Poverty and a Person's Sense of Worth

Poverty is typically tied up with unworthiness and/or shame. It is the psyche creating around itself physical circumstances that approximate how small it perceives itself to be in the scheme of things. In a world of human beings who exist with little sense of their inner beauty and wonder, that perception of "smallness" can be pretty pervasive.

"Money" can be a word as charged with triggering associations for many people as "sex" or "suicide". That's because it's one of the simplest symbols for people to use to equate their own self-worth. For that reason, it's hard to think of money - particularly, the having or not having of it - without accompanying ideas of either entitlement or unworthiness.

Poor people number so many in the world simply because mankind, collectively, doesn't think it's worth much. Our religions for the most part leave us with the sense that our very existence is cause for guilt, whilst our sciences maintain that that same existence is a meaningless cosmic accident. Where is a person to turn to find a sense of their rightness, their place, their right to a life of material abundance? Those who manage it oftentimes have found the resources within themselves - miraculously, it would seem, since they probably had to achieve this feat alone. Conventional psychology hasn't been of much help in this area - indeed, one might think twice about turning inward when the deeper recesses of the psyche have been treated - by Freud right down through to many modern practitioners - as little more than a dark cellar filled with repressed horrors.

Before jumping to try and rectify all the world's ills, though, it'd be more profitable for you and I to take a look at where (and why) we may be placing an artificially low ceiling over some perfectly reasonable financial dreams.

Both pride and shame may have a hand in it when we say, "Nah, I could never live like that...never have it so good, etc." Pride, because we may be thinking, "Only shallow (or uncaring, or evil, or soulless) people chase the Almighty dollar. I'm above all that." Whereas shame may have us say: "How can I live comfortably when so many other people are starving?"

Financial freedom seems to be reliant upon two things: possession of certain gifts (which we all have, though it may take a little work to uncover what they are), and also, equally important, the permission to use those gifts for our own greater good. That permission has to come from ourselves. Before we can grant it, we need to become aware of the ways in which pride, shame, and unworthiness put us in a false moral position that does nothing but deny our real fulfillment.