Born To Spend
SPENDING IN PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
For over twenty years I have specialized in helping people deal with compulsive behaviors. At first I concentrated on working with those who wanted to overcome eating disorders: anorexia nervosa, bulimia and compulsive overeating. At that time I realized that there was a common denominator in all eating disorders, an uncontrollable urge. Compulsive overeaters have the urge to binge, bulimics binge and purge, while anorexics sometimes binge but mostly have the overwhelming need to starve.
As a result I wrote How To Stop Playing the Weighting Game and A Substance Called Food: How to Understand, Control, and Recover from Addictive Eating.In these books I explained the process of compulsive urges, what they mean, and how they can be controlled. During the years I was creating a new approach to treating food related compulsive behaviors I became aware that at least sixty percent of my clients were sober alcoholics, usually in Twelve-Step programs for drugs or alcohol. They had given up the deadlier addictions, but they were stuck in the thrall of food.
As time passed I began to notice that many were also compulsive spenders and debtors. They usually did not talk at first about these behaviors, not because of shyness but because they didn’t consider them much of a problem compared to alcohol, drugs, food, and “love too much” relationships. Many clients described themselves as “compulsive personalities” although scientists say that there is no such thing.
I have learned that the problem is not alcohol, drugs, food, shopping, sex, exercise, or smoking. These are the solutions. The real problem is that most of us do not know how to cope with the ups and downs of our lives. We run away from discomfort and mask our pain and fear with temporary escape or longer-term oblivion. We keep doing this until the solution becomes a full-fledged problem with a life of its own.
MORE THAN ONE PROBLEM
When many of my eating disorder clients stopped compulsively bingeing or purging, they often turned to other compulsions. I remember a woman who began to get her eating under control and then resumed smoking after having given it up for years. She had begun to work in the family business. Her father was her boss. Besides job stress, many relationship issues were coming into her consciousness. She was terribly angry and frustrated. Instead of dealing with her real problems, she smoked.
Another binge/purger began to buy clothing, six of a kind at once, after she quit stuffing with food. Other clients revealed that they resorted to different compulsive urges at different times. Paul overate most of the time, but when he was emotionally distraught he sought sex compulsively. Norma Jean binged or shopped. Stephanie got drunk, used drugs, drank huge amounts of coffee, loved too much, binged and purged, smoked, and spent.
I call the switching from one compulsive act or substance to another “switching deck chairs on the Titanic.” It became evident to me that the urge to binge or splurge in some way is the outward evidence of inner turmoil. Most compulsive alcoholics, drug abusers, eaters or spenders will find another way to medicate their pain unless they deal with the underlying problems that are creating the pain.
Over the years I noticed something else that intrigued me. Most of my clients had more than one behavior or substance that they abused. I wondered why sometimes a person ate and sometimes she spent and sometimes she got drunk. Cora helped me figure this out.
Cora was a compulsive spender who decided to study her personal style of acting out. What she came up with is something I call the “Hierarchy of Compulsions.” Here is the chart she created:
| Anxiety |
Activity | Feelings |
| 10 | Spending | Hurt, Helpless |
| 10 | Changing things in house or relationship | Anger, Loss |
| 9 | Listmaking | Overwhelmed |
| 8 | Workaholism | Loss, Anger |
| 8 | Eat, read, TV, all at once | Helpless, Overwhelmed |
| 7 | Wash & wax floor | Intensely helpless |
| 7 | Movies & popcorn | Frustration, Overwhelmed |
| 6 | Hobbies | Anger, Overwhelmed |
| 6 | Gardening | Helpless, Loss |
| 6 | Washing dishes | Out of control |
| 5 | Sex | Anger, Overwhelmed |
| 5 | Nail biting | Tense |
| 4 | Fantasizing change | Loss |
| 4 | Cutting toenails | Tense, Helpless |
| 4 | Relationship connecting | Loss, Fear of "the void" |
| 3 | Overeat ice cream | Anger, Abandoned |
| 2 | Phoning | Lonely inner child |
| 2 | Reading | Overwhelmed, Anger |
| 1 | Television | Overwhelmed |
The first column shows the intensity of her anxiety on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most intense. The second column denotes the activity or substance she begins to abuse. The third column explains the feelings she is trying to push down or avoid. Notice that the most common feelings that put her out of control are anger, helplessness, and a sense of being overwhelmed.
You may be reading this book to find out about your own problems with spending and debting. As you read about Cora’s uncontrollable urges to wash dishes, cut her toenails or move furniture around, you will discover that any behavior can become a way to sooth emotional pain. I challenge you now to take some time to think about other behaviors you over-use in addition to spending, and make your own list.
Among the first people I counseled when I began in private practice was a young woman I’ll call Zoe. I thought of Zoe as a “triple threat” person. She vacillated between alcohol, drugs and food. One day she discovered that what she really wanted was to “zone out.” She just wanted to lose consciousness and not feel the pain of living. Her first choice was to use drugs. She had overdosed twice. When she was off drugs, she usually would drink until she passed out. Food was a poor third, but very available.
Zoe worked hard to overcome her three compulsive urges. Although she did stop using hard drugs and was able to control her food cravings and lose weight, alcohol was still a “sometimes” thing. Zoe never could free herself of all three addictive behaviors at once.
One major decision that Zoe made because of reevaluating her life and changing her perspective through counseling was to move away to a less stressful environment. When Zoe left town she was free of drugs and had lost weight. Her alcohol abuse had lessened.
