Emotional Currency

Your Relationship To Money

by Kate Levinson, Ph.D.

The Garden Provides More Than Food

In my personal economics, my vegetable garden provides much more than food. Read More

Don’t Overlook What Doesn’t Come in Packages and Bows

Some national stores gave us a jumpstart on their after-Thanksgiving deals by opening on Thanksgiving. One of only two remaining shopping-less days turned into a way to speed up the competitive shopping frenzy. Christmas is now the only day when it's difficult to find an open store. Is this shocking? Not really. After all, shopping is our national pastime. Read More

Watch Out For Those Bargains

The workshop I am leading is being held in a charming Arts and Crafts bungalow built in the 1920s out of California Redwood. For most of its existence this building was a single-family home, and it still feels like a home. I can picture the woman who lived in the house sitting by the stone fireplace doing her mending. Read More

Small Human Exchanges

As is the custom in Santa Fe, a man is selling Sunday newspapers on the meridian of a main street. He looks to be around 75 years old. I drive past him, stop at the red light, then decide to back up and buy a paper from him. Being a visitor in town, I ask how much the paper is and hand him the $1.25 price. He says, "Have a happy day," and we smile warmly at each other. Read More

Fantasy: I could be worry free if only I had more money

In spite of our knowing that hardship is inevitable, it's seductive to think that we can somehow avoid difficulties in our lives. We all fantasize about a trouble free life. Many of us believe that if we were just rich enough, our worries would disappear. It's a belief encouraged by our culture which holds money to be the ultimate protector. Read More

The value of an inner focus with our relationship to money

How many of us have decided to treat money differently: buy less of something, give more to charity, save more, or even spend more? We think there is something wrong with us if our money behavior isn't in line with what we decide it should be. But dealing with money is rarely easy. Much of the time money isn't the problem or the dilemma--it's our feelings about money that create the problem. Read More

Money is both legal tender and emotional currency

For most of my life, I thought money was just the tangle of things that we dealt with every day: cash, coin, check, and credit card. I wasn't supposed to have feelings about it, and when I did, I quickly pushed them aside. Read More

Kate Levinson, Ph.D., is a Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice in Oakland, California. She is the author of Emotional Currency: A Woman's Guide to Building a Healthy Relationship with Money.

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