The Scarcity Shutdown

I birthed my first child in a hospital.

I didn’t really want to. My research during that pregnancy had led me to overwhelming evidence that for a low risk birth, the home is a safer place to birth, for both the mother and the baby--less exposure to antibiotic-resistant infection, less pressure for unnecessary interventions, etc. But in the end I let my mom talk me into a hospital birth, just to “make sure that everything would be okay.”

So I did it, and it was very terrible, but on top of the physical and emotional trauma associated with that hospital birth… we came home the few days later, to a bill from the hospital for several thousands of dollars.

This is a picture of my "little" guy... 10 lb 6 oz at birth, went straight to the NICU for what I later learned were side effects of the epidural. 

We weren’t sure if insurance was going to cover the bill.

Seeing that number on the paper… I couldn’t even sleep. The night we received that letter, I don’t think I slept at all. I felt so nervous. It felt like worms in my stomach, that yucky itchy crawling feeling of not enough, not enough, not enough. Thoughts raced in my mind all that night. How were we going to make this work? How would we ever scrape up enough to pay for that hospital birth? I would look over at my brand new baby and just feel terrible. That awful, feeling like a silent scream and panic and frustration and fear--so much fear. Fear of hardship, fear of humiliation, fear of having to ask for help. Fear of doing everything right and still not having enough.

It was a terrible time.

Back then, I was so stuck in stress and panic mode I didn’t even stop to think about the from a larger perspective.

But that’s how it goes, isn’t it? We get presented with these stressful times and we just shut down. It overwhelms our systems and freezes us.

I didn’t feel frozen in the moment--I felt racey and panicked. But at the same time, I did feel frozen in the sense that I felt so stuck.

When we are caught in scarcity mindsets and scarcity situations, that’s what happens: we get panicked, stressed, we feel stuck, we feel like there is no escape. I call this the scarcity shutdown. It’s what happens when we get so caught up in the sensations of not-enough that we start shutting down emotionally, mentally, and sometimes even physically, as our sleep and eating suffers due to the stress.

That story had a happy ending; we called our insurance and it turned out that the bill was not supposed to have been mailed to us, and they were taking care of it, and they did.

Sometimes our scarcity stories don’t have happy endings. Sometimes people end up on the streets, alone, with nowhere to go. Sometimes we suffer so extremely from loneliness and friendlessness that it drives us nearly to madness.

But the important thing is--all of our scarcity stories CAN have a happy ending. And that is what this upcoming free email series on Conquering Scarcity is all about it. It’s about turning our stories around, creating new stories--shifting into spaces of prosperity where we may be currently stuck in the revolving door of constant disappointment and feelings of not-enough.

Today I’m asking you a question: has there ever been a time in your life where you felt that “scarcity shutdown?” I would love to hear your story. You can reply directly to this email--I read every response.

The fun begins on Monday! So go here to participate on Facebook, and if you have any friends you think might enjoy benefitting from this series, go ahead and send them this link to sign up for this email list: https://forms.aweber.com/form/75/1226416575.htm.