About a year later I received a letter from Zoe in which she reported that she had gone to an alcoholism counselor in her determination to achieve health. The counselor had recommended that the most important thing was to be free of booze, and nothing else mattered. So Zoe gained thirty-five pounds! She was extremely frustrated because she knew that although she was sober, she was still drunk with food.
WHAT PROFESSIONALS THINK
I have spoken with many licensed therapists and have presented my views at centers and agencies where the belief is that alcohol and drugs are the legitimate addictions. In recent years the eating disorders anorexia nervosa and bulimia are being recognizes as major evidences of dysfunction, but other behaviors like compulsive spending are given short shrift. We must stop compartmentalizing addictive behaviors.
In my private practice I began to concentrate on the problems of spending and debting as inadequate solutions to life problems, in addition to the other well-known addictions. I began to teach classes and formed small groups to help people work through their “acting out” with money.
I discovered that two kinds of people attended. One group was the people already in Twelve-Step organizations, usually Alcoholics Anonymous and Overeaters Anonymous. These people were in touch with the way they turned to pleasurable substances to dull their pain. Some had joined Debtors Anonymous and continued to see the problem of spending and debting as a disease. The second group was men and women who didn’t seem caught up in other major addictions, but were secretly worried about the way they overspent or binged by buying or charging.
The common denominator for all of them was that using money or credit was a way of letting off emotional steam, a distraction from their daily problems. They were not facing their problems head on, not processing their feelings, not resolving their problems, just running away from or postponing them. Many Twelve-Step people were so intent on keeping their sobriety that they didn’t realize that behaviors such as spending, jogging, cleaning, reading, masturbating, watching soap operas, or gardening had become as addictive as substances like tobacco, alcohol, drugs and food.
IT IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM
The first stumbling block I encountered in my work was the widely-held belief that compulsive shopping and debting isn’t a serious problem. We joke about it when we say, “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.” Many people, including some health professionals, do not understand how these compulsions can be linked to other psychological problems.
The second obstacle is the theory that all addictive and compulsive behaviors are diseases. Dr. Stanton Peele has stated that America has now entered the Age of Addiction. “What characterizes modern-day Americans and American society that can possibly explain the out-of-control growth of the experience of being out of control?” In his book, Diseasing of America, Dr. Peele maintains that we are bombarded by the media, and the concepts of addiction as a disease are being marketed as if they are products. We hear it so often we eventually come to believe it.
Another factor is that we have distanced ourselves from our basic emotional and physical experiences by creating a picture of the world and others around us as a fearsome place. A third possibility is that we live in a very medicalized society. We tend to rely on technical solutions to sickness and other problems.
We have become convinced that we are helpless. We believe the medical model of disease: “We didn’t create it, therefore, we can’t cure it.” “Only professional healthcare experts can fix us.” Meanwhile we must hope that a cure can be found, but are not required to take responsibility for our actions. We tell ourselves that it is bigger than we are, so only something bigger can save us or cure us.
I don’t mean to be blasphemous nor to discount the amazing results of the Twelve-Step programs, but I have often wondered why God can’t cure alcoholism, over-eating, drugs, and gambling if God is so all-powerful that He created heaven and earth? The members of anonymous groups think of themselves as having a lifelong disease that can never be cured. They must bear the label of victim forever. Recovery is only a daily reprieve.
The impact of labeling an activity as a disease often convinces people that they cannot control these experiences. Dr. Alan Marlatt did a classic study with alcoholics where they drank more when they believed that they were drinking alcohol than when they actually drank alcohol in a disguised form. Their beliefs caused the lack of control, not the substance.
A student in a class for compulsive eaters complained that she couldn’t eat just one slice of pizza and stop. The second week of class she revealed that she had eaten one corn chip and stopped. The class oohed in amazement, seeming to imply “How could she have achieved that almost impossible feat?”
I used to ask my clients who were members of diet clubs whether anyone went home with them to police their actions. ‘Who kept you good?” I asked. The answer is “You do!” Who chose to eat one corn chip and stop? By the eighth week of class that student could choose to eat one slice of pizza and stop. She stopped feeling powerless and learned how to manage her life and her behavior.
I began to apply the program for change that I had created for compulsive eaters and purgers to spenders and debtors. They had the same wonderful success. The spenders began to understand what set them off, and grew more conscious and responsible about both their feelings and their behaviors. I will be repeating throughout this book that the behaviors of spending and debting are not the primary problem. The underlying problem is that most of us don’t know how to solve the life problems arising from stressful situations and relationships. Compulsive urges to shop and to have “things” are ways we distract ourselves from our real issues and our intense negative feelings.
In the following chapters I will teach you how to overcome compulsive spending and debting using this approach.
AWARENESS: Stop rationalizing.
ACCEPTANCE: Understand that you are not a bad person. You will discover that you do what you do for reasons that make sense when you consider what elements or experiences have shaped you.
ACTION: Learn new ways to think about yourself and new ways to behave.
Living a life out-of-balance is not a disease. The behaviors we develop to try to feel good again are not the result of disease. They are “syndromes,” a set of concurrent emotions or actions that form an identifiable pattern. Thinking you have a disease prevents you from being responsible for yourself. You can rationalize, “I can’t help myself.” I want you to know the answer is within, and so is the power to bring your life into balance.
