Why do we compulsively shop and spend? Let's talk money and trauma

0:02 A listener production. Welcome to another solo episode of Crappy and Happy, and today I have another listener question which I thought was a really interesting one. So let me play that for you right now. Hip pass. I'm wondering if you could provide more details and go into the psychology around money and the connection to trauma. So, for example, I get rarely stressed at Christmas time based on family members, that I've lost my connection with my parents, feeling lonely, all sorts of feelings. Basically, I was overspending and I drained my bank accounts. I was conscious that I was doing it, but then at the same time, I just kept doing it.

1:02 Okay, So, first of all, straight off the top, it goes without saying that this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical therapeutic support. The only information that I can share here is general information that is broadly applicable to lots of people. I am not offering individual advice or therapy on the show or ever online, So that's my disclaimer. I would be in a lot of trouble if I offered personal psychological advice on the podcast. Having said that, this issue of money and trauma, I think is a really really interesting one, and so that's why when this question came in, I was really keen to address it here on the show, because I think many listeners, as we know, have experienced some form of trauma in their lives, and many people also struggle financially, whether it's to do with being in constant debt, always spending more than new man, never feeling like you have enough, whether it is undercharging for services, having difficulty asking for what you're worth financially, there's a whole lot of really complicated links and associations between money and self worth, and also to do with just how we manage our impulses and our behaviors generally. So let me just talk about that briefly on the show today, and then if you identify that this is potentially a problem for you, then it might prompt you to go and seek some advice or some support of your own in this area. Broadly speaking,

2:36 we all know that experiencing trauma in childhood is associated with a whole lot of complicated issues later in life, particularly to do with mental health issues. We've talked on this podcast about even physical health issues that might be a later consequence of early childhood trauma, but particularly things like addictive behaviors, mental health, mood disorders. These can all be consequences of early childhood difficulties, early childhood adverse experiences. We know that childhood trauma has links later with attention deficit disorder ADHD, and as we know, as we've already discussed, ADHD is not so much a deficit of attention or a disorder related to attention. It's more a disorder related to executive functioning and impulse control. So it's all of the part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex is associated with planning and implementing and executing on a task or a project and staying on track with that, holding that in your working memory, and keeping that at the forefront and the priority, as opposed to being pulled offline and pulled off course by other what we call the subcordical regions of the brain, which is more that impulsive kind of behave where they come in. So issues to do with impulse control, issues to do with behavior management, regulating

4:09 your behaviors, resisting the urge to do certain things, these can all be compromised by early childhood trauma. The parts of your brain associated with executive functioning and impulse control can be affected by early childhood trauma. So therefore, anything that is a compulsive sort of a behavior, whether it be eating, spending, gambling, inappropriate sexual activities, pornography, anything that serves that purpose I guess, of providing an immediate source of pleasure or reward. Those really high dopamine kind of behaviors, the pleasure seeking sort of behaviors. People who have experienced trauma can have difficulty regulating those sorts of behaviors and keeping them in check. When we talk about shopping, compulsive buying disorder is an actual term, and compulsive buying disorder refers to as it probably sounds, compulsively spending money in a way that ultimately is going to have negative consequences.

5:13 It's very much like any other addictive behavior. An addictive behavior is something that you continue to do you compulsively. You feel compelled to continue to do the behavior despite the fact that there are negative, very real, negative consequences associated with the behavior. I guess. The other thing that we know about early trauma is that it is often associated with fairly chronic feelings of unworthiness. It is if you have an insecure attachment, which is the most likely outcome if you've experienced childhood trauma, and we've talked previously about insecure attachment on this show, then that can often manifest as feeling fearful, untrusting, feeling unsafe in the world world, having difficulty forming intimate connections with other people, being vulnerable opening up, have difficulties trusting people or being trustworthy, whether you are comfortable to get close to people, or you remain avoidant of people because you are fearful of that kind of vulnerability that comes with those intimate relationships, potentially because you have no experience of that if you didn't experience that growing up feelings of shame, and remember shame is that belief that if people really knew you, they would reject you. So it's just sort of this internal core feeling that there is something bad or wrong with you that other people would have difficulty accepting. Childhood trauma

