How being poor leaves lasting imprints on your psyche — for better and worse
Extreme financial hardship can leave invisible scars — reminders of past trauma that can trigger difficult emotions at times. Dealing with the lasting effects of the trauma of poverty is one of the challenges that upwardly mobile people must overcome in order to break the poverty cycle, and become empowered and healthy as adults.
When I was a little kid, my family — two adults and three children — was financially secure. We didn’t live a luxurious lifestyle, but there was always enough to go around. Then one day when I was 12, my parents separated. That was the day that things changed dramatically for our family.
My father moved out, and refused to pay child support to help with the raising of his kids. My Mum, who worked part time as a library assistant, had to stop studying and go on the single parent’s pension so she could look after us. Her income was meager and we often witnessed her stress about finances. I remember seeing her shouting and crying on the phone to the Child Support Agency. I remember knowing that we couldn’t afford things like other families could. After a while, I stopped asking, and learnt to be thankful to have anything at all — a roof over our head, food, money for bus fare, and so on.
Winning an academic scholarship to a local private high school should have been a stroke of luck, but in retrospect, it mainly reinforced feelings of social exclusion and isolation from my peers. I would sometimes wear my sports uniform to school on casual clothes day, rather than wear clothes from home. In the afternoons after school and weekends I worked shifts at a fast food chain. I got paid $8.30 an hour, and I would save the money from this job for when I went to university.
On graduation, I got accepted to study a double Bachelor’s degree in Law and Journalism at a university in my state’s capital city. I felt on top of the world. But my study allowance was tight. Even though I had saved up $2000 while living at home, I was now responsible for paying rent, bills, and buying $150 textbooks (which were revised every year so you couldn’t just use the second-hand edition). I remember rationing out my savings money so carefully, but studying full time at University is expensive and time-consuming. If high school had been bad, this was worse — I was surrounded by kids from 4th-generation law families, who drank bottled mineral water and brought their books to school in Louis Vuitton backpacks.
In the end, I dropped out. But not until I had spent three long years eating varying combinations of rice and frozen vegetables, two-minute noodles or carefully rationed chunks of chicken breast seasoned in soy sauce, or, often, vegemite on toast for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It proved impossible to subsist on a non-existent budget while being involved in campus activities and also getting to class and submitting all of my assignments by the due date.
In that time, and the years afterwards, I learned some habits that were understandable at the time, given my situation. For example I learned to be extremely careful with money — to watch every penny I spent like a hawk — a trait which some would see as stinginess. As money was always a source of stress, I learned to cut back on any non-essential spending. I only bought second-hand clothing or the cheapest clothing from Kmart. I wore all of my clothes and my shoes until they fell apart to a point where they couldn’t be fixed. I kept a spare ‘interview outfit’ that consisted of a nicer pair of pants, shirt, and shoes, which I never ever wore except for special occasions, so they wouldn’t wear out. My parents got me an old 2nd hand car and I never got it serviced until it was on its last legs. I kept a wad of cash in my underwear drawer for ‘just in case’.
I even developed something of a compulsion towards purchasing cheap canned food or non-perishable food goods whenever I had a small amount of money spare — even when I already had a cupboard full of tinned tomatoes and baked beans. I learned to garden and grew my own silverbeets, spring onions, broccoli and tomatoes, so I always had something green and fresh to eat even when I couldn’t afford to buy groceries. I learned ‘life hacks’ like that in a pinch, hard bars of soap can be grated to make soap flakes for doing laundry. I foraged tree fruit like olives and herbs from around my local neighbourhood, and scavenged construction supplies and old crates to make furniture with. Kerbside collection was a feast of treasures. I learned that you can heat a room and make it smell nice by boiling a saucepan full of water and spices on the kitchen stove. I learned which essentials really were ‘essential’ and which you could go without if you really had to choose. These were just some of the many compensations or strategies that I developed in order to ensure that I could survive.
Even after I dropped out of Law school, it wouldn’t be until later that I would finally find some stable employment and finish a university degree (four, in fact) while juggling a range of part time jobs of varying levels of tolerability and precariousness. And it wouldn’t be til much MUCH later that I would find myself relatively financially stable and even affluent — able to afford bona fide luxuries such as yearly overseas holidays, for example, or purchase high-priced items of clothing, or eat takeaway most nights of the week (although not all of these all of the time, to be sure).
I know for a fact that I am not alone in this experience. Having learned how to read people in my career as a community worker, I can notice the small ‘tells’ that people have that offer insight into where they have come from or where they have been. A lot of us do come from a different place than the one we currently inhabit. These are often the most interesting and unique people you will meet.
There’s no arguing that escaping from the ‘poverty trap’ — no matter how long it takes — is something to be grateful for. But it brings with it some unintended consequences. A lot of people who go through this process end up going through a similar process of un-learning learnt coping behaviours.
The fear of ‘losing it all’
Many of us will learn that having more money does not automatically take away the fears and learned coping strategies that no longer serve us once we have ‘made it’.
Living in poverty means that the bulk of your time and energy is spent trying to find ways to meet your material needs just to survive. It also means that a small streak of bad luck can be absolutely ruinous, and a small streak of good fortune can never be taken for granted or relied upon. It’s natural to form unusual habits as a strategy to guard against ‘lack’, and that includes anxious thought patterns, and related behaviours, for example hoarding money, food, clothing or other resources. Consistently focusing on ‘lack’ makes complete sense when your survival depends upon it, or when what you lack is something you need just to survive.
