Earning Less Than Your Partner? Inner Work for HSPs on Financial Self-Worth

By the end of this episode, you’ll discover how to rethink your experience of power if you’re the one earning less in your relationship.

Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People, a podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie, a way to question and reduce stressful thoughts. And you guessed it, I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

In this episode, you’ll discover how not being able to make an equal financial contribution can leave you feeling powerless in your relationship, where your power can be found, and how to create a more balanced experience for yourself and your partner around money. This is an edition of Guided Meditation Mondays, where I’ll be guiding you to do the work of Byron Katie as you listen.

There is a tendency for highly sensitive people to earn less money than others. And this kind of makes sense when you think about it. Highly sensitive people tend to avoid high stress, high paying careers, first of all. We may have some struggles with self promotion or negotiation. We may tend to overwork for less pay.

We may not have strong boundaries. And we may prioritize meaning over money. And there may be many other reasons as well. It’s not an absolute, and highly sensitive people can also earn more money, say, than their partners. But sometimes it’s not the case, and that’s what I want to look at in this session.

So if you happen to be in a relationship with a partner who earns more than you, then this work is for you. If you happen to be the one who earns more, then you may want to listen and just see what it looks like from the other side, just for balance. So to begin this work, let’s look for a situation, a specific situation where you became aware of the fact that you don’t earn as much money as your partner.

Maybe you wanted to get something and you felt bad asking or didn’t feel like your money or there was some kind of just like feeling like you don’t have as much of a vote or something like that. So think of a situation if you can where you wanted something and had that hesitation because of money or it could be any other kind of feeling of imbalance because of the lack of income.

Maybe it’s just a moment when you were looking at your bank account and you see how much you contribute, how much your partner contributes. Any of these situations would work. But I want you to find one find, find a situation that really happened and use that as the benchmark or the reference point for doing this inner work.

So I can think of a situation where I want to spend some money on my ec OCU training, which I love, but it’s not cheap. And I usually buy bunch of sessions at once to save some money, but it means a lot of money going out all at once. And I notice right now I haven’t been contributing very much for the last few months.

So what’s the situation for you? Where are you? What’s happening?

Where is this stress over money for you?

And to help you with this, the thought we’re going to be questioning is that your partner has more power in the relationship than you do because of this. So think of a situation where you have that experience of them having more power because of contributing more financially.

And feel free to pause this and take some extra time to find a specific situation. That will help as you do the work with me.

Now let’s begin by questioning this thought. In my case, he has more power in the relationship. Look at the situation where you’re wanting something. For me, I’m wanting to purchase this large purchase of some private sessions. And I see that I haven’t been contributing very much. Your partner has more power because of your unequal contribution. Your partner has more power in the relationship.

Is that true?

My immediate answer is yes. It just seems very true. And I’m just going to run with that. You may find a yes or a no. But what I want is for you to be as honest with yourself and as true to your inner experience as you can when you’re answering these questions. So the next question is, can you absolutely know it’s true that your partner has more power in the relationship because they bring in more money?

That’s just a yes or no.

And again, I want you to be honest. Honesty is more important in this inner work than even right or wrong. We want it to be true for us.

So is it, can you absolutely know it’s true for you that your partner has more power in the relationship because of the money?

This one’s a strong one for me, so I’m going to go with a yes again, even though I can see, I can see not absolutely true but if I’m really honest, I still think it’s true. So I’m going to stick with the yes. How do you react? This is the third question of the work. What happens when you think that your partner has more power in the relationship because of the money, because of what you contribute?

How do you react?

And keep it in this situation. For me, it’s this wanting to purchase these private sessions for my, with my Egoscue trainer, and I’m thinking that’s a lot of money. I don’t think I’ve brought in that much money in.

So what happens when you think your partner has more power?

I immediately feel powerless. I immediately feel poor. Together we have enough money, but suddenly I can’t spend any of it. It’s not my money. I’m poor. So what happens to you? What’s the feeling when you think your partner has more power because of financial contribution?

I notice anger coming up for me. It’s subtle, but it’s there.

It’s not fair.

I feel like a prisoner a little bit.