6:45 creates all of these kinds of feelings, So if you feel that way, then often that can lead to behaviors that really are an attempt to escape that kind of Those are all really painful feelings, deeply painful feelings, and so when you've experienced trauma, you're often drawn to behaviors that give you something pleasurable or help you to escape or avoid those core feelings of shame or unworthiness or unhappiness, whatever it is that you're experiencing. Hence the compulsion towards addictive kind of behaviors. And we know with addictive behaviors they are highly rewarding in terms of they produce a lot of dopamine in your brain, and dopamine is the chemical, the neurotransmitter associated with motivation. So you when you experience something that gives you a lot of pleasure, that you are compelled to repeat that behavior too. That's its whole function, that's what dopamine is designed to do. This is why people who have difficult early experiences can often be drawn into this kind of cycle of addictive kind of behaviors and then end up in this pattern of repeating those behaviors.

7:56 And of course the more that you repeat the behaviors, the more compulsive they become. And if you also have feeling self shame or guilt associated with those behaviors because you know that they're bad, or you're getting yourself into debt, or you're getting yourself into not functioning in life. You know that you're drinking too much or eating too much, shopping too much. The feeling of shame, which just makes you feel worse, is going to only propel you more towards those behaviors that are designed to avoid the feelings of pain, very self reinforcing, very much a vicious cycle, and that is often what the cycle and the pattern that people find themselves in. Compulsive buying is characterized by excessive or poorly controlled preoccupations, urges, and or behaviors focused on shopping and spending, which can cause psychological distress and lead to reduced quality of life. So compulsive buying or shopping is just one variation of a compulsive behavior that you might experience if you have experienced childhood trauma. And I'm not saying that only people with childhood trauma might experience compulsive buying. And I'm not saying that every person who's experienced compulsive buying will engage in compulsive behaviors. That's not true. We just know that there is a greater likelihood, there is an increased risk. You may have had no childhood trauma and still be compelled to engage in these compulsive buying activities or any other compulsive activities. It's just that the association is stronger when there is a history of trauma or adverse childhood experience. So there hasn't been

9:33 a lot of research done into this from what I can tell, but I did find a couple of studies, and one examined five different types of childhood trauma occurring before the age of twelve years and they were witnessing violence, experiencing physical neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. So those five types of childhood trauma, which you'll probably recognize as five from the ACES study, the ad Childhood Experiences study. They looked at those five experiences in relationship to compulsive buying and they found that all forms of trauma, all of those five forms of trauma were statistically significantly correlated with compulsive buying or shopping. And what they found was that particularly strong were witnessing violence and experiencing emotional abuse before the age of twelve, So there was a very strong correlation between early childhood trauma and compulsive shopping.

10:32 Another study found that people will often turn to materialism in the face of uncertainty in life, either uncertainty within themselves, as in a core feeling of self doubt or just uncertainty socially uncertainty with the world. People are drawn to materialist kind of behaviors when they experience uncertainty. It's almost a form of exerting control over what you can control when you feel like things are out of control, or you're feeling self doubt or uncertain or unstable within yourself, which makes sense. The other thing that shopping does is if there is a core feeling of unworthiness, if there is a feeling of lack within yourself, it can be very easy to be drawn to acquiring things and holding onto things, either to project an image of worthiness. If I look nice and if I dress well, and if I have this nice car and these nice things and buy this nice house, then people won't see how unworthy I feel inside. So I'm trying to present an image that will be I think will be accepted by other people.

