The Tricky Psychology of Money w/ Amanda Clayman

the Golden Globe. After all we've been through. We deserve an orgasm. Cis I deserve? Welcome to Go ask Ali. I'm Ali went where This season, I'm digging into everything I can get my hands on, peeling back the layers and getting dirty. Today's excavation is a psychology of money. So last season I go asked Alli, Shamila's front was talking to me about the real nuts and baults of finances and a legacy book. And this season we got a question from Erica who asked me, did I actually

do a legacy journal? And Erica, I did? I put a whole book together so that I know where our money is at all times. I even have a copy of our will, and I'm telling you it gave me so much security. Not so much. You know that I have this legacy book, but that I know where our money is and I understand it, and I actually have something tangible to give to my daughters or God forbid, if something happens to us. They have it all in one book. And so I implore you do a legacy book,

make a legacy journal. It's so helpful. The psychology of money is fascinating to me because it tells us what kind of a person we are. And what I mean by that is, are you a big spender? Are you cheap? To you hold onto the coin tightly? All these things stem to how we are made up emotionally. Money comes with some baggage, and Amanda Claimant is going to help us unpack it. Amanda Claimant is a financial therapist who specializes in the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects of our

financial well being. Amanda run seminars and workshops around the country and her work has been featured a major media outlets like The Atlantic, The New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal, and she's appeared on MSNBC, Fox, and so much more. She's a featured therapist working with couples on Death, Sex and Money's Financial Therapy series, and you

can read her blog at Amanda Claiman dot com. Amanda Claiman, thank you so much for being a go ask Galey and fasten your seatbelts because I have a lot of questions. I'm excited. Thank you for having me. I'm truly somebody that this is a very scary terrain for me to walk through because I have issues with money and I think I come from a family with issues of money. This is not going to be a podcast where we're going to tell you how to get rich or any of that. We are talking about all our kind of

different psychological peces. So that's why I'm excited to dive in. So okay, Ali shut up, let me ask Amanda question. Can you start with your story about how you kind of blew up your financial life? You're infamous nineteen dollar haircut. Yes, And this is also a great story I I feel about mothers and daughters, which is I moved to New York City with a dream and an empty bank account and really just thought I'm going to throw myself at

the world and kind of figure it out. And I did, But it turns out there are a lot of financial consequences to throwing yourself at the world with an empty bank account in New York City. In New York City, yes, and so I was doing certain things. I was always trying to figure out the problem in front of me. So, for example, like I use those checks that come with your credit card statement to pay for the security deposit

on my first apartment and broker speak. Because I didn't know to expect those, I was very naive, and that really just started a snowball of credit card debt that I did not have the means at that point to pay off. And I got very anxious about the situation. I started doing other things like avoiding really sitting down and looking at how much money was in my bank

account and then paying my bills. I just I was so emotional and overwhelmed and avoidant that not only were there external financial challenges, but I was creating even more problems for myself with how I was managing my behavior around money. Cut to a few years into this kind of a situation, and my mom had come to visit me in New York, and I asked her to give me a haircut, which was weird. She hadn't given me

a haircut since I was probably seven years old. But she gave me one of the worst haircuts that we've ever seen in time, although it's probably very fashionable today, right, But she gave me this awful haircut, and I burst into tears, and she was like, don't panic, it's okay. We'll call your hair stylist and she'll we'll tell her it's an emergency. And I said, I can't do that. I bounced to check there and and I can't go back.

And that was just kind of the beginning of the truth coming out, which was that my financial life was just in shambles. Yeah, so you bounced to check at the hair salon, yes, with the idea that if you didn't go back, you would never actually have to deal with it or pay for it. I don't think that

there was thinking behind it. There was no plan. It was always just like, here's the emergency or the highest priority thing that I'm just trying to deal with, and then I'll figure out emergency number two, which is waiting in the wings for me to sort out. Emergency number one um and that Honestly, I I feel like that experience in particular gives me a lot of empathy with clients when when other people find certain financial mistakes or problems to be just so baffling, like don't you know

that making it harder for yourself? It's like I knew that I was making it harder for myself. I just didn't know how to do anything differently, I had no idea how to begin. And the important thing about this terrible haircut is that I was finally talking about the problem and my mother, whom I expected to just be like disgusted and horrified, was actually really just I mean, she was shocked, but she was very matter of fact about like, here are the things that you need to know,

