TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the subject of lending money and borrowing money. I recently loaned someone money, by my standards, kind of a considerable amount of money. It would take me a while to earn this money, and this person, I felt ambivalent loaning him the money. I kind of didn’t want to do it, but I kind of did want to do it. I kind of felt guilty about doing it, and I had a whole complex process go on in my head after he asked me, after he begged me, “Please, please, please! His life is gonna crash and burn unless I loan him this money.” He’s a friend, not an old friend, but someone who I do like, like a lot in some ways. But in other ways, I feel kind of mixed about. And the fact that he asked me to loan him money, it kind of honestly made me like him a little bit less. It set up a dynamic between us that, well, he put things in me— all these feelings, guilt and desire to help him, and this and that— made me feel kind of mixed about him. And it has motivated me to come and make this video. Well, he promised he would pay me back. Will he pay me back? I sure hope so. I don’t want to lose the money. I don’t have a lot extra, but I don’t know if he’ll pay me back. And this is part of the problem. I think if I was totally confident he would pay me back, it would have been much easier for me to loan him the money. But part of why I’m not so confident that he’ll pay me back is because I’ve spent time with him. I’ve seen his lifestyle, and his lifestyle is often frivolous. I even told him that a couple of times when I was hanging out with him, and we spent time together because he asked me for input about his life. And I saw that he was, well, living in an unhealthy way, not being that intelligent. I didn’t realize he was so unintelligent with money. He never told me about his finances. I certainly never asked. I don’t ask such things to people, but I now realize that that was part and parcel of how he lived his life. And the irony is, if he had had a healthier lifestyle, a more mature lifestyle, less acting out his unresolved traumas by trying to get his needs met in externalized, projected ways that cost a lot of money, if he had been healthier, he wouldn’t have actually needed to ask me for money. And that’s probably part of why I felt ambivalent about jumping in and helping him. It’s like I would have much rather preferred to give him my energy to help him heal his traumas so he would never have been in a position to have to ask me for money. But sadly, when I think about it, he wasn’t interested in that. He knew what I was about. He knew what I stand for in life, and that didn’t interest him so much. He was attracted to other parts of me, to the fact that I cared about him, that I listened to him, things like that. But in terms of real healing, I don’t think that’s where his focus was. Will it ever be? I don’t know. One could ask, “Why did you give him money?” And then I think that’s probably part of why I’ve come here, because I still feel ambivalent about it. I think it’s because I saw he was, underneath all of it, a very good soul, and I felt pain to think of him crashing and burning. And maybe at some level, I was willing to consider that I could lose the money, and better that I lose the money than watch him crash and burn without me stopping to help. Even though maybe if he did crash and burn as the result of not getting my money, maybe that would be a wake-up call that could have helped him look at himself better. Which is why I consider I may have been enabling him by giving him this money, loaning him this money. Well, now I think of that Shakespeare quotation. I’m going to paraphrase it. I don’t know exactly how it goes. I can think I’ll link to the actual one in the description box, but as best as I can remember, Shakespeare said in one of his plays, “Neither lender nor borrower be, for oftentimes lose the debt as well as the friend.” And when I think about the psychology of having loaned this person money and loaning money in general, I do think that if he doesn’t pay me back— he gave me a date, “I will pay you on this date.” But if he doesn’t pay me on that date or in a future time, I don’t know if I could continue to be friends with him. Then it’s sort of like he lied to me, even almost like he stole from me. And maybe he’d have excuses, whatever, or maybe he’ll pay me back. But definitely, it’s like I could see myself losing the debt and the friend, as Shakespeare said. And I think part of my ambivalence about loaning this money is I have the experience of a few times in my life— three, right, that I can think of off the bat— of having been burned by people when I was younger. All three in my early 20s, actually, where I was more naive, and people were in need from what I could see. They said they needed money. They begged me, “Please, can you loan me some money?” And three times I did it, and three times in a row, they never paid me back. And for me back then, it was a lot of money, a lot of work to save up that money. And I didn’t think about it so much then, like I’m thinking about it now. I didn’t self-reflect on it so much. I didn’t analyze the situation, analyze my motives, analyze their motives and their characters. But what I realized back then is all three of them were troubled people— troubled people who weren’t practicing good self-care and were looking for someone to be a fantasy parent for them, to bail them out, take care of them, save them. And guess what? There was a part of me that wanted to be a savior. I think I felt lost and lonely and disconnected a lot in my life, especially back then when I was in my early twenties. And this was a chance for me to get quick self-esteem, in a way to buy self-esteem. I could be a hero. I could be grand. I could be a parent figure. I could save this person. And I justified it by saying, “Oh, I don’t need the money so much, and what is money? Money doesn’t mean anything.” And in a way, money is an artificial thing. And in a way, money isn’t an artificial thing. It’s always taken me a lot of work to get money, to earn money, to save money— a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of devotion, a lot of sacrifice, and a lot of self-care to be able to save that money. I know a lot of people who save nothing. I know a lot of people who live on credit. They’re always borrowing money from credit cards and banks and different institutions, even from friends, to be able to live. Or what they do is they borrow from Peter to pay Paul. They borrow from one person to pay the debt that they owe to another person. Very unhealthy way to live, very stressful. Also, it’s interesting. I think it’s very distracting. And I think a lot of people live with profound financial stress, always needing to borrow money and always stressing about how they’re going to pay back loans in order to not deal with their deeper issues, to deal with their deeper self, to not deal with the deeper traumas that are motivating the conflicts in their life. And this big noisy horizontal distraction— distraction often to horizontal areas with money and debt and financial problems— well, it can be comforting. It’s stressful. It can cause a lot of anxiety, but it can be more comfortable than dealing with the horrible pain of looking at one’s past. I’ve actually never seen someone who borrowed money from me, especially in these really stressful situations. The people who didn’t pay me back, I never saw any of them dealing with their past, dealing with their history, really making sense of what had happened to them, how they’d been stolen from emotionally, often by their parents.
