Money is often more than just numbers on a page—it’s tied to our emotional experiences, beliefs, and unconscious patterns. In this blog post, we dive into how financial therapy can help individuals address emotional money wounds by examining the nervous system’s role in our relationship with money. If you’ve ever wondered why certain money triggers cause deep emotional responses, this post breaks down the connection between financial therapy, emotional healing, and nervous system responses.
We’re continuing the conversation started in our YouTube video series on financial therapy, with a focus on the deeper psychological and emotional layers that influence our financial behavior. Through this exploration, you’ll gain insights into how your nervous system reacts to money-related stress and how financial therapy can create lasting change. Here’s the second video on Youtube here.
Find more Dr. Robin Norris and her practice here.
Financial Therapy for Emotional Money Wounds: A Deeper Look
In financial therapy, we address the emotional connection to money—an area often overlooked in traditional financial planning. Emotions such as shame, guilt, and anxiety often surface when it comes to money, especially if someone has unresolved emotional wounds tied to past experiences or family dynamics. These emotions can be difficult to identify, and when they remain unprocessed, they can affect an individual’s financial behaviors.
The link between financial wounds and emotions is critical. As Dr. Robin Norris explains in the video, addressing this is essential for making lasting changes to one’s relationship with money. Without healing the emotional underpinnings, we are likely to repeat harmful financial patterns.
How Nervous System Responses Influence Your Relationship with Money
“When emotions are involved, so is the unconscious.” This statement underscores the complex relationship between the nervous system and our financial habits. Our nervous system plays a significant role in how we react to stressors, including those related to money. Often, when faced with financial difficulties, people enter a fight, flight, or freeze response, driven by past trauma or fear.
This biological response doesn’t simply dissipate—it impacts decision-making, budgeting, spending, and even saving. As we dive into the link between trauma and money, we begin to see how subconscious emotional responses influence our financial choices. Understanding this dynamic is key in financial therapy
Understanding Financial Therapy for Emotional Money Wounds
Financial therapy goes beyond just managing your finances. It seeks to uncover the emotional layers that may be influencing your decisions. Dr. Robin Norris brings attention to the critical aspect of “inner healing,” where people must learn to confront the emotional issues that emerge when money triggers old wounds. Financial therapy is about helping individuals see and heal those emotional scars so they can develop healthier relationships with money. When emotions are involved, so is the unconscious.
This process also includes reprogramming responses. Instead of relying on unconscious emotional reactions, individuals can develop conscious awareness, learning how to respond to financial situations with clarity and grounded emotional regulation.
Exploring the Role of Emotional Money Wounds in Financial Therapy
In the video, Dr. Norris emphasizes that addressing emotional wounds related to money is not just about managing finances better—it’s about unearthing and healing trauma that impacts a person’s overall financial health. This could involve revisiting early childhood experiences, exploring family history, or understanding past financial losses. By addressing these deeper wounds, individuals can break free from patterns of financial self-sabotage.
Understanding how emotional money wounds show up in daily financial behaviors can illuminate why some individuals struggle with money, even when they have the knowledge to manage it. For example, someone might spend recklessly to avoid feelings of worthlessness or fear scarcity, even when they know it is detrimental to their future financial stability.
Healing Emotional Money Wounds Through Financial Therapy
When financial stress becomes overwhelming, it often signals deeper emotional money wounds that are affecting the individual’s nervous system. Working through these issues in therapy can allow for a healing process where the person feels less triggered by financial stressors and more in control of their financial decisions.
This involves building awareness of the nervous system’s responses to money, identifying past trauma, and learning new emotional and behavioral strategies to move forward. Dr. Norris’s approach to financial therapy creates a safe space for this emotional work, where individuals can heal and develop healthier financial habits.
Conclusion: Financial Therapy as a Path to Emotional Healing
Financial therapy is an essential tool for anyone looking to make lasting changes in their financial life. By addressing the emotional wounds that influence money habits, individuals can uncover the subconscious influences driving their financial behavior. As we’ve discussed in this blog and our video series, understanding the role of the nervous system in these responses is vital for healing emotional money wounds.
If you’re looking to explore financial therapy for emotional money wounds, seeking out a qualified professional can help you begin the process of emotional healing and reclaim control over your financial well-being.
Full Transcript below:
Introduction: Financial Planning and Therapy Collaboration
I am Maggi Colwell with Chiron Art Therapy in Columbus, Ohio.
And I’m Dr. Robin Norris with Windward Optimal Health in Northern Virginia.
We’ve been having an ongoing conversation for a couple of years, working together on our business and mindset work. It’s the idea of surrounding yourself with people who raise you up, motivate you, and inspire you, and we realized that it made sense to bring this conversation to other people as well.
