Overcoming Financial Trauma

Here are 5 key takeaways from this episode:

• Financial trauma refers to highly stressful or emotional experiences related to money, like bankruptcy, losing a job, divorce, etc. These can create subconscious fears about money.
• Financial trauma often originates in childhood by observing how parents or others interact with money. Even “microtraumas” can accumulate.
• The subconscious mind tries to “protect” us by keeping us stuck at a certain income level that feels safe based on past financial trauma. This creates an income ceiling.
• Signs of financial trauma include anxiety about money, judging others’ financial status, fear of spending, etc. Becoming aware of trauma is the first step.
• To move past financial trauma, we need to address the roots through nervous system regulation, reprogramming subconscious beliefs, and releasing old traumas so more income feels safe.

So today we’re talking about financial trauma. Financial trauma is basically any of those experiences you may have had about money that have caused you a huge degree of stress. It’s usually a really highly emotionally triggering event or experience that you’ve had around money.

Now, I’m Dr. Ashlee Greer, and I’m a former psychologist who is a specialist in trauma, but who now works with entrepreneurs to build wealth, abundance and businesses that they love. And so I’m in the unique position to really discuss and help you understand how financial trauma may have impacted you in your life and particularly in your business.

So let me give you some examples of what financial trauma may look like or may have looked like for you in your life and see if you can envision yourself in any of these. The first is going bankrupt, losing everything. Another that I seek frequently with my clients is experiencing a challenging divorce.

Particularly if you had a spouse who was a total dick peg and ended up screwing you over financially in that divorce. Another experience that’s frequent is losing a job or perhaps having your business go under. Other things that people have experienced is a chronic inability to pay their bills or unexpected bills coming up that they didn’t even know they were going to get hit with, like medical bills.

There are all kinds of experiences that we can have that can be traumatic around money. But as long as money is involved, what happens is that trauma, that stress, that emotional triggering inside of us, those deep subconscious roots get attached. They almost get glued to money.

And when they get glued to money, what happens is it totally messes with our relationship with money going forward. It totally screws with our ability to break through income ceilings, create consistent income months in our business, to make a lot more money, to scale our business, to move beyond the place that we’ve been stuck at financially. Now, why does that happen? It happens because this stress response, this trigger, this trauma, this financial trauma from the past has taught us on a subconscious level, outside of our awareness that money is dangerous in some way, that money comes with big costs.

Like you could lose it all, you could lose everything, or your parents might leave, et cetera. Because that’s the funny thing about these things, about financial trauma is financial trauma doesn’t even actually have to be about you and your specific experience. About money.

It can actually be looking and observing other people’s experiences with money. So watching your parents go through a bankruptcy watching your parents go through a divorce where one of your parents ends up financially strapped after the divorce goes through, watching your parent lose a job or your experience with your parents and foundational experience of yourself as a child growing up like your parent, never being at home. Because either they’re running a successful business or they’re working themselves to the bone to try to put food on the table.

Either direction, it will end up messing with your own relationship with money. Or maybe you even saw a relative become toxic or narcissistic or self centered or just a complete jerk hole once they began making a lot of money. Or maybe you just heard your parents talking about that relative saying, oh, isn’t Uncle Freddie just a jerk now that he’s driving a Porsche? And so in your head, you then begin to associate people who have money with being jerks.

So why would you ever want to go there in your own business and your own finances when subconsciously there’s a belief that people who make a lot of money are just jerks, they’re jerk squads? Well, this is how financial trauma can impact us on these levels. And like I said, many of these financial traumas go back to childhood. They go back to childhood of watching other people struggle with money.

They go back to childhood of watching people be removed from our life because of money or watching people have beliefs about other people who had money observing it. Children in particular learn through observation. They learn what is appropriate and how to act and how to behave and what to believe by watching their parents, watching their peers, watching people in their neighborhood, watching people in their community and in their culture.

And so if people in their community and culture and neighborhood and then their household have these kinds of beliefs, have these kinds of experiences, of course they’re going to take them on themselves and they become a financial trauma that they’re experiencing as a child, even if they’re not the one going bankrupt. And so that can be an incredibly difficult experience for a child to deal with because they don’t have the capacity to know how to cope with those things. And as an adult, we go, oh, that was no big deal, and we brush it away.

We brush it under the carpet. We think it’s no big deal. It was a minor thing, particularly if it’s something like a microtrauma.