Their childhood, their parents owed them a debt. A debt that the parents never could repay. A debt that they themselves, all of us, ourselves, are required to figure out how to pay back to our own selves. So unfairly, by healing our traumas our parents stole from us. But we have to pay it back. It’s incredibly unfair.
And I think a lot of people replicate that by borrowing money that they will never pay back. They, in a way, become, in a strange way, the parents that are ripping off the child. And in that way, even though I felt like a great parental figure coming in to save people by doling out money, in a way, they were the parent who was never going to pay me, the child, back.
Now that I think about it, I also think about sometimes when I have said no to people. “No, I’m sorry, I can’t loan you money.” And oh, how painful it is! Oh, how guilty I felt! And it’s like when they ask me for money, I think sometimes they have induced, maybe consciously or unconsciously, a profound amount of guilt into the relationship onto me.
And I think even sometimes people who we’ve had a very equal relationship, like two friends meeting as equals, and then suddenly when they call me up or even ask me directly face to face to borrow money, everything in their dynamic changes. They’re like, the tone in their voice changes, and please! And in a way, they set themselves up to look like they’re so pained and hurt and desperate, even pathetic. And I feel so much like I’m a horrible person, so guilty and bad if I don’t save them.
Am I guilty? I really don’t think so. Because if they had really listened to me, if they had ever asked me long before they got in a position where they were so financially strapped, maybe I could have helped them do things that would have cleared up the problem at the root. Solve the problems of their traumas that led them to have such an unhealthy lifestyle that got them out of control enough to become in such financial dire straits.
But instead, I’m feeling guilty for the failures in their life. They’ve induced that in me, and it wasn’t really my problem. I’ve had to deal with that and saying, “Daniel, no, you’re not guilty.” This is in my own internal self-reflective process. It’s not my problem that they have screwed themselves and often their loved ones in their lives. Sometimes I still feel guilty anyway.
But the reason, the primary reason that I haven’t loaned money, the few times that I’ve said no to people, I can think of three or four times off the top of my head in the last, well, 10 years or so. One, 15 years ago, the reason I said no is because I was absolutely confident. Something in my heart said, “Daniel, you will never get this money back.” And then I’ve asked myself the next question while they’re on the phone with me or asking me in person quietly. I ask myself, “Do I want to give them this money as a gift? Am I ready to give them this money as a gift?” Because fundamentally, that’s what I’m going to be doing. Because somehow I know I’ll never see this money again.
One of them actually had not paid me back for a previous debt, and I just knew he was never going to pay me for this next amount of money, which was quite a bit bigger than the previous debt. And in all those cases where I said no, I realized I didn’t really want to give them a gift. I sometimes do give people a gift of money. Sometimes I have, and that’s called sharing to me. Sharing what I have, sharing from my surplus for people who have often given me so much in ways that I couldn’t pay back in the way that they did. And I would like to share what I have with them. I give them a gift. They have given me gifts, I give them a gift.
But sometimes in these cases with people who have asked me for money, it’s like I didn’t want to give them a gift. Often I saw that this money was not something I wanted to share with them. I didn’t have enough, perhaps. I didn’t have enough surplus, or I didn’t feel they were that deserving. Often they lived very, very unhealthy lifestyles, and I realized I was just going to contribute to an unhealthy lifestyle.
