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Have you ever had a terrible infestation? It’s an awful experience. I talk about the steps we have to take when this happens so we don’t lose hope that things will be normal again.
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He spent $1,500 on her for Mother’s Day. She felt terrible.
A mom wrote in with a situation that sounds simple on the surface — her husband surprised her with an expensive gift she’d actually been wanting. So why did it feel so bad?
In this episode, Sterling breaks down exactly why a generous gift can land all wrong, and what it reveals about the thoughts we’ve been carrying for months without realizing it.
You’ll learn:
- Why his comments about the grocery budget created anxiety that was actually optional
- The difference between him having an off day about money and a real financial problem
- How to know if you actually have “blueberry money” — even when it doesn’t feel like it
- What it looks like to receive a gift well, and why it matters more than you think
- Why your husband’s feelings don’t determine yours — and how to stop letting them
This episode is for any woman who has ever felt confused, conflicted, or quietly resentful when something good happened — and didn’t understand why.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW
I got a great question in my email from a mom. I put out this plan your own Mother’s Day, communicate to your husband what you want for Mother’s Day, and this is true for your birthday or holidays. You know, we just expect them to know, and they really don’t, and it doesn’t mean that they don’t love you.
But I said, “Plan your own Mother’s Day, be very explicit about it.” And in that episode, I said, “Some of you will still plan your Mother’s Day, and he either won’t do it or he’ll do something else.” So this mom emails me and says, “I did what you said. I planned the Mother’s Day,” and instead, he ends up.
And they had a $60 budget in their budget, which I think is so adorable to budget for these things, too. And instead of what she said she wanted for $60, he surprises her with a much more expensive item for their house that she had been wanting, okay?
So she had been wanting this item for her house. It was $1,500. And so he, like, kinda wants to be a hero and wants this grand gesture, and he’s like, “Here, I’m gonna g- I’m gonna buy you this big thing,” and thinks that she’s gonna be so happy about it.
But she messages me, and she’s like, “Gosh, I’m just having so many mixed feelings about this,” because at the same time in the last three months, it sounds like, and we just are gonna take her word for this, because I can never coach someone who isn’t my client.
So I don’t know what her husband thinks. I just know that she is telling me that in the last couple months, he’s been very nitpicky about what she’s spending her money on, and grocery budgets, and he’s been a little freaked out about money.
And so he’s been kind of micromanagey about what she’s spending her money on. But then he kind of sweeps in and does this $1,500 house purchase wanting to be a hero, and she’s just like, “Ah,” all the feelings all at once.
So I just thought this was such a great topic to deconstruct for all of you so that you can see your own thinking when these things happen. And they often feel really big and kind of charged because many thoughts are coming in all at once, and our brain is very loud, and so we’re experiencing many feelings.
And then she also said, “This kind of harkens back to my childhood. There might be some woundedness there.” She didn’t explain what that was, but I wanna just open it up for you might think, oh, I’m having a disproportionate reaction to this. Is it because of woundedness or kind of wounds that are stored in the body? We talk a lot about that in our community, and she’s part of our community.
So just take a deep breath. The first thing that I would do with a person is I would just say, “It makes a lot of sense to me. They’re having a lot of mixed feelings.” Just step one. It’s just like, “Hey. What’s happening to you right now is okay. This is normal. It’s normal to have a lot of emotions at one time. It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong with you. You’re not a broken human. You’re not a bad Catholic.”
Right? Like, yes, of course, if we could watch a movie of her life up until this moment, we would be like, “Of course. You’re having all these thoughts and feelings right now.” It’s not a problem. I love you. And then I would help her to calm down.
Okay? So if it’s swirly, and it’s up here, and your chest is tight, and your breathing is shallow, okay, that is not the time to think about your thinking. You can’t. You’re in a stress state. It might be a low-level stress state, but you’re in a stress state, so there’s less oxygen getting to your brain. Your prefrontal cortex is not fully firing, and that is not the time to think about this situation logically.
So I would calm her down. I might hold her hands. I might make her a cup of tea. Whatever it takes just to like, “Hey, I love you, and you’re totally safe right now.” Right? ‘Cause stress states are designed to make us aware of danger, but they just misfire in modern brains a lot, so I’m like, “Listen, you are totally safe right now. I love you. This is fine.”
And I validate, like of course she’s having these thoughts. And so then her breathing slows down. She’s back into her body. And then I would, on a piece of paper, write down the thoughts that I was having that were feeling so charged. And it sounds like one of the primary feelings that she’s having is, “This isn’t fair,” or, “This isn’t right. Something about the way that he’s been treating me over here, I did not like that.”