11:45 That will make me more likable, that will make me more accepted, validated, approved of. So looking for that validation in the form of material things. It's also remember if you think about Maslow's higherarchy of needs, the very bottom, the very basic level of safety. The very fundamental need on that hierarchy is feeling safe and having enough of the basics in life, having food, having roof over your head, having something to wear, warmth. Before you even go up to feeling safe from harm or climbing up to things like self actualization and self esteem, we need to have how material needs met. We need to have our basic needs, physical needs taken care of. And so sometimes if we're feeling unsafe in the world, which is a key feature of somebody who's experienced childhood trauma, then buying things can give us that feeling of security, that feeling of material security, like I have enough if I keep enough things around me, if there's enough food in the cupboard, if there's enough stuff, then it can kind of psychologically give me that feeling of safety and security. So I guess it's complicated, and there's also no simple answer. There's no straightforward answer about why in this situation would I be triggered into compulsively

13:18 shopping and filling my pantry even though I've already got enough. But it's fair to say that where there is an experience of family dysfunction, where there is a trauma associated with your family of origin, which it most often is. Then contact with your family of origin can be a triggering experience. So if you're you might be getting along fine in the world, doing your job and having your friends and you know, living your life, and often people can feel kind of psychologically activated, triggered in experiences. We're going to be back in contact with those people who are associated with early trauma, whatever that trauma might have been.

14:02 There's a whole lot of associations there with those people and in that situation that can be activated. And even if you're not really consciously aware of it, it's happening at an unconscious level. Remember, your nervous system is constantly kind of looking for signals of safety or signals of danger, and it's spotting things in the world that you're not even conscious of physically, you know, like your nervous system is picking up on sites and smells and tone of voice, and shadows and colors in your environment which you probably have no conscious memory of, but they can trigger associations that are locked away deep in the recesses of your unconscious mind. And then your nervous system starts to react.

14:53 And again this is happening in your physiology. It's not a conscious choice. It's not something you decide or that you have control over. Your nervous system starts to react that that threat response starts to mobilize, it starts to get activated, and you can just find yourself feeling out of thoughts or just compulsively doing things designed to either escape feelings of discomfort or to deliberately induce feelings of safety and security or pleasure because something else is going on. You've been triggered somehow. I guess it sort of makes sense that, particularly for somebody like my listener, who is in a situation where she was going to be back in contact with people who she might associate with early childhood, and no matter how much therapy she might have done and talked through this and felt like she'd resolved it or felt like she was getting a handle on it at a conscious level, then often unconsciously little things can just trigger us into old patterns of behavior. So there could be various reasons why that manifested as going out and buying and overspending, but it was very much the definition of compulsively buying knowing that there was a negative consequence, like I'm draining my bank account buying this stuff when I don't actually need it, and that is the very definition of what a compulsive buying disorder is. If it is continued and repeated, it becomes a disorder as opposed

16:24 to a one off. That's potentially what was happening. So it always comes back, I think, to being able to have some self compassion. The worst thing we can do, the worst response, is to feel shame and get down on ourselves. There can be a lot of shame around the topic of money. If you earn a good job but you have nothing to show for it, it makes you feel like there is something wrong with you. If you have got racked up mountains of debt, or your feeling like you're constantly chasing off creditors, it feels bad, and it feels like you, as an adult in the world, like you haven't got issued together and you don't want anybody to know about that. Shame only makes these behaviors worse, It only actually reinforces that unhelpful cycle. Like I said right in the beginning, So some self compassion and some curiosity about what might be driving this behavior. If you know that compulsive buying is an issue for you in a broader sense, like not just the one off kind of I just went out and I just ran up my credit card or whatever I did. Then if you know that this is a chronic problem, then, like I said, maybe it's not a case of seeing a financial adviser and getting a budget in place. Maybe it's a case of talking to a therapist and working at what's at the root cause of this kind of behavior, Doing things like automating savings so that you take the thinking out of it. If you know that there's an impulse control

17:57 issue that you have difficulty in inhibiting those urges to go and spend, if you know that you're a sucker for a sale and you constantly buy things that you don't need, then setting up automated savings, getting money automatically taken out for bills or put away into savings so that you don't actually see it and you have limited access to it. Things like that can be really helpful from a pragmatic perspective, because you ideally want to have less thinking associated like less of you having to directly manage and make good choices around money. You want some of that to be taken off your plate, like at the risk of sounding patronizing, like you can't be trusted.

