You avoid opening your bank statements. You put off calling your accountant. You know you should look at your finances, and then you don’t. Or you do, and you feel a wave of shame so fast you close the tab before anything registers.
You’ve tried budgeting apps. You’ve read the books. You know the steps. And still, something stops you.
You have a graduate degree. You’re competent. People come to you for advice. So why can’t you deal with your own money?
Here’s what I want you to hear: this is not a discipline problem. It’s not an intelligence problem. It’s not even really a money problem.
It’s a wound. And it lives somewhere spreadsheets can’t reach.
The problem isn’t math. It’s not discipline. It’s not thinking.
We’ve been taught that financial problems are information problems. So we read the books, download the apps, take the courses, make promises on January 1st. And still — the bank statements go unopened.
That’s because the wound isn’t in your thinking. It’s in your nervous system.
Money is one of the most emotionally loaded arenas of human life. It’s woven into survival, belonging, worth, and shame. It carries the weight of every family dinner where finances were spoken about in whispers. Every “we can’t afford that.” Every inherited story about what people like us do, or don’t, deserve.
Archetypally, money is energy. And if there’s a blocked energy pattern around money, it shows up everywhere; in your work, your relationships, your body. The thing you are least willing to look at is always the thing with the most locked-up energy inside it.
The problem isn’t that you don’t know what to do. It’s that your nervous system doesn’t feel safe enough to do it.
Where it actually lives
Shame is a full-body experience. It doesn’t live in the prefrontal cortex where your budget spreadsheet lives. It lives in the places that got wired early, when your nervous system was still learning whether the world was safe, whether you were enough, whether there would be enough.
You can’t think your way out of a shame response. You can’t discipline your way through a trauma pattern. The body has to feel safe first.
This is why the inflammation persists. Why the depression sits heavy. Why the fatigue doesn’t lift even after a full night’s sleep. The body is already speaking, loudly, about what the mind has decided is too dangerous to look at directly.
This is how the unconscious speaks to us about unmetabolized wounds that we need to heal. But to do that you need the following:
- Nervous system regulation to get a feeling of safety. You can slow down and make room.
- A sense of security and emotional containment. This is the role of the therapist to give you that container to hold you, your soul, your emotions and mitigate the flow of emotions so that panic doesn’t completely overwhelm you.
- Then, and only then you have to actually feel, in your body, the emotion that wasn’t safe to feel in your past. It isn’t about understanding what happened. It’s about making space for it so it can move through you and be metabolized.
And here’s the cruel irony for the smart, competent woman: because she can explain everything intellectually, she mistakes explanation for healing. She knows why she is the way she is. And still. The symptoms remain.
The money wounds you inherited
Most of what we believe about money was never consciously chosen. It came through the family dinner table, through what was spoken and what was silenced, through the look on your mother’s face at the grocery store, through the story your family told about people who had more — or less — than you did.
We take these things in as automatic. We never examine them. And they run the show from underneath, shaping how we earn, spend, save, avoid, and ultimately how we feel about ourselves in relation to money.
Sometimes it’s overt scarcity, a genuine financial hardship that wired your nervous system around not-enough. Sometimes it’s subtler: the family that had money but treated it as shameful to discuss. The parent who linked financial worth to personal worth. The religion or culture that taught you that wanting more was selfish or sinful.
And sometimes the wound comes later; through debt that spiraled, a financial betrayal, an inheritance wrapped in grief and guilt, or the slow erosion of never quite earning what you know you’re worth.
These aren’t just memories. They are living patterns in the body and the unconscious, still making decisions on your behalf.
Your dreams are already talking about it
One of the things I notice with clients who are carrying unexamined money wounds is that the psyche doesn’t stay quiet. It speaks through the body, yes, but also through dreams.
Dreams don’t speak in numbers or spreadsheets. They speak in symbols and images. The crumbling house. The locked door. The thing you keep losing and can’t find, like our wallet or your purse. Maybe it’s the size of things are out of proportion or it’s a statement about energy usage. Money and energy can be interchangeable in dreams. These aren’t random. They are the psyche’s attempt to show you what your waking mind has decided is too charged to look at.
Most people dismiss their dreams as weird or meaningless. But in my work, I’ve found that the images that feel the most strange or the most emotionally loaded are often the ones pointing most directly at what needs attention, including in our relationship to money, worth, and survival.
A different way in
What I offer isn’t financial advice. I don’t touch your budget. I work with what’s driving it.
Depth work through dream analysis, art therapy, and working with the body’s signals, gives us a way to approach these charged places gently. Not by forcing insight, but by creating enough safety that the nervous system can finally afford to look.
One of the simplest and most powerful invitations I offer clients is this: draw your relationship with money. This isn’t a diagram though. It will abstract, symbolic, and intuitive. Whatever wants to come.
Then we sit with it. We ask it questions. We listen to what it says back. We will connect with your body in a way that feels safe, so that you can breathe. I’m all the time telling my clients to breathe because they are often holding their breath in the process.
Dialoging with images is called active imagination. It’s a Jungian practice of entering into dialogue with the images that arise from the unconscious. You don’t need artistic talent. You don’t need to know what you’re doing. You just need a little curiosity and the willingness to slow down enough to hear what’s already been trying to get your attention.
Often what emerges surprises people. The image of money isn’t what they expected. The feeling underneath isn’t what they named it as. And in that surprise is the beginning of something real, not a new budget, but a new relationship. With money, with worth, with themselves. In the process you wind up with healing the emotional wounds that are stuck that are keeping you frozen and affecting our ability to get unstuck.
Understanding More about Financial Therapy
I have been recommending the following two books to my clients as they get started on their financial therapy healing journey. One is the Art of Money by Bari Tessler. She goes into how to notice when your nervous system is reacting to fnancial stress and wounds and gives some gentle, trauma-informed ways to facing your money and nurturing a better relationship with it.
The other one is Conversations with your Financial Therapist by Erica Wasserman. She gives a step by step method with lots of stories, questions, and people’s thought process and decisions for how to manage money, what to think about at different life stages, and how to better support your relationships in the process.
If you’d like to check out some of my other thoughts about money in therapy and therapy for money, I have a 4 part video series that you can find here:
- Financial Stress Intro- It’s about Your Emotions
- Money Wounds
- Unconscious Money Beliefs
- Emotions and Money
Avoiding Money is a Freeze Response
If you’re the woman I described at the beginning of this post, who is competent on the outside but frozen (or screaming) on the inside, I want you to know that the freezing is not a character flaw. It’s a signal. Your psyche is protecting you from something that once felt dangerous to look at. We go at it slowly, at the pace of your unfolding psyche, so that you can breathe and find the source of what brings you more energy so that it can grow in a way that feeds you.
The work is learning that you’re safe enough now to look. It’s something we teach your body and the emotional centers of your brain. And those parts, don’t speak with logic. Depth work with me means you don’t have to do it alone. Reach out to me here for a consultation to see if we’re a good fit.
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.