And then this feels very jarring for him to then just drop money, which… And it’s crazy, ’cause he’s dropping the money on her. It’s not even like he bought something for himself. But she did not like the way that he had been treating her, and then, like throws this thing in, and she doesn’t like the way that that feels.
And she might have a thought about that, that leads to the feeling of confusion, like, “I just feel confused. You said this, but now you’re acting like this.” But if you were calm, right, instead of being defensive or blamey or upset, which is often how we talk to husbands, right? She would just show up and be like, “Oh my gosh, I love you so much. Thanks for the thing. I love it. It was so thoughtful of you.
I also just wanna understand, though. The way that you’ve been talking to me has felt very strong in the last three months about money. I thought that we were really worried about $25 things, and then for you to drop this just feels a little confusing to me. Can you help me understand what’s going on?” So calm, assumes he means well, assumes he’s a good guy.
Right? And then we just get to let him say whatever he’s gonna say.
And maybe one of the reasons why it feels yucky is because she has been, um, tolerating him talking to her, however he’s talking to her in the last three months about money, feeling whether it’s not quite right, but not feeling safe enough or brave enough to speak the truth of it. In that time.
So let’s say he’s like, “Why did you buy blueberries?” I’m always talking about blueberries ’cause mom- kids love blueberries and moms love to make kids happy, but blueberries are expensive, right? And so he’s like, “Why are you buying blueberries? Those are 8.99 a pound. The kids don’t eat blueberries.”
And so she’s feeling kind of not trusted or disrespected in that moment, and maybe she feels like it’s not right. Like, “You know what, honey? I kinda do have a sense of our finances and I do think that we can afford blueberries, and I’m sensing that your, like, childhood stuff about money is coming up and that’s why you’re on me about the blueberries.”
Okay? Couple options. So now we’re back three months ago, okay? Couple options. One, you could just love him through his comments and just not make them mean anything, and be like, “We totally have blueberry money. This is just a little boy in him who’s scared and he’s gonna chirp about the blueberries,” and it’s just literally gonna go in one ear and out the other because I really genuinely do know that it’s fine.
This is not disrespecting his wishes. This is just knowing that you might have a husband who grew up poor, and so his eye just, like, twitches a little bit about spending money, and he wants to say it out loud, but in the end, he actually is fine with you spending the blueberry money. You do have the blueberry money, and it is okay.
This is likely the situation here because he spent $1,500 on this other thing. They’re not in debt. And so that shows us we did have blueberry money. Does that make sense? So we did have blueberry money, but he just, like, he got scared in that moment and he needed to say something.
Women do this all the time. We do it about our bodies, we do it about our home, we do it about the kids, where we, like, get upset in the moment and we wanna chirp about something. But really later if you were to ask her, like, “Okay, do we really need to do something and change something about the kid or your body or the house?” You’re like, “No, it’s fine. It’s okay.”
See the difference? So we’re not being disrespectful. He’s not saying, “Hey, I’ve looked at the money. I need you to manage the money well,” like, things are tight. And you’re like, “Oh, forget it. I’m buying blueberries.” It’s that you actually know you have blueberry money and it’s fine.
And then you’re loving him through his woundedness, whatever’s going on for him and the money. You’re like, “I hear that you’re having doubts about this,” and you can respond lovingly and respectfully and not change your behavior.
And then if that had happened, if she hadn’t had anxiety or stress, about money and cutting things out and all of that, then when he does the $1,500 thing, you can just receive it and enjoy it. Like, “Oh, that’s great, and we do have money and it’s fine, and he loves me and he knows what I really want.”
‘Cause I could tell she wanted to enjoy this thing, but it was just coming on the back end of, like, lots of little negative experiences. But those little negative experiences were the way that she was thinking about it, too, right?
And when we allow someone to speak to us poorly or offer us thoughts, and then we take them, and we feel anxious, right? So if he says, “We don’t have any money, I need you to watch the budget,” and she’s like, “Oh, we don’t have any money, now I need to watch the budget.”
And she’s choosing anxiety, we kinda wanna blame him for that. Like, he made me feel anxious. But he didn’t, right? Hang with me. He offered you some thoughts, and then you chose to think them, which created the feelings in your body.
And so it’s easier to blame him for that in the three months, and be like, “You made me feel freaked out and upset, and I’m mad that you made me feel that way, and that’s why this present feels so terrible,” instead of owning like, “Oh, I really see that in the last three months you offered me thoughts on a plate, and I took them and put them in my brain. And they made me feel bad.”
So let’s be honest, we really do not, as humans, want to sit around and be like, “Oh, I’m causing my own suffering.” No times are we excited for that to be the answer. I definitely want him to be a bad guy about money, and I wanna blame him and be like, “This is terrible. It’s totally his fault. Why did he do this?”