There’s been a synergy that we realized has been really helpful for us learning, and we thought maybe some other people might want to learn as well.
Exploring Financial Planning and Therapy
Today, we’ll explore the role of financial planners and why it’s essential to know when to refer clients to therapy. We’ll discuss how money is one of the most taboo topics, even more so than sex and other sensitive subjects, and how this often complicates financial planning. You’ll also learn about the ways that childhood trauma and past experiences influence financial behaviors.
And finally, we’ll look at emotional reactivity, especially during stressful financial moments, and how this affects decision making and money management.
Art Therapy and Financial Emotional Health
In the second part of the video, we’ll dive into the importance of art therapy and exploring hidden financial emotions. Trauma affects how people react emotionally to money, and therapy can provide a safe space to uncover these deeply held feelings. Understanding when to refer clients to therapy is crucial for financial planners, especially when emotions and past experiences are affecting financial decision making.
By working together, therapists and financial planners can help clients achieve greater clarity and healthier financial behaviors.
The Role of a Financial Planner in Therapy Referrals
So in our last video, we talked about the difference between financial therapy and financial planning. I thought it would be really helpful if we broke it down into when a financial planner should have a local therapist to refer out to offer to their clients so their clients have more resources to really succeed with their goals. We’re almost kind of talking about the elephant in the room of the thing you absolutely can’t talk about.
I’ve found that with my therapy clients, finances are the most taboo topic.
Absolutely. More than sex.
Absolutely. More than anything else.
I used to think it was the arguments about children, or like you said, it was going to be about sex, and then I kept digging. Sometimes it was addictions in terms of alcohol or drug misuse, but it ultimately still came down to money.
And money was a driver in so many, many things, and it was the most shameful space to be able to talk about.
The Shame and Difficulty of Discussing Finances
So when shame kind of takes over, we go into this instinctual, kind of protective mode. It’s very difficult to talk about. When something gets triggered, when our emotions get high, especially when we’re in the middle of an argument.
It’s the thing that you can’t talk about, but you’re going to bump into over and over again.
This is where I think you and I coming together has been a really neat blending because I come from such a cognitive behavioral background and strength-based background and incredibly trauma informed.
And what that means is that I’m about the thinking, the feeling, and the doing, but I don’t always unlock things in the way that you can as an art therapist on this topic, because I do use more linear things like a notebook or a book or an audio book, and it doesn’t get down to our more childlike selves where I think a lot of this stuff gets stuck and starts.
So I don’t know if you can talk more about that piece of it, but that is a huge, amazing thing between you and me: how we approach working with people in financial therapy.
Unlocking Emotional Blocks Through Art Therapy
Absolutely. I feel like a lot of times our cognitive, linear thinking brain can’t go to those places, especially when it’s traumatic.
If your parents were arguing all the time about money and that anytime somebody brings out a bank statement, you’re freaking out because then you’re that 5-year-old kid again hiding in your room. It’s not something that can be talked about.
So I think those kinds of pieces, where somebody is moved from their set point, their comfort level that they grew up with and trying to deal with money, that’s a good place to say, okay, how do I explore that? Right? Therapy.
When we’re playing around with color and just exploring what this feeling when I get triggered around money feels like, that gives us the way to start to tap into the emotional part of our brain and connect it with the visual centers of the brain because those two areas are very close together, activating that part of our brain instead of taking over.
So then we can look at it as a piece of paper or the lump of clay we’ve been messing around with, with both our cognitive brain online and being able to feel what’s going on in our body, and get to a place where we’re regulated and can have a slow, safe, secure conversation about it.
And I think those kinds of things where there’s trauma involved or emotional places that don’t feel safe to go to or feel like sacred cows—things you just can’t question, and you’ve planted your flag—that’s where therapy can help in ways financial planning isn’t designed to do.
Exploring Childhood and Family Trauma in Financial Decision Making
Right. And that’s why I said I love the art therapy aspect because so much of it is locked away through the art. It’s finding the magic key to the magic keyhole. And you don’t know it automatically, but the client doesn’t know and they don’t have it automatically. So it’s that self-discovery they get to act on by working with an art therapist in order to be able to say, “Huh, that’s something different I never thought of, or I never saw it that way, but I have a different feeling about it.”
So there are so many things when we make decisions about money that involve our feelings and our body.
Past family history for something that you feel emotional about or triggered about, or that it was just really difficult, would be one reason to refer to a therapist.
I specialize in traumatic grief, and I feel like that can be an incredible hurdle when somebody is surprised when it changes their life situation tremendously.