Like it doesn't have to be this hard. She had a very practical kind of approach to it, and that I know now as a clinician, like that was an opportunity where I really needed to be reparented, like I had picked up all of these kind of accidental financial lessons as I was growing up, Like I had really taken on a lot of my parents anxiety about money, which led to some of my avoidance and what I needed was a way to sort of bow lens out the very real problems that I was anxious about, with

the skills and the tools to be able to approach them and to learn how to manage them. So so it felt like such an awful crisis, but it was helpful, right. I think it's so interesting to think about all the family dynamics because I grew up in a family where you didn't talk about money. I don't know why, but it was always like, it's crass, let's not talk about it. And my feeling was it's a little bit like sex.

You know, we don't talk about sex, Well, then I'm not going to learn anything, and what I do learn is probably not going to be accurate. So I too had a time in my life where I bounced checks because nobody taught me about it, you know. And I also saw that, particularly with my female friends. They this is such an antiquated idea, but it still exists where my married friends would say, oh, I'm going to let my partner deal with it because I'm just not good

with it, so my partner will control it. And a lot of stuff happens, as you know, with a couple, when somebody's controlling money. Yes, Um, that's not two people sitting down as adults and saying, why don't you take care of the money and I'll do the gardening. There's a reason that we relinquish our financial power. And as a clinician, I that's what I find the most interesting. You know, It's not like I I have a particular agenda and I want my client cell to be wealthy.

I actually find it's so fascinating how much meaning we project onto our decisions about how we approach our financial life, Like this is the stuff of life. This is how we we can sort of identify opportunities for personal growth. Like, even if you do have a spouse who's managing the money well and there's no quote quote money problem, you, I would say, might still be feeling like you are

kept almost childlike in that dynamic. You are infantilized. Yes, yes, you know, look not everybody needs to have the same life journey here, but that may be a place where for you to feel like you are standing fully in your own capacities. That that's a dynamic that needs to

be addressed, right. I mean I knew early on in my marriage it was never going to work for me to quote unquote ask permission to purchase something when I was also making my own living, Like, I just thought, I don't want to get into a situation where you're the parent that I have to go to and say i'd like to get this. Also, as an adult, I had a close friend have a close friend who was married for a long time. He ended up being a drug addict, and they're all kinds of problems that came up.

And I said to her, you know, he has an addiction, so you need to go through your finances. Have you been monitoring And she said, no, he controls the money. He always has. And so this to me was such an extreme story, but such a wake up call for her and for all of us that that know her, because she had no idea where the money was, how it was being spent, She had no access to it, and he had been using it not only for his addiction, but he had been funneling it into secret accounts. You know,

It's just it was like a lifetime movie. And you do a lot of therapy with couples, right having to deal with sort of money that has come in sort of through a psychological tributary. I guess yes, and I love to embrace our financial lives as an opportunity for us to really build intimacy. Like money has this wonderful quality and that it's both a symbol and a tool.

So like something is going to go show up in your if has some kind of a money problem or some sort of a recurring fight that you have with your spouse, and if we sort of deconstruct the meaning pieces or the relationship piece, then we can often use money to really set up a new structure that promotes healthy communication, that promotes equal decision making, or transparency or they're all these kind of wonderful, juicy things that we can add in using money as a vehicle towards better

health and wellness and quality of our relationship. You use CBT cognitive behavioral therapy when you deal with finances, which I love because you know, as you said, all financial behavior has meaning. Have you been able to kind of use those CBT tools to pull individuals and couples out of kind of financial crisis. Yeah, because one of the great strengths of CBT is is it it allows us to get really specific, like we're identifying these beliefs that we have or stories that we tell so much of

