In writing my most recent book, “Getting in Touch with Your Inner Rich Kid,” I put forth a fairly simple premise that all movement of money is the result of emotional energy somewhere.
“Poor-kid thinking” is not so much about negative emotions as it is about blocking positive emotions. If you block emotional energy, this will block the flow of money to you, since the flow of money is just a physical extension of emotional energy.
I confess to being at something of a disadvantage when I wrote this book, because I have far more experience with poor kid emotional energy blockage than I do with a rich kid free flow of it. I did my best.
Anyway, in one chapter, I deal with the negative emotion of resentment, for the purpose of hopefully replacing it with the positive emotion of optimism. So far so good, but I think I did not emphasize gratitude enough.
As a poor kid, I was taught to think of “being grateful” as a shameful low status state of having had to accept help from someone else, to be an object of contempt for needing help,and now owing them forever. This wholly negative attitude of course blocks all potential positive flow of gratitude energy.
When a positive flow emotion comes your direction, whether it’s a purely emotional expression or a more tangible version of it in the form of cash, it’s not good to simply be a frozen block and not respond to it in some way. The way you welcome emotional energy to yourself via your gratitude inevitably impacts the future flow of money energy to you, good or bad. It’s sort of like having a reputation as a good or bad tipper, except it’s not about other people choosing to give you things, it’s about you resisting them being given to you because you want to block any feeling at all, including that of gratitude, which can be very powerful.
For poor kids, gratitude is hard, because poor kids tend to view the world through a very negative lens, and to feel gratitude, you have to feel in a very positive way towards the source of what ever largess has come to you. This is in direct conflict with the energy-blocking pain-numbing strategy that is poor-kid thinking. It is much easier to maintain those barriers and walls between yourself and the world (and your own free flow of feeling) if you think the world is a negative place. If you start to think the world is a positive place, now all the buried pain that your poor kid thinking has blocked off and numbed yourself to may come back to consciousness. This can keep one in a non-gratitude state, showing no ‘welcome mat” to wealth, perpetuating poverty.
But no matter what the down sides, I do think the benefits of creating a welcoming aura of gratitude energy around you is a bit of a no-brainer. I don’t mean one where you feel obligated– that’s just more poor kid thinking– but one where you are genuinely letting yourself feel tickled pink at the love other people are showing you. Of course this is counter to the rugged individual I don’t need anybody macho ideal that we hold so dear; but like so many of these cultural ideals, that rationalizes, glorifies, and reinforces isolationist poor kid thinking.
This is not just an individual issue. Just as there is a constant onslaught on our sense of trust, there is a constant onslaught from the outside on our sense of gratitude. For people to sell us new stuff, it behooves them to make us feel as dissatisfied as possible with what we currently have. These many sales pitches create a culture where it is fashionable to be disdainful of what we currently own or who we currently are. I think it’s important to address that. It requires a conscious effort to counteract it.
I’m immensely grateful right now that I have family and friends. I am also thrilled to have four working limbs and all my fingers and toes. If you stop for a moment and think about how wonderful it is to just be reasonably healthy, and if you let that energy flow through you, it’s borderline ecstasy. But then, it’s very easy for negative poor kid energy to step in and block it.
There’s no question that there are many things about my life that I would like to improve, and it’s nature human to always seek a better situation. But sometimes it’s good to just sit down and revel in the moment and let yourself be happy for the many fabulous things you have already. It is my theory that the energy of satisfaction, and gratitude for what you have been given, and not the energy of dissatisfaction and resentment for you did not get, makes it much more likely that more good things will come to you.
© Justin Locke
