You may have noticed some commonality between the posts so far this week. I decided to declare it to be Money Week; all the posts between April 27 and May 3rd will have something to do with money or work. I’d like to experiment with focusing for a week at a time on a particular theme for a while. If you have any requests for upcoming theme weeks, post ‘em in the comments!

At its most basic, economic abuse is any form of abuse involving money. The classic example is in domestic violence situations, where one partner may make a point of controlling the family’s money so that nobody can leave. Besides neglect, economic abuse may be the least visible form of abuse. There are no public service announcements about it. There are no helpful pamphlets detailing signs that economic abuse is taking place. So let’s start out by naming a few here, in the context of an adult relationship.

If one partner is….

• not “allowed” to get a job or go back to school, or not allowed to choose their own job or area of study;
• kept in the dark about how much income their partner has;
• denied access to information like account numbers and payment arrangements;
• given no part in decisions about how the family’s money is spent;
• consistently dependent on their partner for their financial needs;
• loaning their partner money and never seeing it again;
• entirely responsible for their partner’s financial needs;
• unable to get credit because their partner has defaulted on household loans or expenses;
• losing or never seeing income or personal belongings that their partner is stealing from them, whether silently, openly, or through binge-spending;
• disturbed at work by calls or visits against their will from their partner;
• at risk of losing their job because their partner threatens to share inappropriate information or lies about them with their employer;
• required to ask for any money they need;
• required account to their partner for everything they spend even though their partner does not do the same;

…then they are being economically abused.

Like most forms of abuse, economic abuse is often but not always paired with emotional abuse. It is easy to say, “I would never let someone tell me I couldn’t take whatever job I wanted or keep me out of financial decisions!”, but rarely is the setup that blatant. It may even seem kind to begin with. Perhaps you don’t have as much income, and your partner generously handles all the bills. Maybe you naturally defer to them on big purchases because after all, it is their money. Maybe you start out on even footing but slide into this position of unequal power as one partner stays home to take care of children, becomes disabled, goes back to school, or is laid off. Perhaps you are the one who makes more, and extend your hospitality to your partner, covering their rent or their utilities or even food – “just for a while.” Or it may seem minor, even natural, next to the other abuse which has become an intrinsic part of the relationship.

The first step in ending abuse is to recognize it, and the effects it has. We will be examining the effects of abuse later on, but there is one which is important here: anger, which can manifest as defensiveness and even denial. If you feel angry and defensive when reading these lists, grumbling to yourself that I don’t know you or your partner, or that there were special circumstances that made everything on that list perfectly reasonable, or that you can’t call this abuse, you may want to be aware that that is not the reaction of someone who has never been abused.

Economic abuse can occur in adult/child relationships as well. Some simple examples of economic child abuse include:

• having to pay for your own food, clothing, housing, medicine, health care, or other basic needs;
• missing school in order to work;
• being required to work either in a family business or to earn outside income for the family;
• being unpaid or underpaid for such work;
• losing money as a result of broken agreements around chores, allowance, and other financial matters;
• being asked to loan money to your parents or other adults;
• never seeing that money again;
• not having your physical needs for food, clothing, housing, medicine, health care, or other basic needs met at all;
• losing money as a result of your parents or other adults stealing it;
• being forced into sex work to earn money for the family.

Many of us will look at that list and protest that sometimes parents simply can’t help not being able to meet their children’s needs. It is certainly true that sometimes parents feel trapped in low-income situations. Sometimes adults make a series of bad decisions, or find themselves thrust into bad situations as a result of natural disasters and other emergencies. Sometimes a government’s way of handling these situations seems to trap the victims or make things worse. However, placing the burden of these situations on children is always abuse and always wrong.

Handling traumatic situations is very much like writing a sonnet. In sonnets and other formally structured poems, the limits that we place on the situation paradoxically give us tremendous freedom. As we accept a few specific rules, we become able to see all the options that we are not restricted from using. At the opposite extreme, when writing free verse, poets often end up using the same few tricks and making the same sets of mistakes over and over; their apparent complete freedom can bewilder them. Having principles of our own choosing guides us toward experimentation, while having no set rules leaves us wandering in confusion and giving ourselves rules that don’t work.