People who have been caretakers who then have to figure out what their identity is afterwards. But money seems secondary.
With who am I and what am I doing, and how am I going to figure out what life is now? The money seems trivial, and if you’re in that kind of overwhelming grief process, it’s very hard to get your cognitive brain online to even be able to focus.
Financial Grief and Overwhelming Situations
But the way we are in American society is that we request folks to make a lot of very fast, sometimes cumbersome, money decisions very quickly.
If there’s changes of estates or changes of things within the caregiving space, the price tag does not get smaller. And so that’s where I think there’s a space that a financial planner has a limitation.
To help this person through some of the grief at the beginning of a loss or change can really set them up better in the long term to make what a financial planner would consider a wise, helpful decision for the client’s overall wealth and growth.
When Should a Financial Planner Offer a Referral to Therapy?
So what would you imagine a financial planner would be seeing or be thinking when trying to make those kinds of decisions to offer a therapeutic referral?
Sure. So an example for me would be somebody walking into the planner with a locked laptop saying, “I know all the passwords are here somewhere.”
The partner has passed, and now we’re trying to get into that laptop. Once we get into the laptop, if we get into the laptop, what are we even looking at?
At the beginning of financial planning and therapy, we automatically assume, rightly or wrongly, that everybody kind of knows why they’re coming. But that isn’t always the case because there can be surprises that happen along the way.
For a planner, it can be, “Wow, did you know that these five accounts had this amount in it? Or these three accounts don’t have anything left at all?”
They may experience with their client at that very moment the shock of a win or the shock of a loss based on what is presenting in a file box or a laptop.
There might have been some hidden secrets, or even not intentional hidden secrets, but just things that people did and didn’t get a chance to tell each other before something drastic happened or changed.
Psychological Aspects of Financial Planning
Kind of like my psychoanalytic perspective on what you did… please do.
Because that image of bringing in the locked laptop to see your financial planner is a perfect example of an unconscious derivative of saying, “Here is the data that I do not have my own ability to access, to understand.”
It’s hidden for me, and it hasn’t been a part of my world until now. And I probably don’t even really want it.
I may not want that responsibility.
Role Development and Change
Right. Because otherwise, they would’ve already reviewed it and printed out some spreadsheets or something as talking for the planning meeting.
Or the person was never allowed to have the responsibility, in which case, again, you have your client sitting in the room starting to recognize all that they didn’t know because it was that other person’s role.
So role development and role change are now unfolding in the financial planner’s office, and that too is another space to refer.
Managing Emotional Reactions in Financial Conversations
Yeah. You mentioned shock, fear, relief.
Sometimes there’s feelings of inadequacy or shame, too.
And if you get into a place where any of those really complex emotions, like grief, are not one emotion, they can take over. It’s going to be very
hard to sort through it and have a practical conversation.
Absolutely. One of the biggest indicators is can your client get through 10 minutes without crying, where they have to keep stopping and they have to keep grabbing for a tissue, or they need to go use the restroom again.
If your client is spending more time apologizing, they’re not in a learning state to be able to have the planner make suggestions. And I think that’s a big, that’s a big issue is part of the role, the huge role of a planner is to make educated suggestions based on what they’re seeing in front of them.
Or rejecting the advice of saying, well, I just don’t know. Or I often hear like a it becomes higher pitched. . Like, I don’t, yeah. So how about this? I dunno, like mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That’s showing us that somebody is in a state of emotional reactivity. It may be a trauma response. And that they’re in a freeze state.
Brain can’t process. It’s not an intellectual issue. Right. It’s an emotional overwhelm.
Absolutely. And then there’s the other version. A person might give a planner, which is, oh sure, that sounds fine. And they leave with a homework assignment and they never come back with a homework assignment, but they come back with a pile of reasons why they didn’t complete it.
And so again, progress can get stalled. Progress can be stuck because there is something more going on
that they may not even be consciously aware that they’re avoiding it. . It’s not like an active. Procrastination.
Right. They meant well, they really said, oh, that sounds like a great, that, oh, that sounds like a good homework assignment.
Because in the moment they do believe it’s a good homework assignment, and in the moment they hope that they’re going to do it. But they walk out of the office and it’s like it never existed until five minutes before the office again. And then they start to feel a little anxious, like, oh, well yeah.
Didn’t have a chance to do that.
So that
means
it’s gone into a place of denial where it’s like, if I don’t look at this, then I don’t have to worry about it.
Right. Right. Yep.
That’s one of the things I really like about Bari Tessler’s book the Art of Money. Mm-hmm. Because she is so focused on her body check-ins
through the process of like incorporating kind of soothing aspects and sensory aspects into what she does. So that you can really get in touch with yourself and say, oh, if my anxiety’s out of control right now, I’m not gonna make a good decision. So Right. What can I do to help myself ground back down into grounded decision making?