However, this negative thought pattern alsotraps us in a ‘fight-or-flight’ survival mode of thinking that does not automatically correct itself if you manage to escape the poverty trap. Anxiety about losing it all can prevent us from being able to appreciate our good fortune, see all of the options that are available to us, or taking responsible risks that could pay off if we felt more secure in our ability to meet our material needs. It can trap us in unfulfilling but well-paying jobs to which we’re not well suited, it can prevent us from enjoying life, stopping to smell the roses or taking that trip away that you desperately want to go on, out of fear that you ‘can’t afford it’. What your mind is really telling you, is that it thinks you ‘can’t afford’ to stop worrying about survival for even a moment, even if you’re earning a reasonable income.
We know now that repetitive thought patterns become hard-wired into our brains, making them more and more ‘automatic’. The longer you experience poverty and survival anxiety, the more hard-wired these thought habits will be. Undoing these, and learning that we don’t need to hold onto our material possessions tightly, takes time. But it will be very much worth it if you ever want to really be able to enjoy life, relax, and appreciate how far you have really come.
The fear of not being ‘deserving enough’
I can tell almost immeditately if someone was raised in an emotionally and materially secure family environment vs. someone who was raised in an emotionally insecure, scarce-resource environment. The difference is almost always about how confident they appear to be, and how positively they feel about themselves. Most people who grew up in an environment that was both emotionally and materially secure have a reasonable core sense of self-esteem and worth — regardless of the kind of person they actually are. They can walk through the world with a sureness that reflects that they know who they are and that they take it for granted that good things can happen to them, that they even deserve them! And that’s because, often, good things can and do happen to them!
Unfortunately our society teaches us the lie that we each ‘get what we deserve’, and that therefore if you are poor, you deserve it! If you are poor, the likelihood that bad things will happen to you seems to be multiplied, and the severity of the impact of a random misfortune is almost always greater. Poverty simply makes us less ‘resilient’ as we don’t have the money or access to resources we need to recover quickly from a misfortune.
This is the myth of a just world, a logical fallacy that is simply that — a fallacy. In a just world, we would all be seen — and treated as — deserving. But the society we live in ensures that people with more money get more of the good things in life and can skate through the bad parts, while poor people experience the opposite. Like the ignored baby who eventually stops crying, poor people learn not to expect good things, and subconsciously internalise the feeling that they don’t ‘deserve’ these things. Even if we know intellectually that what’s happening isn’t ‘fair’, it doesn’t matter — nobody is coming to help us.
In addition to this, class divided society also regulates the sort of spaces that we’re in, and learned social cues allow us to ‘fit in’. Subtle class filtering means that the odds of a poor kid making it to law school are miniscule. The culture I grew up in — working class, blue collar, rough and tumble, outspoken- was never going to serve me well in the company of people who had never even drunk instant coffee. The kinds of things that were normal to me were beneath the people I was mixing with. Knowing this made it impossible to feel that I ‘deserved’ a place in the legal profession, and I knew for a fact that I would never fit in with them.
It wasn’t until much later in life that I would learn how to quash my feelings of being undeserving in spaces that people of my means and background would rarely enter. I learnt that there are often people in those places who have a similar story, but are also wearing camouflage. I learned not to rock the class privilege boat too much or rub people’s privilege in their faces. But I also learnt to stand my ground and that the cost of my wardrobe did not determine my accomplishments or the value of my thoughts and experiences.
Indeed, having had less privilege in life makes me different in a way that is also extremely important in spaces of privilege, as a witness for the people who cannot be there because life’s arbitrary nature has excluded them from them. I can also hold open the door for others in my position, and mentor them until they gain the confidence to also stand in the presence of people who have had everything given to them from the get-go.
Survivor’s Guilt
Survivor’s guilt is the thing I most struggle with. The term ‘survivor guilt’ was first coined by Holocaust survivors. People who survive atrocities may often feel a sense of guilt towards those who did not survive. The fact is that who did and did not survive the German death camps was often a matter of chance, completely arbitrary. The people who survived weren’t the most good-hearted or the most wicked, the most innocent or the most guilty. The survivors were just that — human beings in all of their emotional and moral complexity who for some reason had lived through an unimaginable atrocity wherein death was almost certain — and survived where many others hadn’t.
In the absence of a meaningful schema through which to understand this turn of events, the mind turns on itself, and the result is often a type of guilt. The same holds true for people who live through extreme poverty and come out the other side. To this day, I can’t buy too many clothes at once, or spend too much money all at once, without a twinge of guilt. Buying two pairs of sunglasses at the same time feels wasteful. I would feel embarrassed to wear conspicuously branded designer clothing. I feel guilty every time I throw out a tattered piece of clothing or rancid food. I am slowly learning to unpack this. Emphasis on the slowly.
But part of me thinks that this conscience that my experience has given me, is also a positive thing. I donate to the Smith Family — a charity that helps children from financially disadvantaged families. I donate to other charities from time to time also. I do work in the community when I can. I do believe that the fact that others do not manage to escape the poverty trap, is cruel, meaningless and arbitrary. People do not deserve to live in poverty. Nobody does. While I will try to unlearn my less helpful responses to my childhood and adolescence, I will never ever forget the simple fact that everybody is created equal and we all deserve to have a shot at a decent life for ourselves and our children.
