"Money isn’t real. It’s just numbers," said one of the clients in my psychotherapy practice. This client came to see me because he had just finished a phase of major depression that has been cyclical in his life, which seemed connected with contracts completing in his private consulting business and his not having saved enough in preparation.

I agreed with him about this matter of money. Money has been a mystery to me. And until recently I had always dreamed of starting my own business, which had seemed impossible to achieve.

My beliefs about money seemed to come from my personality. I have been a dreamer, intuitive, heartfelt, creative, spiritual. I have despised what is practical, concrete, detailed, in the "real world." Tasks that involved these characteristics seemed boring, if not impossible for me. I despised and envied those who possessed them. My beliefs also seemed fostered by my family. My parents talked about "bouncing" checks, (as a child I tried to imagine this literally happening), but we seemed to have enough food and our own home (a mortgage being another unknown reality for me as a child). Our religious beliefs fostered a worldview of sharing, even to the point of putting others first and doing without ourselves. As an adult, I never really hit a bottom of bankruptcy or being sued by creditors.

As with many of my friends and colleagues in our current job market of many independent entrepreneurs, many of whom are also in helping and healing professions, I had dreamed about quitting my job, going into business for myself, and becoming more creative. But I was enslaved to my regular salary, that magic flow of numbers into and out of my checking account, directly deposited every two weeks. And I was bound by that second-most reason one doesn’t quit a job these days—a word said in a hushed tone to silence all dreams — benefits. A critic’s voice in all of our heads seemed to say something such as, "You can’t survive today without health insurance."

My lowest point financially came when I realized that I had the huge debt of a school loan of over fifty thousand dollars (representing the resource of a bachelor’s degree and two masters), not having any major possessions to show for the amount of money that was flowing into and out of my checking account—no house ownership for me and no seeming prospect of one—and the overwhelming feeling of shame that a person today feels having the status of "no credit," due on my part to most of my bills being paid late.

My way out began in recovery for substances and addictive processes in my life, and in healing my childhood wounds. It seemed as though when I gave up one addiction, or changed one aspect of my life, that some new issue would surface for me to have to confront.

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