264 | Recognizing Scarcity and Uncertainty | Leisa Peterson

<ul> <li>Your money story informs so much of your life even if you're not aware of it. For 30 years, Leisa Peterson has been researching and studying how trauma in early life contributes to the money challenges faced later in life.</li> <li>Growing up with a scarcity mindset, money became an escape that gave her motivation. Leisa decided in her mid-twenties that she was going to have money in her life and not have any stresses about it as her parents did. Earning money became an all-consuming response to the trauma she had experienced.</li> <li>There's a very broad spectrum of trauma from mild to quite serious and not everyone reacts to it in the same way. Some people like Leisa may end up wanting a lot of money, while others are lead to feeling like they have no control over money.</li> <li>An adverse childhood study from Kaiser was intended to understand how childhood trauma affected health. In Leisa's reading of the study, she found one of the findings included financial problems and realized this was something not a lot of people were talking about.</li> <li>These childhood experiences become very disruptive, brings an uncertainty to how life is viewed and crushed the sense of self.</li> <li>The concept of scarcity and uncertainty go together. This leads to struggling with either an extreme need to control or feeling out of control with money.</li> <li>Because kids are absorbing everything we say, it's important to change the language we use around money.</li> <li>When people become more familiar with their trauma backstory, they are better able to talk with their partner about their money challenges.</li> <li>Disconnects in communication can occur when each other's backstories are quite different. We can only know what we know from our own perspective. The job in relationships is not just to understand ourselves, but to see the other person and how they are approaching money differently because of their backstory.</li> <li>When people think of something as being scare in supply, they are going to buy more of