Money has the power to change everything around us including family relationships. Obviously, money has the ability to make relations strong, happy, and even havoc too. It has been a central reason for the collapse and ruin of several family relations. Nowadays family relationships are money-based and people love each other for their own gains.

Coming to money vs relationship the money is just an artificial token that gives temporary happiness. But relations can't be bought or sold. These days people just concentrate to earn money and this results in having less time to spend with those who care about them. Basically having a lot of money is great, but if you don't earn in right way by balancing working time with spending time with friends and family you will not be able to be happy in our life.


The most important thing in our life is to have a good relationship with family and friends to maximize our level of happiness. Not only happiness but also relations help us in character formation, emotional strengthening and they're the ones to accept our good and bad. Although without money and wealth life seems difficult, but much focussing to earn money affects our mental health, satisfaction and damages precious relationships.

From a psychotherapeutic point of view, we could say that money symbolizes our shadowy side. We project all our unconscious relationships to values and self-worth onto the amount of money we earn or feel we ought to earn. We may find ourselves “slaves” to money, organizing our whole lives around making more and more, or we may wonder why money never seems to come our way, perhaps suspecting that deep down we are not worthy of more. Either way, the triangular relationship we have between money, values, and our self-worth is hugely revealing.


It is also a relationship heavily intertwined with our society and culture. Take bankers. We might both admire and despise the wealth “Greed is good” . Although we say that money is just a tool of exchange. But in reality, money is a vital force in life. Build stability, build power, create freedom, comfort, and so much more in our lives.

We might instinctively know that money doesn’t make us happy and that beyond a certain point, our happiness stops rising with our income (various studies have come up with different levels of where this peaks). And this knowledge has been proven by what is known as the Hedonic Treadmill, a psychological theory, that shows the more money an individual makes, the more their expectations and desires rise in tandem with that increase in income, which results in no permanent gain of happiness at all.


the British psychologist Oliver James claims there is an epidemic sweeping through the English-speaking world, that he calls Affluenza. In his book, he claims the richer we become materially, the poorer we become psychologically and emotionally. According to his research, mass materialism is making us twice as prone to depression, anxiety, and addiction. Indeed, this idea that materialism makes us miserable has been around for many years. The social philosopher and psychoanalyst Dr. Erich Fromm wrote: “A healthy economy is only possible at the expense of unhealthy human beings.”


Yes, our relationship with money is indeed a complex one. As the Jungian analyst James Hillman wrote in his 1982 essay, A Contribution to Soul and Money: “Money problems are inevitable, necessary, irreducible, always present, and potentially if not actually overwhelming. Money is devilishly divine.”

He goes onto say that money “can be taken spiritually or materially but which in itself is neither.” And that “if money divides the two realms, is it also that third which holds them together?” Hillman is touching on a very raw nerve: can I be paid well, want nice things and be a good person? In this, he seems to be suggesting that money and soul must be explored together. That we cannot keep dividing the material from the spiritual and that to fully explore ourselves, we must look inwards to explore our relationship with money. As we look towards the festive season, with all its inherent contradictions between the spiritual and the material, perhaps there is no finer time to begin the exploration.

Sources

https://welldoing.org/article/psychology-money-what-does-our-relationship-money-say-about-us

https://www.stumagz.com/in/influence-of-money-on-human-relations-/