The Money Trap

By Ron Gallen

(c) 2002

ISBN 0-06-621158-1

harper Collins Publishers

$23.95 USD

This is a non-DA approved book. (But as you already know, I have just been reviewing Non DA books.) It does have an acknowledgment to Jerry Mundis.

In previous reviews I have tried to give an accurate presentation of "how-to ideas." I won't do that with this book, because most of the how-to ideas can be found in DA literature. The chapters on Clarity, The Spending Plan, Dealing with Creditors & Working the Spending Plan cover familiar material, but are well written with examples. The chapter titled The Time Plan (Jerry wouldn't let Ron use the title Time Debting) addresses an idea that many recognize. That people with money disorders are usually compulsive in how they use (or misuse) time.

Ron overcame his problems with debting to become a crusader in helping others to do the same. "My work having grown out of my own terrible money disorder, I have had that powerful feeling wash over me so many times: 'Me, too,' I have said. 'I felt that way, too.'"

What this book does exceptionally well is explore areas that many of us understand so little and have been unable to find material about. The Money Disorders: Overspenders, Workaholics, Money Obsessives, and Underearners are all defined and explained. Money and Couples gets into codependency issues, how opposites attract, different incomes, different feelings. A topic area that comes up on the list regularly is covered under Money, Therapy and Depression.

The book is worth getting for the chapter Money, Therapy and Depression. A couple of years ago I was at a wedding reception. I sat at a table with a few of my cousins. I asked where one's husband was. He was not feeling well. Gosh, you have to pump hard sometimes don't you? I told them that I had been going to therapy for depression, too. "Did it help?" I was asked. "Oh, yes!" I said. "Then when I got the bill I really got depressed." We all laughed at my little joke. (Was it a Bradbury character that said, "I only laugh because it hurts." ?)

"Eventually, the therapy devolves into a more or less constant struggle between the patient's urgent demands for solutions to their money problems, and the therapist's wish to get to deeper causes. None of the therapist's most trusted techniques seem to work, and many of their most piercing insights don't get through. Therefore, people with money disorders may be viewed as concrete (read dense), or as help-rejecting complainers. But until the addictive money cycle gets broken, progress in therapy may be impossible." (page 92)

"I remember a certain therapist whose patient owed her $40,000. I asked her why she let the debt get so big." (page 93)

"Depression and money disorders: which came first? . . . I am not convinced it would be all that instructive to learn the answer. . . . Even when the depression is not debilitating, the feelings of hopelessness are more or less the same, and the idea of putting one's finances straight while battling what feels like a vortex of despair seems an impossibility, beyond the pale. And it does feel impossible -- but it is not. When the addictive cycle is broken first, and a supportable structure is put in it's place, then whatever traction had been missing from therapy scan finally be established." (pp 94 & 95)

Richard