money are the stories that we tell. I was just having a conversation with a couple about like a decision that one partner had made without discussing it with the other partner, And even though there was nothing bad had happened, it still felt like a real breach of trust. And it was a husband and wife couple in this case, the wife felt very personally betrayed again even though no money had been lost. And so we go back and we we sort of look at the stories that we're

telling ourselves about what has happened. And one of those stories could be this was his money, you know, in the way that the couple had their money organized, this was his money. He did not have to discuss this in any way. You couldn't point to a transgression or an injury that this behavior had caused, and yet it

still was coming up as a relationship issue. So obviously we need to look at what is the story that the wife is telling herself about what has happened, Like where is the rupture if she is unable to kind of articulate it, And that's what the work is, and we know that there is a story there because she's

having this feeling. CBT helps us kind of like dig underneath and then look at the structural side and say, Okay, do we need an agreement moving forward that decisions above this amount of money need to be discussed, or do we need a system where we talk about everything once a month, etcetera. There are lots of ways that we can play with that. You know. I think about the horrible things that have happened to people during COVID, both

you know, obviously health wise but also financially. And I know that mary couples have been struggling because a lot of them, for whatever reasons, their relationship imploded and they can't afford to get divorced. What's your therapeutic advice for people that can't get divorced right now because they literally

can't afford it. I have a lot of compare fashion first and foremost, Like, what we're doing in that situation is we're having to tolerate a painful feeling and a painful situation that it's just not available to us to

resolve it right now, so we can't move forward. We need to look at whether the strategies that we can identify that are going to help us be able to stay functional and stay together and still do all of the other things we need to do, like have peace in the home, to be able to co parent if

their children, etcetera. And so that becomes a negotiation. And and sometimes it's funny, like I've seen that couples who are in the process of trying to split resolve things in the split because they have to be kind of negotiated and there's no way to avoid it. That probably could have really helped the relationship if that had happened, but that's just kind of not the journey that this

particular couple is on. So we we just try to have the best split that we can while understanding that a lot of stuff that's legacy from where this relationship fell. Aparty is going to be one of the things that's hard to talk about because we negotiate this peaceful split, right, and it's time for a short break, Okay, let's get back to it. I read many of your blogs, which were so fascinating, But you talk a lot about shame when it comes to money, and you certainly describe that

a little bit with your haircut story. I think everybody has a money shame story. I just I'm sure of it, and I think about when you have this shame, it's important, whether it's just you or in a couple of situations, to have vulnerability about it. Yeah, shame is is really tough.

I think it can help if we have an understanding of the purpose of shame, because shame just feel like our experience of it, it's almost like like I almost picture like hot tar just dripping like it wants to stick to you, and it's it's dirty and so uncomfortable. But shame is a social emotion, and what I mean by that is that that humans are programmed to experience shame because shame is what protects us from being kicked

out of the tribe, so to speak. So it's something that says, oh, if I continue with this thing that is bad, it's going to mean that I get rejected. It's going to jopardize my relationships. And you know, once upon a time that literally meant our survival if we got kicked out of the tribe. So shame is is very deeply wired into our psyche. And shame is also one of the first things, especially with money, that is a form of like a way to put the brakes on the engine of our needs and wants, which are

kind of always running. So shame is the thing that says like, oh, I can't ask my parents for that because they're going to get mad at me or I'm being greedy if I ask for that. And there are different ways that we can sort of like parent around that, like saying our financial values are X, y Z, and that's where our money goes, you know, so it doesn't necessarily shame the asker, but we are going to pick

up a lot of shame. Like when you were describing earlier how you didn't talk about money in your family, you were still i'm sure, receiving lots of messages about money, even though none of those messages were explicit, and therefore you couldn't ask questions and you couldn't get clarification, and you know, you're just in this sort of emotional world.