Now, a microtrauma is basically a smaller stress point. It’s maybe not something big like bankruptcy or somebody dying and you getting an inheritance and you feel guilty and that becomes a trauma because the inheritance feels traumatic. It’s not maybe one of these big things, but it’s a small things.

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Like the first time you ever asked for money from a parent. Being told no and being made feeling really bad about it and feeling guilty and ashamed or feeling ashamed that your family didn’t make more money growing up. Or that you made too much money and you made more money than your friends or being given money by relatives and being told to give it back by a parent and being confused about what they were upset about.

It’s funny. I have multiple clients who’ve experienced that exact thing. These microtraumas can stack up and make your relationship with money really, really funky because they stack into limiting beliefs around money.

They stack into these feelings that money isn’t safe. Either having too much money isn’t safe or not having enough money isn’t safe regardless. It ends up creating anxiety and fear and either has us holding ourselves back in our business, putting on the handbrake subconsciously, because a level of us, an aspect of us doesn’t feel as though it’s safe to make more money because we’ve seen people make more money and they turn into money hungry monsters.

We’ve seen people make more money and it ends up causing divorce. We’ve seen people make more money and it ends up they die of a heart attack early because they’re working too much. We’ve seen people make more money and suddenly they’re sacrificing everything and they become a workaholic.

Or we’ve struggled making money our whole life and we feel as though making money is always going to be hard and we have limiting beliefs around that. We’ve struggled making money our whole life and we feel as though money is really hard to come by. Money doesn’t grow on trees and we have these limiting beliefs that maybe come from watching people in our family or in our community struggle or we have shame around money whether we have enough or don’t have enough.

And we carry that over into our business and we make it mean something about ourselves. What I mean by that is then we go out there, we try to meet our income goal, we don’t make it, and we feel like a failure. Or we feel an internal sense of rejection, as though we’re not good enough.

Because we didn’t make our income goals. Because this is what we were taught through this financial trauma when we were growing up. That to not make more money meant that something was wrong with me, meant that something was wrong with that person, meant that we weren’t doing something right because that’s the lesson we learn by observing our parents because they felt traumatized by not earning enough money.

And we had that trauma passed down to us through our family lineage. And so I want to encourage you to understand that financial trauma can be an experience in your own life. It can be something big like divorce or bankruptcy or a medical emergency, things like that.

But a lot of times it comes from your childhood. A lot of times it comes from observing other people and the struggles they went through. And sometimes it also comes through these micro traumas, these things that we’ve discounted and don’t even think are that big of a deal.

But they stack up and they create these subconscious impacts on the way that we interact with money today. And that ends up holding us at our income level, that ends up holding us where we are at making it so that we have a glass ceiling that we continually hit our head against when it comes to our income. The reason this happens is we feel safe within a certain zone of income.

And that zone of income, our money set point, our thermostat, our wealth thermostat is where our nervous system feels relaxed and we don’t feel as though it’s a threat to either make more money or make less. And just like the thermostat in your house, when you set it to 68 degrees or whatever, when the house starts to get too hot, the air conditioner is going to come on and it’s going to bring it back down again. When the house starts to get too cold, the heater is going to come on and it’s going to bring it back up again.

This is what happens to you and why you might feel as though you’re stuck at the same income level. These old financial traumas from the past end up pulling you back to that same set point where your nervous system feels safe and where your subconscious goes, okay, we’re going to survive here. We’re going to stay here.

Because the thing is, when it comes to financial trauma, what happens is our subconscious mind, we brush these things away, we ignore them, we don’t dig them out. We oftentimes don’t even think about them, to be honest with you. We think that we’re over it.

But they’re in our subconscious mind. They’re out of our awareness and they’re still influencing our behaviors, our choices, and what it is that we’re doing in our business every day and how we’re interacting with money. And so when those subconscious factors are influencing us, what happens is that we end up getting stuck at that money set point and we end up feeling as though we can’t break free of it because it’s constantly telling us that this is the only place to stay safe.

Our subconscious mind, the role of our subconscious mind is to keep us alive. And anything that it thinks is not safe, it’s going to try to protect us from. And so even if consciously we want to make more money, like we’re like, yes, hell yeah going to make that money if our subconscious mind believes that it’s somehow a threat because of these old traumas and because of these old emotional triggers it’s going to throw on the handbrake and stop us from achieving what it is that we think we consciously want to achieve.

