This is not what I intended to write about tonight so  my post may be short.   Tonight I found out that someone has some private financial information about my family.  I am not happy about this and am embarrassed that this person knows about our money.  It is not terrible or shameful news, but it is about money.  OK then, to be honest there are two topics I never talk about except with my husband.  One is money the other is sex.

Physical and Emotional Response:

I am embarrassed.   So what then is my embarrassment made up of.  My response was and still is incredibly physical.  My face feels like it is on fire, then my stomach hurt, I cried for a minute.  Then emotional responses kicked in.  I panicked,  became angry and felt some shame.By the way for some unknown reason I was angry at myself but also at my husband.  We will look at externalization of our anger on another day.

What to do…what to do:

What could I do in order to ease that physical response.  I called my husband who is away from home tonight and told him.  He told me to put things into perspective and frankly that did not help much.  Then he listened and said he understood my reaction.  That did help. I thought about calling a friend and talking to her but I thought again about my taboo of not talking about money with others.  I did call one of my daughters in law who knows my dynamics and boundaries and told her what happened.  She made a few comments but mostly validated my response.  She did not offer me advice.  I need to mention that both my daughters in law are smart and wise.

I put the email away for a bit so that I can do what my dear husband suggested and put it into perspective.  I will deal with this but maybe later.

Where does embarrassment come from?  I read in a psychology text that it comes from a weak ego structure.  I do want to call baloney on that.  My ego structure is just fine, thank you very much.  However I did grow up in a time and culture that told me some things are just private. Frankly it is all right to have areas of our lives that we do not want to share with the general public. Only my family and my banker need to know  about my financial affairs, but now this other person does too.  I will have to learn to live with it and put it to the back of my mind.

Definition of Embarrassment according to Miriam Webster dictionary:

The state of being embarrassed: as a :  confusion or disturbance of mind <couldn’t hide her embarrassment> b :  difficulty arising from the want of money to pay debts

I think in this case the a: part of the definition fits for me.  I have a confusion or disturbance of mind.

What I have learned from my clients:

• First of all this is not going to kill me and I will not harm the other person so that is good and very honourable of me I might say!

• I need to put the whole incident into perspective

• I want to understand the other person’s motivation. I actually know this person and care for them,  they are not evil or vindictive.

• I can be concerned about the incident but do not have to be shamed.

• It might just be business and not about me at all.

• I will set this aside for a few days and have one of my little thinks.

• I can talk to my husband again when he is home and we can make a plan.

• If I dwell on this I will feel worse.

• Humour helps…to quote today’s client. “I am not the centre of anyone’s world but my own.” Oh darn!

• Sometimes people are thoughtless or unaware of your reactions and do not anticipate a strong response.

How to go on living by letting go

Hold on a second! What I learned from my clients is actually pretty good advice and I need not to awfulize or catastrophize this quite small breach.  I can back up from this feeling or let it pass.  Oh yes,  in last night’s blog I wrote that my clients taught me  happiness like all emotion is fleeting so that means this just may be transitory as well.  I can change the story around this and someday I might be able to laugh or even address my taboo, although I don’t want to right now!  The really horrible thing that happened is that this other person knows I am not rich.  So what!

On a completely different note I brought a nice cappuccino and some cookies to my daughter in law while she was at work today. Talk about boundary violations.  I walked into her teaching space and had a little chat with a few of the children she was teaching. Then I went on my merry way.  She seemed fine with my violation. It was a good day overall. However, my friend’s daughter did not win in the civic election and I am sorry about that.