And I’m getting a strong image from my childhood coming up in this. You may find something similar for you. In my household, when I was young, they didn’t give us an allowance. They didn’t believe in allowances. And so we just didn’t, as kids, we didn’t have any money. We were taken care of. We had food on the table.

We had clothes. We had books. We had everything. And they gave us gifts and all kinds of things. But I think the only money I remember making was like getting a dime here and there for some yard work or So the feeling was I’m almost poor living in a comfortable household and I feel the same way in this situation.

It’s like I did my homework for school but I didn’t get paid for it. I was just supposed to work. I worked hard but money didn’t get to come as a result of it.

I’m seeing another image. I’ve started cutting grass when I was young and had a fairly good business going. And I actually started accumulating money. Even then it didn’t feel like my money. Didn’t know what to do with it. Very funny. I ended up buying silver coins at my dad’s recommendation, which I don’t know, 40 years later I sold for not much profit.

We digress, but these are images that come in when you’re in a situation like this, and you’re under the influence of the thought, in this case, He has more power. So what images come in for you? Could be from your past, could be from other interactions with your partner. What do you see when you think he or she has more power?

I see images of us doing our taxes. And it’s just quantified right there. He earns so much more than me.

And then I feel ashamed. There’s something wrong with me.

And I try to overcompensate by working harder, trying harder, pushing.

Almost like my life is on hold until I can earn as much or more than my partner.

It’s actually a real power struggle when you look at it.

I’m really looking at ranking here. Putting my partner above me, quantifying that, and I’m below. So when I look at what I want to get these Egoscue sessions and I can’t. There’s not even the courage to raise my hand, to ask, to bring it up in discussion. It’s a true powerlessness.

What happens to you when you feel like your partner has more power because they earn more? What are you unable to do?

And how do you treat yourself?

I literally am treating myself like a second class citizen.

It’s not that I should just go and spend without thinking. It’s that I’m not even willing to discuss it.

And then how do you treat your partner when you think that he or she has more power because of how much they earn?

I feel a certain resentment. There’s a jealousy there.

There’s an emotional distance that I put between us.

Almost a certain kind of secretiveness, like I’m not even going to share my desires. Because what’s the use? Maybe that’s how I treat myself. But how I treat my partner is putting him up and me down.

Who would you be in the same situation if you didn’t have the thought? If you weren’t feeling on any level that you’re Your less income meant less power. Who would you be without the thought that your partner has more power because they earn more than you?

If that thought really wasn’t there for me, all that ranking goes away. I see us as a household.

I see it as our money.

And I’m more respectful of my partner, is what I’m noticing. I’m more willing to enter into negotiation and ask for what I want, put on the table the things I’m interested in, instead of just letting him put on the table the things he’s interested in. This is that secrecy I was talking about with the thought, I tend to just secretly wish I could do things with money and don’t talk about it.

So without the thought that he has more power, I would be talking about those things.

I can feel the joining. I can feel the connection. I can see how that would strengthen our relationship.

So how about you? Who would you be without the thought that your partner has more power because of what they earn compared to you? I

see it as our money. With the thought, I see it as his money. Without the thought, I see it as our money.

With the thought, I don’t want to discuss it because I don’t think I have a say. And if I did earn more money, I think I would just spend without discussing it because I would think it is my money. So I see a separation there when I’m comparing in this way. But if that thought isn’t there about power connected to money, I see it as our money.

And even if I earn more, I would probably still be discussing, Oh, what should we do? This is something I’d really like to do with our money. And what do you think? Feels freer. Feels more connected.

So we’ve seen the effect of this thought. He has more power in the relationship because of the finances, it’s debilitating. And without that thought, it’s more connecting and more empowering. So let’s turn the thought around. He has more power, or they have more power in the relationship. The turnaround could be they don’t have more power in the relationship.

Even though they earn more than I do. So how could that be possible? How could that be true? Is it possible?

They don’t necessarily have more power just because they earn more. We’re looking for examples of how this perspective, the opposite of what we’re normally thinking, might actually be true.