It is the same with trauma. We always have a very large number of options available to us, but all too often we are sure that we are stuck in the situation at hand. We may even put tremendous amounts of energy into finding reasons that no other option will work. However, if we are determined to do anything to prevent our children from being adversely affected, we begin to be able to see that the choices we had rejected before might actually work. When we are willing to put our energy into preventing any harm to them, we start looking more closely at our options, gathering information on resources we never knew existed, pressing points that we had formerly given up on, and trying things we had never before been willing to consider.

If we have children, we must also be willing to put our energy into refusing abuse to ourselves. Abusive acts never happen in a vacuum. If we are abusing ourselves by not making sure our needs are met, whether physically, emotionally, or otherwise, then we are not fully available to support, nurture, and love our children. If we are staying in an abusive relationship at home, work, or elsewhere in our lives, we are not just teaching our children that it is reasonable to expect and accept abuse; we are also exposing them to abusive people and depleting the emotional resources that we have to offer them. In that spirit, let’s take a moment to look at another kind of economic abuse: abuse which occurs at work.

Abuse in the workplace may look like simple emotional abuse, but it carries one of the clearest hallmarks of economic abuse: the abuser has economic power over the victim such that they may seem to be unable to meet their needs if they leave the abusive relationship. Often it does not look so clear. Workplace abuse can come from co-workers at any level, from subordinates to CEOs, and might involve:

• performance pressure, in which the expectations for an employee’s performance rise as far as they can, without recognition or reward, until the employee is punished for not being able to exceed the final set of expectations;
• shaming or punishing employees who make mistakes;
• sexual harassment;
• discrimination on the basis of race, age, gender, sexuality, physical or mental abilities, et cetera;
• refusal to pay for work performed, including overtime;
• threats of violence, whether joking or serious;
• threats of any kind, such as using the threat of layoffs to demand that employees work harder or longer, especially without a commensurate increase in pay;
• pay that is below a living wage for its area;
• pay that is considerably below the standard for the work performed;
• refusal to communicate clearly about expectations;
• denial of benefits for any reason, including forcing employees to work fewer hours than they are able to in order to avoid paying them benefits;
• requiring employees to lie on behalf of the company or their supervisors or other co-workers;
• yelling or insults;
• outsourcing departments.

None of the items on these lists are options. If we are to truly face abuse, we have to accept that as our most basic premise. There is no situation which can justify any of the above acts. As adults, we have a double responsibility: we have to refuse to abuse others, and we have to refuse to condone abuse against ourselves.

It has only been perhaps twenty-five years since people began talking openly about any kind of abuse and sharing what they did to recover from it. We do not have a very large pool of information from which to draw. But one of the lessons that people have discovered over and over in that time has been that no matter how limited our options seem, no matter how little we know about what else can happen for us, it is not until we refuse to get involved with even potentially harmful acts that the cycle of abuse ends. It is only then that we are truly free to heal; it is only then that we can end abuse completely.

Yep, I’ve been fiddling with the themes all day. I really like the old green one, but it’s hard to read the comments because every other comment is against the green background instead of a white one. Plus, I found Teresa Jones’ very hip themes and had to grab some to play with! I really like this purple one with the trees. It’s very retro in a very modern way. I hope none of you were inconvenienced by coming by to get a faceful of black-on-blue or headerless or text-only bloggitude while I was checking out my options!

The Number: A Completely Different Way To Think About the Rest Of Your Life

by Lee Eisenberg

I was very proud of myself because when this book caught my eye in a local bookstore recently, I raced down the street to check it out of the library first. I have had a lifelong habit of buying first and deciding later… often much later. In fact, over the past year and a half, I’ve gotten rid of at least three hundred books that I never read, or read and didn’t like enough to re-read, or never finished. A lot of this was codependent book-buying: I had so many books that I thought I should own, so that I could convince other people to read them. You know, Important Political Books that would make them see why they should think a certain way, usually about things like race in America or class in the 20th century or women in the workplace. And I had even more books that I thought I should own because, well, they seemed like “my” kind of books. I thought that they “proved” something about me – like that I had the right ideas about race or class or gender or sexuality or…. It took me years to look at why I actually owned them and accept that it clearly wasn’t for reading.