And also, I think of one, like 15 years ago, it was an old childhood friend of mine who asked me to loan him a lot of money. I had given him money once before, never got it back, and now he was asking me for a huge amount of money. It was about, I would, it would have taken me like two months of hard work back when I was a therapist to save that amount of money. And he begged me, and I said no. And a big part of why I said no is I wanted to preserve our friendship. I knew I’d never get the money back, and I knew if I lost that amount of money, I could never be friends with him again.
And now it’s 15 years later, I realize I never would have gotten that money. He did find someone else to give him that money, and he never did pay it back. He even told me about it, and I think he forgot that he even asked me. And what shocked me is after I said no to him, and it caused me such pain to say no, I even felt guilty and ashamed. On all these things, he was sort of like, “No, okay, I’ll ask somebody else.” And it was like it didn’t seem like it was such a big deal to him.
And I realized that if I had given him that money, I could, and I’d never seen it back, he’d never paid it back to me. How could I have been friends with him? It would have felt like he robbed me in a way. And so now it’s 15 years later, and we’re still friends, and I’m like, good decision, Daniel, for saying no.
But I also would like to say that there have been a few times when I have offered people to loan them money. Two different friends of mine I can think when they were buying houses. Incidentally, they had money, they worked, but they didn’t have the savings. I knew they would pay me back if I needed to loan it to them, and I offered them enough money to help them buy their houses, to put down payments on their houses. This is back when I was a therapist, and I had some savings, and both of them said no. They didn’t want it, but they were both extremely grateful that I would trust them enough to offer this. And I’m glad I offered it.
But I would like to close this video in these last few minutes by talking about a flip side of me being a lender of money, and that is the idea of borrowing money. Well, I will say this: I don’t like to borrow money. I don’t want to ask anybody for money. I don’t want to take loans out. The last loan that I took, the only loan that I’ve really taken in my life, was when I went to graduate school to become a therapist, and I got a government loan, a low-interest loan. And for me, I didn’t like it. I wanted to pay it off as quickly as possible, and I did.
I remember my tax accountant at the end of one fiscal year saying, “Why are you putting so much money into this loan? You should pay it off gradually over time. It’s a low-interest loan. You can invest your savings elsewhere, save your money, invest it elsewhere, enjoy your life, take holidays, x, y, z. This will help you build your credit if you pay it off slowly.” And I’m like, “I don’t want to be in debt. I don’t like being in debt. I want to be free. I want to be independent.” And for me, not being in debt is being free, is being financially free. I am in control of my life. I am an independent being.
And I think a big part of that came from my relationship specifically with my father. My father liked loaning people money. He did it very easily and comfortably, and I think he liked the power of people owing him money. It kept them attached to him. It also gave him…
An excuse to be angry at people, to berate people. Why aren’t you paying me back? My father paid for my four years of college, my four years of university. I never asked him to do it; he wanted to do it. He desperately wanted to do it. I got into a fancy college; he desperately wanted to pay for it. But he held it against me again and again and again that I wasn’t the perfect son he wanted.
But I didn’t love my college and loved my professors in the way he fantasized that I would. I wasn’t the perfect Joe College boy. I wasn’t bringing home girlfriends in the ways that he wanted. I wasn’t building a career the way he wanted. And it was like he owned me by paying for my college, and that hurt me. He held it against me for years and years and years and would rage at me.
It was like he had bought the right to act out his unresolved childhood traumas onto me. And somehow, it embedded very deeply in me that as I grew up, as I entered my twenties into my thirties, I wanted to be financially independent. Being rich wasn’t important to me, but just having enough that my head was above the water, that I had a little protective cushion, that I was always at least one month ahead on my rent.
I mean, I’ve been close to broke a few times. It’s really not fun. But I’ve tried to protect myself financially so I don’t have to go into other people’s debt. I want to be an independent entity financially so that I can actually do the real work, have a platform to do the safety of the work, to go into the places where I’m still not independent, where I’m still in debt—in debt to my traumas, where they in a way still do control parts of me.
And I’ve made great progress in working them out, but I still have more work to do. Until I heal all my traumas, all those unresolved wounds inside of myself, I’ll always be in debt to the buried parts of my history.
What I see is that if I am in debt financially, my energy is dissipated. My emotions are distracted more to the outside world. And the outside world calls me enough, stresses me out, distracts me enough as it is. I want as much of my extra surplus energy that I have to be able to go into myself, into my history, into my buried emotions, into my unconscious, into the part of myself that still needs to be loved and taken care of and really parented properly.
And to love myself and help myself heal and grieve so that I can become more free and more independent and can take better care of myself in the outside world. And so that fundamentally, I can have more of a surplus to be more useful to other people, to help them do this so that they can be more independent and free and equal.
[Music]
You.