I just saw in question four for myself that when I’m not focusing on this differential of money or earning ability, I feel more connected. And so that is the opposite of power for me. Power is like one’s up, one’s down. One has a say, one doesn’t. But

the idea that we’re, it’s our money and we make the decisions together and I can bring up things to spend money on and my partner can bring up things to spend money on makes it feel like a we thing, like an us thing. And from that perspective, I’m just not seeing anybody having more power. So the turnaround may be true.

Partner doesn’t have more power in the relationship.

Another example is, the power is how I’m perceiving it. I’m perceiving more power because I’m almost giving up power, in a way. So the reality may be that my partner doesn’t have more power because of what he earns. It could be my partner has more power in my mind because that’s how I’m seeing it, which is self fulfilling prophecy.

So how about you? Could it be that your partner doesn’t have more power in the relationship even though they earn more? I

mean, what is power?

Like the ability to do things

and just because I don’t exercise my ability to do things doesn’t mean I don’t have that ability to do them. I can literally take the credit card and pay for it. Boom. If you want to get down to the nitty gritty of power. I have that power.

So this is my belief system

as much as anything else.

And what is the worst that can happen is my partner will be upset.

Even if my partner gets upset, does that mean they have more power?

That could be a whole other inquiry, but the feeling I’m just getting a taste of right now is that not necessarily. It depends on how I handle his upset. And I may be able to avoid upset. If I’m more upfront and more collaborative in thinking about how to spend money. Really what I’m seeing in all this is it’s about me bringing my issues to the table.

What would I like to do? What would I My preferences, my interests. My partner has different interests on how he likes to spend money. But I do have interests. And why am I not bringing those to the table? It’s because of this thought. Oh, he earns more than I do. He has more power than I do. All that.

I’m a second class citizen, all that. It’s a story. It’s a story. In reality, he doesn’t have more power in the relationship. Even legally for a divorce or something, the law is very clear. It’s 50 50. What am I thinking? This is It doesn’t make sense.

So let’s see if we have another turnaround. He has more power in the relationship. I have more power in the relationship. So what could that mean here? Even though I earn less, how could I have more power? Or as much power? I don’t know.

And look for yourself. How could you have more power than you think you have even though you earn less?

I have the power of an equal. Partners are equals. They’re not like parent and child, or teacher and student, or king and subject. They’re a relationship between equals, and by definition, that means I have power.

I have more power in the relationship, maybe, than what I think.

I have the power to ask for what I want. Maybe I don’t exercise it, but I have the power.

I have the power of collaborating.

My favorite way to collaborate is to put all the cards on the table and say, these are the things that I’m really wanting. And is there anything you’re really wanting? And maybe we all just throw it all out there. And then we think, how much do we really want to spend? What are our priorities? And yeah, you know what?

I’m willing to compromise here, but I’d really like to get this. And then a solution comes out of it. So I have that power again, that I’m not exercising. In this episode, we looked at How not being able to make equal financial contributions can leave you feeling powerless in your relationship. And we saw how much our reactions, our thinking, our way of seeing this as just true, makes us powerless.

As opposed to the reality of it. We also looked at where your power can be found. And that power is found in you. In your willingness to come out and say, Hey, I’d like this. What do you think? Yeah, it’s expensive. Let’s think it over. It’s something I want. It’s not, don’t have to have, but I would like to. Is there any way we can make it work?

That’s my power. And I forget that. I usurp that when I just believe that because I earn less, I have less of a say. And then we looked at how to create a more balanced experience for yourself and your partner around money. And that balance comes from seeing the partnership more, seeing the equality between two people, and seeing that both sides have a right and a say when it comes to money.

And ironically, When I step into my power more, it can often be relieving for the other person that we now have two people at the table talking instead of one person hiding and the other person, who knows, it might be stressful for my partner to not having me asking and sharing and looking for what can we what am I interested in?

So it’s about balance. It’s not about taking over. It’s not about just becoming subservient. It’s about interacting with an equal, which in my opinion is one of the hardest types of relationships to have, and for that reason can help us grow tremendously.

So thanks for listening. Thanks for doing your work along with me, and I look forward to Another session, but in the meantime, I hope you have a great day and I will see you next time.