy problem-solving skills we usually stay f*cked ona specturm. Recovering attic with no healthy problem-solving skills is a victim waiting to be eaten by the disease of addiction.
—Dignity and Grace
PS: I have a Sponsee and a few other friends in recovery that have read and gotten a lot of insight and wise experience from a book called “The Soul of Money,” by Lynne Twist which helped them move in a healthier direction, in terms of now allowing insecurity and scarcity mentality hold them upside down and shake their pockets out.
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