18:44 Some of us can't be trusted, right, So you make it easier for yourself if you can automate some of those things. I think when we talk about money too, and just the energy of money, then oftentimes people make an association between self worth and net worth, and I think that probably applies more to people who potentially are in business or charging for services, or maybe in the workplace. If you undervalue yourself, if your early experiences have led you to feeling undeserving or unworthy, which can often be the case, then that can lead to you feeling uncomfortable to charge what you're worth in your business. For example, negotiating higher salary can lead to you undercharging, over delivering, overperforming, overachieving, seeking that kind of reward, and again, acceptance and approval and validation very much also part of the impost experience, you know. I obviously teach my program Beyond Confidence is all about helping women in particular to overcome imposter syndrome and self doubt, and so there's a really clear link there too between feeling unworthy or undeserving or not belonging and that manifesting as undercharging, over functioning, overachieving, over delivering, and so they can be financial consequences of that as well.

20:09 So if you are experiencing that, then that's definitely something worth looking at, and sometimes things like tapping, if t tapping anything that helps to regulate your nervous system and help you to resolve some of those emotional blocks that you might have. Money is very much a charged kind of issue. It's a topic of conflict in relationships, in marriages, people's relationship with money, how they use money. It really does kind of all come back to our core feelings of safety and security in the world, and so it can be a really charged topic and there's a lot of emotion around it, which is why there can be a lot of shame around it too. If you're having trouble managing money, managing finances, if you grew up in a household where you didn't have anything, or you were always the one that the kid that didn't have the nice things or the nice clothes, or you couldn't go out and do the things that your friends were doing because your parents couldn't afford it, or because they chose not to spend money on those things, then that can lead to you over compensating as an adult, overspending kind of wanting to have those things and wanting but having that association in your mind that being able to wear those nice clothes or those brand labels, or to do those things and participate in those activities, that's all representative to you of belonging and connectedness and feeling enough, feeling like you are as good as and as worthy of

21:40 other people if that wasn't what you had, So there can be an overcompensating kind of behavior that happens for some people. But you know, on the other hand, people who were given everything as children can grow up with a sense of entitlement and have no concept of boundaries and limits and kind of just have this expectation that that everything will be provided, and that can lead to compulsive overspending as well. So this is why I say there's no one answer. There's no one cause and effect scenario. There can be multiple scenarios, multiple different causes and conditions and experiences and family dynamics that can manifest in different ways in terms of your relationship with money as an adult and your compulsive or otherwise spending habits. So I hope that it's been helpful. I hope it gives you some food for thought. Always self compassion, always managing your nervous system, finding ways to cultivate a feeling of calm and safety and connection. We all ultimately want to have a sense of belonging. We want to have a fundamental sense of our own self worth. We want to feel safe in the world, safe within ourselves. We want to have supportive relationships, and we want to have a level of calm and an ability to be able to manage our selves and manage our impulses so that we are

23:13 living in a world in a way that is healthy and balanced and not really driven by these compulsive urges, which are really kind of these primal urges that we have that are driven by a need to either escape or to feel safe in the world. We want to be able to have different ways of cultivating those feelings of safety, and obviously we all want to feel a sense of our inherent self worth. And so this is your reminder that you are worthy, you are enough, you are safe, and you are all valued for the wonderful kind people that you are, regardless of what you have or you don't have, and regardless of what you do.

24:04 That's my little pep talk for today. I hope that has been helpful. Hit me up if you have any other questions about that, and I can't wait to catch you on the next episode of Crapy or Happy. But in the meantime, if you are interested in my Beyond Confident program, these doors are open again. You can find out more about that cast done dot com forward slash Beyond hyphen Confident I think it is, but you will find it on my website castdne dot com. The Imposter solution also available on Audible. You can download that for free. Can't wait to see you next time Listener,