Confessions Of A 'Surrendered Wife' With Finances

The letters had arrived and were unopened, which threw me into a deeper rage. Addressed to his company account I didn't pay any attention to them when collecting the mail. I uncontrollably continued my tirade by picking up an old Ikea bar stool which I proceeded to smash to smithereens against one of the poplar trees in the yard while my husband watched in controlled arm-crossed chilly silence as I made an utter fool of myself. If you’re wondering how good it felt, I must admit that it did feel really good to take it all out on the bar stool! Yet, I wasn't too proud of myself once I cooled down.

But here’s the deal. It really wasn’t at all about the money issues and bounced checks which were covered by overdraft protection. Nor was it about the cultural differences around different banking systems. And no one even knows about credit scores in France! The banks were happy to have us paying them interest every month.

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It was deeper than that. The cultural differences are  undeniably impactful and they just served as excuses for covering up what was going on beneath them. It was about our inability to communicate and understand the impact of our cultural backgrounds regarding our values, couple finances and our individual relationships to money. It was about me feeling insecure, my fear of potential mounting debt and the fact that he seemed to disregard my values regarding that. It’s always about the lack of communication around something deeper that we don't easily see. In this case it was about us being unable to se and acknowledge the cultural differences and discuss how to negotiate them. And in order to do that, we first needed to know where our blocks and beliefs were regarding money and being able to talk about it.

At the time, had we had access to my Compatibility Index, an innovative assessment tool that pinpoints where the obstacles are to compatibility, we would have known where our energy blocks were. We could have shone a big bright light on those culprits and flushed them out into the open, improving communication in ways the self-help books can't. And instead of getting angry, we could have perhaps even laughed about it, as we ended up doing afterwards, every time we looked at the other surviving bar stool.

Cultural differences aren't only between countries, but are present in all of our relationships to one degree or another. They stem from traditions, beliefs and values passed down from generations and can be as geographically close as being from  Northern or Southern California! And they can impact all our relationships until we figure out what is going on beneath them and how to effectively communicate about them with poise and understanding.

How is culture impacting your relationships? If you want to "Crack the Cultural Differences Code" and are ready to start creating the ultimate ecstatic relationships in all areas of you life, then give me a call. I'd love to help you!

Vive la différence!

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