Those were the books that I wanted to want to read. There was a whole other category after that: books that I wanted to finish or to like. I wasn’t trusting my feelings about them. What if I got rid of one and then realized I desperately wanted to read it? What if I got rid of something that I didn’t know I would really like? Worst of all were the books that I really wasn’t sure about. All the ones that looked like they might be good, but which I had never gotten around to reading and didn’t feel that motivated to try. A whole lot of these were books that had seemed really exciting in the store, but which turned dull and uninspirational as soon as I got them home. Could it be that it was just the thrill of the chase, of picking out and spending tons of money on books, that made me want them in the first place?

Well, I was finally willing to face reality. And I still have hundreds of books. I’d say at this point they break down pretty much into 60% comfort books that I love to read over and over again, 30% books that I haven’t read and think I would really enjoy if I could bring myself to try them, and 10% reference sorts of books. I lean very heavily toward comfort reading, whether it’s books that I have read before or books I know I will love and am excited about trying. Facing a book that looks good when I flip through it, but which I know nothing about, is like trying to psych myself up to get into a cold swimming pool. Sure, most of the time I love it once I’m in there and can’t wait to go back, but it’s really hard to overcome that initial bump.

I guess it’s a kind of fear, fear of the cold plunge or the inhospitable novel. And thinking of it that way helps a lot. I can separate fear and reality; I know that there’s nothing I actually need to be afraid of in starting a new book, because I am also finally willing to put down a book that sucks instead of trying to struggle on through. If I refuse to buy into that bump of fear, I can see that I am just trying a new book on for size to see if it meets my needs. I can see that I have the power to make sure my reading needs get met; I’m not at the book’s mercy. And I like thinking of it from that angle, like I’m challenging the book to pull me in and give me what I want. It puts the power back in my hands, instead of giving me the illusion that I’m at the mercy of a bad book.

The Number was a good book, with some important information. It’s about the amount that we need to retire, about what different people do with retirement and how that is changing, about how different people save for retirement and how that is changing. One of the big points I took away with me, which he makes repeatedly, is that a whole lot of people don’t start thinking about planning for retirement until they are about 50 – and that for many people, that is way too late.

Eisenberg explains a wide range of ways that people fund their retirements, like increasingly rare pensions, chancy inheritance, possibly-chancier Social Security, and more. The Number is packed full of human interest stories: he profiles different people, even imaginary people, and visits Sun City to investigate how heavily it really traffics in polyester high-waisted pants and golf courses. He holds off for most of the book on any really detailed explanation of how to figure out how much you really need, saving that for the end. He does, however, talk at length about the professionals whose job it is to figure it out, what they do, and how they ended up doing it anyway.

I was confused for the first two-thirds or so of the book, because I expected more nuts and bolts about how to find “my number.” I thought there would be worksheets, checklists, formulas. I enjoyed the meandering trip through what other people have done, but it felt undirected. Once I accepted (acceptance again!) that Eisenberg just had a different idea of where the book should be going than I did, I got a lot more out of it – but I do think it should have done a little more work to tell the reader where we were going to go. A bigger problem, I think, was that even though he talked to a lot of different people with different Numbers and different plans and lifestyles, they were all solidly middle-class and above. The middle-class people tended to be older, with decades of continuous service at companies with nice pension plans; the younger people, who wouldn’t have had pensions, tended to have lucrative careers. Eisenberg also (like many people who write about finances) clearly doesn’t understand the emotional and psychological roots of binge-spending and not taking care of ourselves; he says a lot of good things about avoiding the debt spirals that we are urged into by credit card companies, but portrays compulsive debtors as both confusingly out of control and as being able to stop on (metaphorically speaking) a dime.