Right. Absolutely. Yeah.
I think that’s a, you know, a great resource for people. And if reading the book isn’t enough support
mm-hmm.
That’s a perfect example of somebody who doesn’t need a book, they need a therapist.
Right. Or if you’re struggling to get through the book mm-hmm. If you’re struggling to want to do the exercises where you sit down and, ’cause she, Barry’s got some really wonderful exercises in her book.
But if you find that you’re starting them and you’re very tearful or fearful as you’re trying to complete them, yeah. It’s time to maybe have a, another person in the space with you. ’cause therapy gives
containment. So that you don’t feel lost or out to see mm-hmm. With that tearful and fearful piece.
Right. It feels more like you’re moving through it and a therapist can help you get to a place where you’re able to say, why is this happening? How do I manage these overwhelmed feelings? Right. And how do I get a new perspective on it . So that I can kind of feel this pattern, Right. Rather than it being something that’s kind of a n albatross following you around and hanging around your neck all the time.
Right, . And I think for some people, not only, it’s the feeling heard. They’re having the space to do that, but recognizing that they’re probably not the only one that has experienced this. The second they walk through your doors until that point, you feel very lonely. You feel very isolated. You feel very different.
You feel like you’ve got the world secrets on your shoulders, but once they get beyond that threshold, what you and I see is that they recognize, huh, okay, you might not have ever seen somebody like this. And then you and I are kind of like, well, yeah, similar but different. Yes. And so it can help them feel very supported in the sense that this is part of the human experience.
While it’s individualized for each one of us, there’s a lot to be said about us not being completely alone, even though we feel lonely. So, and money can feel very lonely. Money can do that. Money can bias things and it can take away things and it can, you know, put us in a room full of people. But as we stand there, we still may feel very alone.
So
is there anything else that a financial planner should know to refer?
I can’t think of anything offhand right now. Like I said, for the planners, it’s really that gut space of, I don’t know what to do next to help them move the needle with the, the numbers. I don’t know how to help them complete the items that we have before us because some, there’s just this invisible wall of emotion that’s hanging between us.
I, I think we’re, we’re not using the exact term, but I think some of that gut awareness of, in the, the counseling world, we’d call it counter transference, is what are you feeling by being in a space with somebody else? And if it’s overwhelm or really high anxiety, or a client that is exhausting you
, and you feel like, oh, I can’t do this. Right. It’s because it’s not the right tools for the job, you know? Right. You have a screwdriver and you need a hammer, you know, or you know what, what’s a, what’s a better tool than a hammer? I, I don’t, I don’t,
I use the back of my shoe sometimes when the hammer’s not available.
Okay. But again, if you, if you’re, if you’re needing a screwdriver, using the back of my shoe is not gonna work. Exactly.
If you need a pair of needle nose pliers.
Right.
The pipe wrench just isn’t gonna do it.
Exactly. Exactly. It can cause more damage than good.
So none of us are able to do everything for everybody.
Right. So if you feel overwhelmed and feel like this is something bigger than something that you have training for, or you have the capacity for or something that’s making you feel like exhausted. Or you know, just like, oh, I don’t want to be here. Like,
right.
That’s time to say, Hey, let’s, let’s call in, let’s call him back.
Right, right. And I would say the same works the reverse way. There’s been plenty of times that I have suggested to a client or a couple or a family that I think you need to go talk to a wealth manager. You need to talk to a planner because their emotions may be aligned together. But I am not at all trained to be able to discover the different, you know, avenues that they can talk about that in planning that can help them not only increase their wealth, but to maintain it across generations.
You know, I know a little about that, but that’s not my swim lane at all. And so I think that both fields, recognizing the importance of each other’s roles is, is critical to being able to have somebody have overall health and wealth.
That was great. I, I feel like the more we talk about it yeah. The more everybody’s able to be effective and feel supported and feel like we’re you know, creating an overall team, . For our clients to succeed.
Yes. Absolutely.
We’re gonna talk a little bit more in our next video about some more kind of the unconscious aspects and the archetypes of money and more about the emotional aspects of money in our next video. So take a look at the playlist and we will see you there.
Maggi Colwell
Maggi is a licensed art therapist at Columbus Art Therapy who assists their clients to discover more of themselves through dream analysis, art therapy, shadow work, and depth psychotherapy. They specialize in working with grief and loss as well as c-PTSD. Click the button to sign up for Maggi's newsletter to get notifications about new blogs and upcoming events including workshops, groups, rituals, and art.