Personal finance: Battling the debt trauma

Battling with the emotional trauma of debt can invoke many negative repercussions for someone in a dire debt crisis who has not been able to take control of these emotions.

Many of us have borne witness to families being wiped out, suicides, emotional breakdowns, divorces, unstable home enviroments and many other situations that foster negativity, stump harmony, happiness, joy, love and prosperity, also unity within a family unit.

While creditor has a job to do and achieve, most of the time a person gives up hope when continually hitting brick walls, so the negative outcome is at the cost of not really having the necessary empathy and training of basic human characteristics where the creditors inability to identify these ‘red flags’ are zero.

The debtor is pushed into a corner, forced to find additional funds over and above what is available and so the borrowing starts externally from money lenders and other sharks whose pressure to meet their payment deadlines, is even worse than the actual creditor.

So debtors sometimes don’t have choices because they are not understood, neither is some of their sincerity when they are realling telling the truth about their situation.

Then it is way too late for the creditor to ask them ‘Where is the money? How did you spend it? What do you have to show?’

Creditors, the damage is done where the only solution is damage control to the best of your organisation’s ability to fully support the debtor begging for your help, because begging is what the final outcome normally is.

It is a shameless process of humiliation that debtors find themselves in and normally in the presence of an audience of creditors who crowd around to see what the story is, regardless of whether it is their assigned account or not.

I’ve been there so I know.

Most of the time the debtor has no idea where the money is, because as it flowed in, it flowed out and when those good times presented itself then there is a serious memory or a passion for selective memory habits, simply because sometimes it’s true, we don’t know how we spent the money!

It is absolutely correct that the creditor only focuses on the payments due at the deadlines and the outstanding amount.

They have no regard for any emotional outbursts or explanations because they only have their monthly targets in mind where most times it is a cold hearted tone of conversation, normally only one-way metered out by the creditor who almost never gives the debtor a chance to put a word in sideways.

So, when you as a creditor cannot identify a debtor who upon your request, submits their entire critical financial situation for your senior managements approval for a restructure or consolidation and you flatly refuse to assist or even consider assisting, then remember you could be the reason the debtor decides to throw in the towel, whatever the consequences.

Hence it just becomes another statistic, not a life, a family destroyed or an individual that could have recovered.

Absorb this:

- Imagine your entire being is engulfed in solid fear where you don’t answer your phone at work, home or mobile;

- You can’t concentrate on your job at work hence minimal productivity because you are too scared the phone will ring and you won’t be able to explain why you have not met your payments, including the fear of someone hearing you in the office;

- Daily you exist in a negative stressed depressed bubble and it’s sucking you in more and more as the days progress and it seems like there is no light, so you face anxiety attacks and other negative state of mind that pulls you down even more;

- You’re totally anti-social at work and when the opportunity arises, you spend more time at work on the phone to creditors trying to fight fires that are impossible, so you no longer become an asset to your company;

- Creditors threaten to deliver legal action documents at your place of employment so besides being unproductive and stressed, you’re also sitting on pins and needles all day long watching who comes in and out, hoping it’s not an official legal document for your manager or HR;

- You’ve already been warned about receiving such notifications and that the next time you will be terminated – a further burden on your mind that weighs you down more.

- You no sooner paid a current minimum payment where after a few days you receive multiple creditor calls for a next payment, or legal action will follow;

Once you reach home you have the energy to do the minimal and you’re ready to bark at anyone of your family members, or bite their heads off, because you are ‘not in the mood’.

So you create negativity, animosity, unhappiness and you a miserable life for yourself and all those you come into contact with.

Then you start mastering the art of becoming a recluse and at any given opportunity of ‘free time’, you’ve crept into your hole with no inclination to interact with anyone.

You find even after paying the mimum your income is completely depleted and you have no extra money to sustain yourself and/or your family and everyone’s needs.

This is just the very basic situations faced by a debtor who must deal with emotional debt trauma.

Humans have their limits too, some have salaries that cannot sustain their commitments and others are terminated at short notice or salaries are reduced with no notice and these situations are common anywhere in the world.

Surely if out of 50 employees, 30 are facing a debt crisis and this form of emotional trauma, how can any company sustain itself and meet its commitments if these employees in debt are unproductive on a daily basis because something must give?

What is relevant is that you can do something about it, you are in a position of strength to empower those who made bad choices and mistakes to recover from their debt crisis and start leading normal lives again.

What would we be as a people if it was only about us?

How do we know we will not face such a dire situation in the future?

We certainly would expect the empathy, assistance and support from those capable of giving it to us as we are human, so not one of us has different emotional setpoints, everyone’s is the same when you identify the root.

[Note 1:  Theda Muller is a UAE-based author of two books: Embrace Financial Freedom Volume One: 10 Proven Ways To Release Debt And Emotional Fears In Today’s Economy, and Volume Two: Releasing Fear And Bouncing Back From A Debt Crisis.]

[Note 2: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect in any way, the views of Emirates 24|7. Readers are advised to carry out their own due diligence before taking any decision.]
 

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