A book about how you probably aren’t saving enough for retirement and you might already be screwed doesn’t sound like an enjoyable, positive tome. But there was a lot of hope sprinkled throughout the storiesin the form of different saving, earning, and lifestyle options. And, most of all (to me), in our future longevity. According to Eisenberg, a lot of people who study health and longevity are projecting that people will be living to 150 even within our current lifespan – that is, we’ll be alive to see this happen, and maybe even to experience it ourselves. And they are starting to think that it’s likely humans will reach lifespans of 400 years, “joining the ranks of lobsters, sturgeons, sharks, alligators, and tortoises, all of which scientists classify as nonaging creatures. Gerontologist Leonard Hayflick explains that these species just keep growing, albeit more slowly over time. Physiological functions, while reaching a peak, don’t demonstrably decline as they age.” The financial flipside: we can no longer assume that we’ll only live a few years after retirement. People planning for, and even enjoying, retirement today must (at least for safety’s sake) assume that they will live to see at least 100.

It left me with a lot to think about, and feeling very glad to have read it at age 29 instead of, say, 49. I’ve always pictured “retirement” as an age where I am enjoying the continuation of a very flexible and lucrative career, writing books or giving keynote speeches for plenty of money as I choose to while I travel or play or do whatever I like, hopefully with excellent health. Eisenberg’s book gave me more information I needed about how to plan both for that and for other possibilities at once. I’d say it falls firmly into the categories of books I like to read, maybe even more than once, and books that I want to give away – to all my friends and relatives, so that they can be prepared too.

This is a new meme – new to me! They put out a set of fill-in-the-blank sentences each week and everyone gets to fill them in and share. I’ve been meaning to post more personal experiences, and this seems like a good way to start! I’ve bolded their prompts:

1. The last time I lost my temper, I… Hm, I don’t know what exactly would qualify as losing my temper. I got pretty pissed off earlier when someone – we think it’s a creditor – called for one of my co-workers. I answer the main line most of the time, and this particular woman is out on medical leave for a while, and I’d already asked the probably-creditor to take this number off. I didn’t think they would because the caller was just all “You have a nice day!” which is not an agreement. And indeed they went right ahead and called back again today. I told them in no uncertain terms that they should not be calling her at work, that she will not even be here for a while, and that they need to take this number off their list, and the woman refused at first and then finally sent me to her supervisor, who took it off.

I was proud of myself for standing my ground but I was surprised how triggering a simple thing like someone refusing to stop calling, and claiming that what I said is exactly wrong can be! (They claimed that she told them this was a good place to call her and that they don’t have to stop ever so there – like she wouldn’t have given them her direct line, and like it’s relevant if she’s out for months.) What was triggering was the experience of getting all geared up and righteous and flaming-sword-of-stop-calling-here, and then the potential shift into “you’re totally wrong, you shouldn’t have insisted you were right with the first woman” – basically, the simple temptation to shame myself for “being wrong,” which is going to be the topic of a big upcoming post.

2. The way abuse has ground these shaming beliefs into my brain is what I’m fed up with!

3. The next book I’d like to read is something by Terry Pratchett. I’m reading my way through the Discworld series in order again, and I stopped because I realized I’m missing several books! I think I’ll have to hit the library to get started again, although I also am selling some books to Powell’s soon and maybe I can use the credit to help. (Did you know they’ll buy your books online now and let you ship them for free? Store credit only, but still!)

4. Reading the next Buffy comic, writing more, and buying a house is what I’m looking forward to.

5. If you can’t get rid of the skeleton[s] in your closet, who the fuck cares?

6. The best thing I got in the mail recently was a refund from the power company because they got their butts kicked for cheating people! I’m doing the “1/3, 1/3, 1/3″ rule of thumb with it – a third for fun, a third into savings, a third toward debt.

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to art night at my house!, tomorrow my plans include art afternoon at my house… and Sunday, I want to *blushes* sharing this would be wildly inappropriate