The Most Basic Fear that Stops Us From Thriving and Expanding

One of my greatest fears is the fear that if I keep financially expanding and allow myself to succeed beyond my wildest dreams, then I will lose the people in my life because they will reject me.

I call this the fear of losing love.

The need to be loved is one of our most basic needs.

Research has shown that babies who are starved of affectionate touch can actually stop growing and can become ill. It’s not enough for babies to be held, they have to be nuzzled and kissed, they have to be held in a way that makes them feel loved.

So as adults, it makes sense that we’d also want to hold onto the love we have in our lives and not lose it.

Our childhood programming about who we need to be in order to get love, may hold us back from expanding financially

As a child I learned that I needed to be the same as everyone else in my mom’s family in order to get love and acceptance.

I saw how breadwinners who were making more money than anyone else in the family were resented or shunned, which taught me that people are only loved and accepted if they are poor or broke.

My constant desire for expansion, often bumps against this fear of losing love, which plays out as a deep desire to get rid of money, shrink and be invisible when I find myself in the spotlight, because my inner child believes this is the only way for her to get love.

Almost every idea and belief we have about money and relationships, comes from childhood; these ideas and beliefs then impact our entire view of money as adults.

We're walking around thinking we’re adulting, being grown and making our own decisions around money, when it's really the four-year-old version of us that’s making those decisions.

Sorry to break it to you, but you're basically a four-year-old in a grown woman or a grown man's body and you're making decisions about money from the point of view of a child or a teen.

And children don’t make the best decisions because they lack deductive logic and have a limited view of the world.

But the mind and the body keep track of memories, so every time we manage money, we’re triggered and all our childhood memories and decisions about money come to the surface at a subconscious level.

And our inner child or teen, takes over and starts managing our finances, which is why it can sometimes feel like we’re having an outer body experience when we manage money.

If that’s not bad enough, there’s also the fact that kids and teens make decisions based on the need to belong to the tribe, which means that most of our financial behaviors won’t always be rational and will actually be geared to give results that keep us in the tribe.

This is why families tend to have the same behavioral patterns around money.

It’s why we find ourselves repeating our mother’s or father’s financial mistakes, because we’re trying to get love by belonging to the tribe, and we equate belonging with loyalty to the tribe.

The need to be loyal to the tribe

During the Stone Age, people would die from hunger or the elements if they were cast out from their tribe or were different or disloyal to the tribe.

Our ancestors needed each other, in order to survive so they learned to do things that made them accepted or liked.

And usually being accepted or liked meant being like other people and doing what other people were doing.

Even though we’ve evolved, the amygdala, the emotional part of our brain is still very primitive and hasn’t evolved much, so doing anything that will get us rejected actually feels like death to us.

It’s why we have this need to be liked and to be accepted; it’s why we obsess about what people will say or think about us, because to our ancestors that information was important to keep them in the tribe.

But loyalty to our tribe comes at a cost - we are loyal to even the bad characteristics of our tribe, including, but not limited to, financial beliefs, emotions and patterns.

Our loyalty and need to belong to the tribe, when left un-examined and unhealed, can keep us in generational poverty or repeating toxic financial patterns.

Click play, on the video below, to learn more

What is your greatest fear about financial expansion?

How are you staying loyal to your tribe?

Share your insights in the comments section below.