In that emotional world, I'm sure there was a lot of shame about what we don't do or what we do yes with money, yes, and so like instead of taking in that badness and identifying with that badness and feeling like I am really bad because you know what, I am gree and I really do want these new sneakers to be able to say, like, Okay. Once upon a time, when I was learning about the world, I received messages that said it wasn't okay for me to

want this or ask for it. But now I'm a grown up and I have the opportunity to look at some of these feelings which happened automatically. I can look at these feelings with a little bit of critical distance in a new light and figure out if that shame is something that I want to work on letting go of, or maybe I I feel like that shame still sort of helps keep me safe. Right, You're probably gonna think I'm crazy, but there's a feeling I have with money

that I equate with my relationship with food. Now I have a healthy relationship with food. I don't have any eating disorders. But there's a similar feeling, certainly when I was younger, which was, oh, I can't really afford that pair of boots, but I just don't care. I'll figure it out later. You know, I'm willing to bounce to check. I want those boots. There's a similar thing. When you're

feeling physically healthy. You know you've you've walked ten miles, you had this big salad for lunch and you're feeling good and you suddenly think, I want a pint of ice cream. I don't care if it's not on the diet, and I don't care if I'm going to feel shitty afterwards. For me, it's a very it's a very similar feeling. Totally.

Does that make sense? A thousand percent? Of course, we want without consequences, like because we want, we want, And I really feel like like being in touch with our needs and wants is like the key to happiness, honestly, because we live in a complex world and we have all of these ways to kind of interpret things, and sometimes what we need is like we kind of need

the universe to have our back a little bit. Like I have spent all of this energy being virtuous and exercising discipline and doing all of the things that I'm supposed to do, and you know what, I kind of feel done. We feel like we need something from the outside world to fill us back up, and that can

be boots, that can be ice cream. It's funny. One thing that I have learned is if you don't want to have boots, are ice cream, like, do something kind of benignly antisocial, like jump in the shower with your clothes on. Oh, I know it sounds bizarre, right, Like, No, I like it, like I do. What we want to do on a psychological level is kind of rebel and

break free. That's one of the ways that we can interpret that and try to meet that need in a different way sometimes, And my husband thinks I'm literally a monster about this, but I have started in my own household, and I use this with clients too, saying I would like praise. I walked ten miles, I would like praise. So funny I I do a version of that, which is I speak for my husband. So if we're going out and I walk in the room and he doesn't say anything, I say, oh my god, honey, you look

so amazing. I don't even want to go out. I just want to stay home with you. And he laughs and we carry on. But I mean, I can write a better dialogue for him than I can probably get for him, so I just do it myself. You know, we learn, I think, especially as we get older and we mature and we figure ourselves out, and there's some freedom that comes with, like just getting tired of judging ourselves.

For some of these things, and so we find a workaround, whether it's writing your husband's dialogue or whether it's it's asking really directly, like we can kind of figure out strategies for making ourselves happy and getting our needs met. And I would say, no matter what the socio economic background is. I mean, you quote Oscar Wilde when he said the only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. And there's a little bit of that in there, of this idea that for whatever reason I

can't have but I must, must, must have it. Yes, there's something that it's so beautifully affirming about that it's a way of sort of expressing this existential planting a flag on the ground and saying I am here. The world would want to say that I can't do this or I can't have this, and and even though it doesn't make sense for my bank account, like that, I think is often the need that sort of drives those behaviors.

At people look as scans and say like, but don't they know that they're messing up their life Even further, It's like, sometimes what we need is to say life isn't going to beat me. I can still have fun, or I can still do this if we look underneath the behavior. There's so much there, and that always makes sense if we know how to look at it. You know, I also look at money and I see how it

gets weaponized as well. And I mean weaponized emotionally because I see money great amounts and little amounts can destroy families because of the emotional undercurrent of all of it. And I sometimes think that people are so obsessed with shows like Succession or Billions because the money is used emotionally in these TV shows. But also I think people want to see people with a lot of money being horrible people, you know what I mean. There's something very

satisfying about that. Sure. Yeah, I mean money is an energy source and it can fuel whatever you put it toward. And when you're putting it towards something dysfunctional, yeah, it can create a big, dramatic mess. I mean, there's tremendous destructive power that can come with having a lot of money.

