My wonderful colleague Sarah recently graduated from a professional development program called “Trauma of Money”. The course looks at the intersection of human psychology and finance. I’m excited to have her guest write this month’s newsletter as she shares her thoughts and learnings.
In April 2024, I was sitting at a table of my dearest colleagues listening to the opening plenary at the Canadian Association of Gift Planner’s National Conference. One of our speakers was Chantal Chapman, a Vancouver based financial literacy educator and co-founder of a program called Trauma of Money. Her presentation dove into heavy topics like financial shame, stress responses and breaking free from cycles of self-limiting beliefs and behaviours.
I can remember feeling her words cut deep as I recognized some of my own habits falling within the spectrum of fight, flight or fawning. This was the first “ah-hah” moment I’d had in a long time, feeling something tugging towards a purpose that could not only benefit me, but strengthen the next steps of my professional development.
When I showed up on day one of the course, there were over a hundred people logged on from around the world, spanning from professional therapists, personal coaches to business leaders, lawyers, and financial advisors. Over a period of nineteen weeks, we explored the physiological, scientific and economic factors that inform our modern world and how it engages with money. Instructors coached us through somatic exercises, teaching us how to recognize emotions stored in our bodies and develop healthy ways of releasing them. We shared our own experiences and insights with the group, branching our knowledge across different expertise, challenging our norms and daring to dream up a different system that would benefit the world.
Every week felt like holding up a mirror to myself and asking the big questions with the purpose of truth seeking. There were moments where I felt triggered by what I learned, there were moments that felt like a paradigm shift of never looking back. But ultimately, these uncomfortable moments would become my greatest insights.
Breaking down barriers within your own goal planning and financial planning within relationships.
Throughout the many stages of our lives, money often plays a central role. Whether you were born into a family with financial stability or instability will influence the way you view money and interact with it. Moreover, the money values your family demonstrated in childhood, regardless of wealth, mold the development of your own values. Some of these values stem from positive experiences, but some of them can be rooted in negative experiences learned firsthand or passed down through family.
A legacy burden is a belief or emotion that is passed down over successive generations within a family, impacting money values, emotions and behaviours.
- Systemic legacy burdens are rooted in design of our economy and practices within our society. It’s interconnected with accessibility to community resources and education. It can sometimes appear with individuals not trusting financial institutions after losing life savings during a market crash.
- Familial legacy burdens can be passed down through generations of family held practices and beliefs. Whether driven by cultural conventions or business decisions, it can be viewed as expectations to protect traditions, social status or wealth.
I feel it’s a healthy exercise to take a moment and ask ourselves “what are my beliefs around money?”. Are those messages solely our own, or do they come from outside influences? Many times, these are subconscious thoughts or memories that can be self-limiting or even damaging to the way we engage with money. I have learned through practice of exploring these messages, recording them and dissecting the source to be a liberating journey in understanding some of my past behaviours with money.
Exploring the intersections of shame and money behaviours
Financial shame is something that many people have felt at one time or another. Shame could come from being judged (even by ourselves!) for an impulsive purchase, or maybe carrying heavy debt. Shame is a powerful emotion that causes us to feel threatened in our bodies, and leaves a long-lasting imprint on our nervous system that we may not realize until a triggering event occurs.
Shame is also hard to avoid in a society that uses material goods as a demonstration of social status and conformity. This can lead some people to spend more than they should to give the appearance of high standing or by not spending that money they feel shamed for “not keeping up” with social standards .
For myself, I remember feeling financial shame at a very young age. At one point in my childhood, my mom would drive me to school in her black 80’s Cadillac that we dubbed “The Boat”. I remember the feeling of embarrassment pulling up to the drop off area at school and watching all the other kids jump out of their mom’s fancy mini-vans, A blond-haired girl in my class had called me poor, and I, as a child, saw our downtown-looking Blues Brothers-mobile as hard proof she was right.
As an adult, I relived this memory, post separation, as I sat with my kids in my twenty-four-year-old Honda Accord with chipping red paint. I could almost hear my children’s unspoken thoughts as we watched everyone pull up in their newer cars. Would they feel the same way I was in that moment?
I felt that very old sense of shame creep up once again and evolve into feelings of failure. Looking back now, I wish I could go back in time and interrupt my own personal shame cycle in that moment. Now, knowing what I know today, I would remind myself that my car had no monthly payments – which gave flexibility in my budget during uncertain times. For that, I hold gratitude in my heart, and it brings peace to those past memories.
The Dangers of Doing Nothing
When self-limiting beliefs and sabotaging habits go unchecked, over time, the buildup of those emotions may lead to the development of perfectionism, procrastination and paralysis. This can result in financial avoidance, excessive risk aversion, underspending, compulsive spending, hoarding, gambling or even hiding wealth. In extreme case, some people may find themselves in situations of financial codependency, financial infidelity, or even staying in a financially abusive relationship.
In a trauma-triggered state, the part of the brain that’s responsible for language articulation & comprehension shrinks. That’s why many of us have a difficult time finding the right words or describing our experiences when we feel activated. That’s also why its very hard to deal with problem solving, especially if the body has been coping with high stress for a long period of time.
Welcoming in New Patterns
In order to shift into healthier patterns, we need to understand the neural connections our brains have made in relation to our habits and sever the connections that are no longer helpful. Hardest of all, is building new connections that are helpful. Think of these connections like a roadway, some connections have become highways, whereas other connections are like gravel roads. Some of our habits prefer to take the highway because its faster and well known. Building new routes is like driving without GPS and the process of re-routing traffic can be slow moving. But with time and repetition these gravel roads evolve into multi-lane expressways with more and more traffic.
The path to healing is to approach each behaviour with radical honesty, acceptance and empathy. When we reframe a destructive behaviour as once helpful, we give it grace to be left in the past. This creates the space to move forward, building a path of corrective actions that foster belonging and connection. Creating strategies that play and interact with old beliefs and new beliefs allow us to practice creating new habits in a state that feels safe to our nervous system. Creating cognitive flexibility that over time leads to real change.
Graduation
On February 24th I gathered with my classmates one final time to celebrate the completion of the course and say goodbye. It made me emotional because I’d grown accustomed to these dedicated time blocks in my week, they felt like self-care time. Sure, I was learning, but everything I learned I could take home and apply to my own life. Every week I was challenging myself in new ways and I didn’t want that to stop. So last week, I took that same time and used it to try something new – actual self care! I spent time tackling some uncomfortable tasks – like taking the next steps towards finalizing my divorce, and mapping out my finances for this new chapter of my life. They weren’t always enjoyable – sometimes even scary – but they brought a lot of peace and empowerment in a way I haven’t always been able to approach without the skills I learned in this insightful course.