Being bad with money and why it can't buy you class, my name is Andrea and this is adult child.

Welcome back to adult child where we take a deep dive into the impact of growing up in a dysfunctional family.

And today we are diving deep into our relationship with money, money, money, money.

Now money was always a very charged topic in my family growing up as I'm sure is the case for many of y'all listening.

And when faulty beliefs and faulty fears pertaining to money are ingrained in us as kids, this can cause some real fucking damage in adulthood.

And that is because money is one of the only things that touches on and impacts each and every one of our needs and not just our physical needs but our emotional needs as well.

In today's society financial success is so often tied to our sense of self, our self worth.

It can be so easily linked to our emotional needs that we cannot separate the two.

We come to believe that money is love, that money is security, that money is attention and I can definitely relate to this.

So today I'm going to share about the faulty beliefs that were ingrained in me regarding money.

And then I have an amazing conversation with writer, producer, podcaster, Ben Rimmelauer.

Now for any of y'all housewives whores out there, you will know Ben as Countess Luan's cabaret director.

So I knew that he was sober, I think he said it in an episode of Real Housewives of New York, but a few months back I heard him on another podcast and he was talking about his primary drug of choice, money.

And about his one man show called Bad with Money, which was in 2016, which is a play by play of his unhealthy relationship with money throughout his entire life.

You need to check it out, he holds nothing back, it's raw, it's vulnerable, but it's also super funny.

So when I hit my adult child bottom, in most respects, my life was much more unmanageable than it had been when I hit my alcoholism bottom.

I got sober at 19, my life had essentially been managed for me up until that point, the unmanageability that I could create was rather limited.

My life pretty much stayed managed for me for the first five years of my sobriety.

But when I moved out to San Francisco at 25 and I entered the working world, that is when unmanageability began to slowly creep into my world, just an inability to adult, which got progressively worse as my adult child and my codependency issues progressed.

I think I mentioned it in one of the prior episodes, but one of the ways that the disease of family dysfunction showed up for me was through financial irresponsibility.

In the last few years leading up to my adult child bottom, so six to nine years of sobriety, I created a bunch of financial wreckage.

And it wasn't reckless in the sense of going on crazy shopping sprees at Neemons or going on lavish vacations, it was like taking over some lifts everywhere when I could have easily walked or taken the bus.

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