And one thing that you can say, you know, if you're not fighting over money because you don't have that kind of money, then those kinds of problems are problems that you don't have, And it makes a life of not having those problems seem more attractive and dearer to us. I always love that saying, though, that if you threw all of your problems onto a pile with everybody else's problems, you'd be so excited to snatch your own problems back.

And I think looking at those kinds of shows does give us that kind of an opportunity to be like, oh, I'm glad I don't have those problems. I mean, do you sort of look at our country right now because there is such a polarization of wealth. People are so angry right now, and a lot of it is I think the divide of the haves and the have not. Don't you see that connection as being what is imploding

so many issues in our country right now? I do, And I love that you asked that question, because you know, when we get into the psychology of money, the first thing that we discover is it's it's never just about the dollars and cents. And one of the ways that we create meaning around money is using comparisons. I forget who did this study, but there's some research that found that if you offer people, you say, I could give you a hundred fifty thousand dollars, but all of your

neighbors have two hundred thousand dollars. Or I could give you a hundred thousand dollars, but all of your neighbors have seventy five dollars. The vast, vast majority of people would take less money as long as they have more money relative to other people. So when we see a huge amount of income disparity, and the trend of income disparity even increasing over time, the part of our brain that deals with loss and loss of status really lights up.

And human beings are much more aversive to loss than we are conditioned to seek gain. So like our brains are just panicking there in panic mode as we we sort of see how much harder it is to have a secure middle class existence and all of the institutions that really make being in the middle class work, like

having access to great schools and clean water and good transportation, etcetera. Like, as those things go away, not only is the story that we tell ourselves one where we are being unfairly targeted and oppressed and losing status, but we very much feel like, how am I going to make sure that my family's needs are met? And then you can spare all into shame you know, and then make probably make bad choices. Yes, yeah, I do feel that in our

country right now a lot. And I mean from every community, you know, this feeling of fear, and what's unfortunately come about is this real anger. Yeah, I mean anger is the protective emotion, you know, it's it's there to say, hey, this is getting really close to a boundary and I don't like it, and I need you to back off. And underneath that anger is something that's much more tender, and a lot of times it is vulnerability, it is grief. But because it is so hard to stay in those

vulnerable feelings, we stay in the anger. But the anger, especially if there's anger on the other side, it's like we just can never get to a place where we feel connected, where we have any sense of trust that people are there to support us, and we don't have any faith that things are going to get better. So so I do think that there's a real crisis of anger. And to the point about shame and families like I remember the great Saint burn A Brown saying about shame

that the quickest route to shame is unwanted identity. When we feel like who we are is being devalued or losing status in our our social group or in our society. That is where we're going to experience shame and then again go right into the anchor to try to distance

ourselves and protect ourselves from that feeling of shame. And in families especially, this can lead to certain messages that go into how we talk about money in the family or socio economic status, and like family money stories are are really meant to give the next generation to set them up for what they should expect to see in

the world. So if what you're teaching your child is that they should expect to see that the world is against them, that somebody is trying to keep them down, the intention is that that's going to be protective, so the child knows like, hey, you got to get in

there and fight. On the other hand, that might also, because of the confirmation bias, set the child up to just only see that when they get out into the world and maybe there are helpers, maybe there are solutions, but those kinds of opportunities or resources, if we're on the defensive, then we're not going to notice them. Or similarly, in a family that says there is privilege and you need to make sure that you're one of the people who has it. Don't worry about anybody else. The world

is tough. You've got to get yours like that is sort of inoculating that person to distance themselves from the shame of the inequality and feeling that disconnect or maybe even feeling like they're taking advantage. So so how we sort of interpret these social events or socio economic events and try to raise our children to understand the system that they're born in. Sometimes what we're doing is sort of unwittingly perpetuating the very system that we're finding difficult.