But my job as a coach is to get you to see your own thinking and to know that you can change it so that you feel powerful. So for her, I’d be like, “Okay. How can we know the difference between him chirping and really a real budget thing?”
And we’ve experienced that. We actually took a couple of our kids out of music lessons because we felt like money was tight, and that was a real like husband and I looking at our budget, feeling like things were tight, and dropping a couple things intentionally.
And that doesn’t feel good, but it was real, and we agreed. Like, we could both see the numbers, and we were like, “Yep, I think this is just what it’s gonna take right now.” So having a conversation with the husband and saying, “Hey, for the last three months you made me feel like we didn’t even have $5.”
I would say it that way even though as a coach I know that I had thoughts that made me feel a certain way. But he was giving you words that sounded very true. And you could say, “But I see now that with this amazing, generous gift that we actually are a little bit more financially stable than I thought.
So how can I know when you’re telling me things if you’re just having an off day, which is still fine, honey. I love you, and you’re allowed to have an off day and feel a little tight about money. But how will I know the difference between that and like, oh, we really do need to drop music lessons, we can’t afford them right now? Like, how would I know the difference between that?”
And I bet he’d have a really great response for that.
So back to the conflicting feelings. I hope I’ve explained why it felt yucky, and that you have control over not feeling yucky about him saying things. You don’t even have to feel yucky if it was true. Let’s say it was true And money was tight, and you had to drop the piano lessons, you can feel yucky about that.
I would choose to feel a little sad. A little grief is what it felt like for me. Like, I really thought we would have enough money to easily afford piano lessons, and I’m a little bit sad that I’m kind of letting that version of us die right now, and I’m allowing myself to feel disappointment and grief about that.
So I’m not saying we should never feel negative emotions, but hers was, like, conflict or resistance or anxiety. Like, those emotions are often unnecessary, and you can see how I explained, like, what her thinking about his comments created in her body, and that was optional.
Now, I would ask myself, how do I want to receive a gift? How do I want to receive a surprise? How do I want to receive an unexpected Mother’s Day situation? And that is a totally separate question. Like, we’ve left the budget thing back over here now, and now we’re just asking ourselves, how do I want to receive a surprise gift that we can afford? It’s not an irresponsible purchase.
And, like, for me, the answer is like a princess. I want to feel like a pretty, pretty princess. I want to squeal. I want to, like, shake my legs. You know when you, like, jump up and down really fast and just go, “Oh, my gosh, I love it”? I want to be someone that people love giving gifts to because they are so excited.
Now, if that’s not your natural vibe, don’t force it and be weird like some sort of doll, you know. But I would be super… I wanna be excited. I wanna lavish kisses and praise on my husband for doing something like that. I wanna show my kids that I can receive something well, with grace, with kindness, with gratitude.
Again, don’t force yourself into doing something you don’t feel comfortable with, but here you can tell her conflicted feelings are dampening the experience. And I would just wanna, like, receive it and be super happy. I would talk about it all the time. Like, “Oh, my gosh, I love that thing that you bought.” Every time I saw it, I would just tell him for a long time, “I really love that.”
I still do that about my car. My husband bought me a car five years ago, and it was the nicest car I’d ever had, and I just love it still. And I tell him sometimes. I’m like, “You know what? I come out of our house sometimes, and I see that car, and it makes me so happy. I love it.”
And he really bought it for me. Like, we needed a car, but we didn’t need that car, and we didn’t need a blue one, and, like, you know, he really let me choose all these things, and it was very special. And I love it, and I want him to know that I love it.
So that would be the next thing that I would be thinking about is, like, okay, separate from what we’ve experienced, how do I wanna receive gifts, and how can I do that more right now? But when it comes to childhood wounds, and I love talking about wounds, I really do, but I want to remind you guys that your pain right now is because of your thinking right now.
Now, it may be practice thinking because of a wound and you practice the thought a lot, but you can have a different experience about this without healing wounds. You could just decide, I want to love this. I want to be happy. I want to feel excited. I want to receive this appreciation. I want to let him feel like a hero.
Like you can just do all of that right now without thinking about how someone made you feel when you were 10 and how you felt dismissed and how you felt jerked around. You know, you really trust anyone because they give you one version of themselves and then there’s a different one that pops out.
Like those kind of things are common and we have those patterns and they’re real. And I do like healing wounds, but I don’t want you to think that you have to go do that work in order to have a good Mother’s Day. Okay. This was just so perfect. And I thought about writing an email back to her, but I was like, no, I want to tell everyone what I think about this situation because I think it really is helpful.
All right, my friends, I’m praying for you. Please pray for me and have a blessed day.