You have discovered prepping. You have awakened to the fact that the world isn’t right. Everything could be gone tomorrow. Your job could be over with at the end of the month. A storm could take out the power for several days. You suddenly feel an urge to get your stuff together and be ready for the next disaster. You want to buy food and supplies to have stored in case of an emergency.

You are excited to get started. You have been reading articles online. You are starting to decide what kind of food storage you want to get. You have been looking at generators and camping stoves. You have already bought some extra cases of water.

Then you talk to your family and suddenly you find a lot of cold water thrown at you. They don’t understand what you are so worried about. Nothing like that has ever happened (amazing how short people’s memories are)! They don’t think you should be worried about the future. They don’t want to have to worry about things like disasters, job loss, and financial difficulties. They think you are just being ridiculous.

That is just enough to discourage someone, isn’t it? Prepping is hard when no one believes in what you do and doesn’t see what could happen. A lack of support from loved ones is one of the biggest reasons people don’t start to prep or quit prepping. Most non-preppers don’t understand that prepping is not doom and gloom, but a positive thing that will give you and your family a great peace of mind.

If this is happening to you right now, please keep prepping. You are doing something for your loved ones that will not appreciate now, but most certainly will later. Most loved ones come around to prepping, but sometimes they don’t either.

So what do you do when you want to prep, but have no support?

1. Do not quit prepping! You have started a great thing and nothing should stop you. You might have to change how you prep, but do not stop prepping.

2. You can prep in secret. Yes, you can prep undercover. Sometimes it is a good idea for other people not to know you are prepping. You usually want your family to know, but they aren’t in that frame of mind yet.

3. Try talking to your family. You can try to make them see reason. You can point out different situations where being prepared is a good thing. Bring up things in the news that leads to being prepared. Just try reasoning with them a bit and see what happens.

4. Don’t mention what you are doing as prepping. Prepping has a good and bad reputation. You can twist what you are doing into something else. You can tell them you are putting together some supplies for a power outage. You can tell them you are just putting some emergency equipment in the vehicles. You can tell them you found an amazing sale at the grocery store at a good price to stock up.

5. Put your prepping supplies in a hidden spot. Do you have a room or a shed that no one but you uses? Put your prepping supplies in there. Use some ordinary totes to hold your supplies in your closet. You might have to spread out the prepping supplies in different spots.

6. Hide your emergency cash and money for prepping. If you have a spouse or significant other who is going to spend your emergency cash as soon as they see it, you need to hide it. If you have a part of your paycheck that goes to prepping, you should probably withdraw the cash and hide that too. Some people will spend that money out of spite because they think you are being ridiculous.

7. You can still learn new skills and not call it prepping. If you have loved ones wondering why you are starting a garden, just tell them that it is something you always wanted to learn how to do. If you want to work on your shooting skills, just tell them that you want to be more accurate and suggest everyone goes to the shooting range as a family activity. You can buy or build a fire pit in the backyard and use it for cooking out or just learning to start fires right. There are ways to learn skills and not call it prepping at all.

8. Explain away your purchases. For a while, I just said that I always wanted “blank” or “blank” because I thought they were cool. You can use this one on a lot of gadgets like solar chargers and weather radios. You can say that you just wanted to see if they really worked or how they worked. You can buy a lot of solar powered gadgets to say that you wanted to use them to save on the utility bill.

9. Be creative. A lot of these suggestions involve creativity on your part. If you loved ones do not come around, you will have to be creative with your whys and hows. Prepping is not something to brag about to everyone anyway because you do not want everyone coming to your house when an emergency happens. You just might have to take that OPSEC to another level with your loved ones.

10. Speaking of OPSEC…you will have to figure out a way to not have your prepping discussed with everyone. You will have to find a way to explain to your loved ones that not everyone needs to know what you have or don’t have. You can explain as not liking to brag about material items or not everyone needs to know what happens in our home kind of thing.

Hopefully, these ideas will see you through until your loved ones understand why you are prepping. Sometimes, it will take a major life event or a natural disaster for them to see the light. However, you need to keep prepping, remember that you are doing it for them, and eventually they will be grateful that you did!

Thanks for reading,
Erica

Sharing is caring!