And we'll be right back. Great, let's get back to it. My fear is with how our country has set up payment and what I mean by that is with Apple pay and Venmo and everything. Are our children losing or getting a disconnect from the idea of money and budget and understanding the gravity of money. Does that make sense

to you? Yes, When we forfeit awareness because awareness makes us uncomfortable, we're sacrificing the ability to be deliberate with our money and to really say these are my financial values. I'm going to use the feedback of like seeing where my money goes, and I can tolerate the feelings of that in order to say I'm putting my money towards

the things that are most important to me. And I deal with a lot of this because there's an incentive in the financial services world to under the guise of making things easy and taking away friction in our ability to to an active financial transaction, that we are robbing ourselves of the ability to really be conscious and grounded and use the knowledge that we have about the reality

of our money in order to guide our decisions. Like we're really just putting ourselves into this very ephemeral kind of rule of thumb behavior where like, if I'm naturally frugal, if I have my brain setting automatically on no, unless you know, I really give it some time and make it a yes, but automatically I'm going to say no. That's a way of keeping us safe financially. But it's also a way of keeping our our needs and wants really small and not interacting with them because of that

automatic no setting. If rather we have it set to maybe, and then we take away all of that friction and all of those opportunities to reflect to go, oh, maybe I shouldn't. Maybe there's an alternative where else would I rather put my money. If I'm paying attention to it, then we really are subject to the whim of the moment. If we're hungry, then we're going to get the ten

dollar twenty dollar salad. If we are tired, then we're going to take a rideshare home instead of taking public transportation, etcetera. Like we need those feelings that kind of pump the brakes. And there will always be I tell cliences all the time, there will always be more needs and wants than there are resources. So let's kind of make friends with what all of these emotions have to offer us. So is this kind of financial radical acceptance. It is. It is

radical acceptance. But one of the things that you're accepting is the wisdom of the brain and the body, and the partnership between the emotions and the subconscious and the meaning and the stories with just the kind of boots on the ground reality of like this is how dollars come into my life, and this is how dollars come out of my life. So money can be your focus to have a deeply personally meaningful and purpose driven life.

And it doesn't mean that by having this focus on money that you're just trying to hoard all the money. That's not it at all. It's just being deliberate with all of these dollars about how you operate in this money world. So let me ask you this, how how does our relationship with money change over the course of our lifetime. So as we grow and mature, we express our developmental tasks and phases very much in terms of

the kinds of choices that we're making with money. So one rule of thumb, I think for a happy life is not to judge the previous developmental phase by the

one that you're currently in. So if, for example, you happened to be a twenty four year old named Amanda who got a lot of credit card debt because she wrote herself checks and put them into her bank account, twenty four year old Amanda's developmental task was establishing independence, figuring out who she was professionally personally said, having friendships,

like figuring out where does one get a couch? And all of these had here sort of grown up tasks um And then thirty five year old Amanda who is partnered and thinking about a family and saving for the long term, like it would be possible to be very judgmental of all of the mistakes and the learning that

that younger Amanda had to go through. But that was what all of that work accumulated, along with the financial consequences of figuring it out, the learning accumulated such that you know, I'll switch back of first person, like I knew who I was at thirty five because I had gone through all of that stuff at So suddenly what I'm trying to do with my money and the things that I'm trying to figure out, the lessons I'm trying to learn, those are different in those two different time periods,

And now as somebody who's in her mid forties, I am so much more into like having the perspective of a life's journey, and it becomes much more reflective and thinking about impact kinds of things. This is much more i think, developmentally appropriate to where I'm at at this point in my life. So in working with people, one of the things that I'm listening for is sort of like, what are the lessons that are in their life right now?

Where do they see the value and where do they seek the mistakes or the sacrifices based on what they learned in an earlier base of adulthood or even what they were learning in their family when they were growing up, which hopefully they're doing simultaneously with looking at their life

in general. You know, if you're in therapy, one could I could look at my life and think, well, my, you know, my frontal lobe wasn't developed when I was a teenager and I was doing all kinds of crazy stuff because I felt invincible, and so I didn't manage my money that well. I was sort of free falling in all areas. And then in my twenties there were still bouncing of checks because they were still bouncing of

relationships and bouncing of ideas of what to do. And so the money stuff does track with your own personal emotional journey in general through your lifetime. I think I find this all fascinating because I think there's so much correlation between what's going on with you as a person trying to be self actualized as it is with your finances. Yes, so my sort of like research fascination right now is all around needing and wanting and how we we think

of those distinctions as categories in our financial life. Certainly, but like if you've seen Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You know, there's a big triangle and at the bottom of the triangle it starts with like physiological needs like when we're hungry or tired, and that we have safety, etcetera. And then at the top you have self actualization. And so I like to look at that as like that is an arrow, Like it's not like we get to the top and we have no needs. It's like no needs.

