I Believe! Or Do I?

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Jan 22, 2002

In a couple of weeks (Feb. 3rd) I am fully expecting the Publisher's Clearinghouse folks to pull up to the door here in Lake Huntington and present me with my check for ten million dollars, a dozen red roses and a new car. This year they are bound to get it right. In the past they have persisted in giving my money to other people- lovely people, I'm sure - who probably needed the money more than I do. This year I want it to be me. I just wanted to put that out there to the universe. I'm on fairly shaky financial ground and it would - no WILL - be nice to be a bit more secure and to be able to do nice things for people, including myself.

There's a wonderful free book available on line at http://www.scienceofgettingrich.net that I highly recommend to everyone. It was written in 1910 and is called The Science of Getting Rich. Although most of us think of being "rich" purely in terms of having money, there is much more to it than that. It's possible to have a million dollars and still be poor and equally possible to have very little and be truly rich. As in all things in this life, how well we survive depends in large part on our attitude and our beliefs.

The trick of course is (I've said this before) knowing what our beliefs ARE. The human psyche is so mysterious and layered and then convoluted on top of that, that most of us remain a mystery even to ourselves. We believe one thing with our heads and something entirely other with our hearts and bodies. My head has no trouble at all with the idea of me being a multi-millioniare. But when I try to imagine what I think that means, how it would feel, I have a hard time getting beyond where I am right now. Not surprising then that I am in a financial rut. I'm not sure that at core, I really believe that I deserve great abundance or even modest success.

And it is not just in the area of money that this doubt persists. Hard as I have worked, I have a very difficult time with intimacy. I don't mean physical intimacy - there's a book and a half to be talked about on that subject - what I'm talking about is emotional intimacy. It may seem odd for me to say that because my writing is so direct. I am equally direct in conversation, yet despite that I am profoundly insecure about human contact even with those I love. Neal Sideman who created and maintains the wonderful http://www.paniccure.com website for agoraphobics wrote to me a week ago and offered me - not for the first time - free lessons in cognitive behavioral therapy (cbt) one of the only therapies for agoraphobia which I have not yet tried. What a generous offer! Did I leap on it? Did I do the dance of joy? Nope. I read it with a sense of panic, clicked on "keep as new," and have eyed it each day for a week as though it were a time bomb which might explode any minute. Why? Well, what if I fail? What if he realizes that I'm an idiot, a phony. What if he realizes that I'm ME? One of the things that troubles me most about myself is that I'm like this even with people I know and love. I worry so about disappointing people, I am so fearful of not being "enough" - be it good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, kind enough, serious enough, funny enough... you get the idea.

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