Our needs and wants are the story of how you live your life in a human body in this crazy complex modern society, and and our needs and our wants help point us towards our purpose that we're going to have on this journey. And that allows me to relate, I think, and I hope in a healthy way to needing and wanting, which can be really scary, but it

also I think provides a lot of hope. Oh God, Okay, I'm gonna end on this because it's um it's funny because I've always been so afraid of money, and having read a lot of the things that you've written and speaking to you today, I feel the kind of a sense of relief, you know, because so much of it was connected to emotions that I didn't I didn't sort

of dig into before. So thank you. You've certainly answered a lot of my big questions about finances, and so if you have a question for me, I'd love to answer it for you. I do, so bring it, Amanda. So I also have two daughters, and mine are just a little younger than yours, but kind of right behind you.

And I don't know if this is true for you as a parent, but my two kids have very different personalities, and I wonder in your approach to parenting, do you find that you knowingly parent your two children differently or do you try to have a really consistent sort of like this is the way a parent. This is what I'm trying to impart to you. That's a great question, big sort of fundamental moral structure. Ways. I parent them the same way in terms of like, this is what

we do, this is what we believe. You know, we always have family dinner at six. I don't care if your social so those things. I parent both of them the same way. Now as they've gotten older, I have a tendency to tailor my parenting towards each girl because their needs are different. You know, one of them is just emotionally much more needy, so I have to sort of be there for her. The other one is a lot more independent, doesn't want me cuddling and giving her

good mother messages. So as they get older, you start to understand what their needs are and how you can help. And now that they're full blown teenagers, it's very clear to me what they both need. And now it's I don't have to think a lot about it. I know, well this one, you know, this one, I'm not even allowed to ask. He was at the party, and this one is I know. I got to put an hour and a half aside because she's going to go through, you know, every single detail of meeting this boy. So

it evolves and changes all the time. But again, to bring it back what I first said, as long as I've instilled in them sort of our collective familial morality and big lessons and stuff, then the rest I can sort of figure out as we go along. I love that. I hope that's helpful. By the way, it's a work in progress till the very end, so you know, God knows what I'll be like as a grandmother. Amanda, thank you so much. And again, I'm sort of obsessed right

now with this connection of therapy and finances. It was but a nibble. I feel like there's a full meal in our future. So thank you. I would so be delighted to come back. Thank you. I had a great time talking to you. So I was thinking a lot about shame based on what Amanda was saying, and I was thinking about how in my twenties I was sort of a delinquent financially and then I sort of got my act together in my early thirties. But when I met my husband, and it was very, very hard to

divulge this. I was in credit card debt and I had to borrow money from him to pay off this debt. And I wasn't such a huge debt that he ran away from the relationship screaming, but you know, it was humiliating to ask him to bail me out. And that

was a big moment for me. And that's when I decided, you know what, I'm now in a partnership where I don't want to be irresponsible um And we sort of thankfully got together and had real conversations about how we react about money based on our own emotional makeup and how we were going to move forward and not let money become a lot of baggage and fighting and so

um I'm grateful for that. And I also think that for all of us listening, if we can somehow understand how we deal with money based on our own emotional makeup, it's really going to free us. It's not gonna make us richer, but it's definitely going to free us. Thank

you for listening to Go Ask Alli. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast, and follow me on social media on Twitter at Ali e Wentworth, It on Instagram at the Real Ali Wentworth and if you have questions or guest suggestions, I'd love to hear from you, call it text me at three to three four six three five six, or email Go ask Gali podcast at gmail dot com. Go ask Alli is a production of Shonda

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