And this is why addressing our money mindset is so important and why working with somebody who understands trauma in the context of money mindset is so essential and it’s the missing piece that is not addressed in most money mindset work. They don’t go down to the roots to address trauma on an expert level that understands how it can influence everything that it’s like this network beneath the surface that we don’t even see and don’t even realize is there. And we have to understand and allow it to be released so that we’re no longer stuck with it.

The beauty about it, and this is an aside, is that it doesn’t mean you have to go and dig up every old trauma that is actually not very functional and that is not a good strategy and that is not how you deal with trauma in a successful way. That is actually a way to retraumatize yourself. So I do not encourage you to go digging through every single trauma in your background that you’ve ever had about money.

That’s not the point. The point is we have to understand these traumas and we have to work with them in an expert way so that we can reprogram our subconscious mind to make wealth and creating more income feel really good. That is the point.

So let’s talk about some signs that you may have experienced financial trauma. Signs that you’ve experienced financial trauma include feeling chronic anxiety about money, negative thoughts about people who have a lot of money, or judging people who don’t have a lot of money. That’s an interesting thing.

When we judge people who don’t have money or we judge people who do, that judgment usually comes from a limiting belief, an emotionally tangible memory that says these people and these things are good or bad. Instead of it’s neutral. Money is neutral, people are neutral.

It’s what people choose to do with these things that really matters anyway. Other signs of financial trauma include fears about never having enough money, physical stress when you think about spending money, or physical stress when you go and try to pay your bills. Or physical stress when you experience a new bill in the mail.

Or physical stress when you go to invest in yourself. Fear of spending money, fear of investing in yourself. Fear of like what are the costs going to be to go out to dinner with your friends tonight? Feeling like you can’t trust your judgment when it comes to money and limiting beliefs around money.

These are all signs that are still present whether or not you are making the money you want or not. A lot of times they’re present and really they’re almost always present unless you’ve done the work to dig this out once we reach this financially stable position. And oftentimes they’re even present when people up level and get to the next level of their income.

Something I often say is new level, new devil. That’s a quote by somebody and I couldn’t tell you who said it, if you know, let me know and I will definitely give them credit. But new level, new devil.

Because as we reach new income levels we will encounter new beliefs that we have about money, new traumas that we may experience. So at first, for example, maybe we’re experiencing and being influenced by fears related to financial traumas about not having money. And then once we do have money, we’re relating to financial traumas, related to observing the way people treated people who did have money or how they were judged.

And so suddenly there’s different aspects coming up depending where we are on our journey with creating wealth. So as I’ve said, financial trauma is often responsible for keeping you at your money set point, for keeping you underneath that income ceiling because your subconscious mind is just trying to keep you safe. Your nervous system when it feels dysregulated, when it feels tense, when it feels stressed out, your whole body is going to do whatever it can to give your mind the signal on a subconscious level, often outside of your awareness that we got to do something to get ourselves back into safety, to get ourselves back into that zone where we don’t feel triggered around money.

And so we pull ourselves back into the same place where we have that comfort zone. So what do you do if you’ve had financial trauma? What do you do if you recognize yourself in what we’ve talked about today? Well, the first thing is I want to say congratulations because identifying it is a huge part of the picture. Being aware of it is enormous.

Sometimes when we just bring our awareness to things they begin to dissipate. For example, when we become aware that we’re afraid of something, sometimes we realize that there’s nothing to be afraid of to begin with. So even your awareness that you have financial traumas that are impacting you is really powerful and so I want to really acknowledge you for that.

But secondly, we need to really work on making it feel safe to make more money, to have more money. We want to make it feel as though it’s not a threat to our safety. This includes things like regulating the nervous system, reprogramming the subconscious mind uprooting those old traumas that are influencing us in the here and now.

Again, it’s not about digging out every skeleton in your backyard, laying them all out of the backyard to look at them or anything like that. It’s about understanding the ones that are impacting you here and now and your business decisions and your income level so that you can move past those in a way that’s functional and then in a way that is proactive and not in a way that’s always about looking backwards. We want to look forwards and we want to look towards what it is that we’re creating here.

But it’s also about understanding your limiting beliefs around money. But here’s the thing. A lot of times when we’re working on our money mindset, when we’re working on working through these financial traumas, we’re trying to do it in a way that is just like, oh, let me think through it, or, let me do some affirmations, or I’ll just do some meditations, and that’ll solve the problem.

We really need to come from a much deeper perspective, where we address the deeper roots of where some of these traumas have come from. We need to really address it on a physical level. This is why I talk so much about the nervous system and our subconscious mind, because a lot of that actually exists on a physical level.

I know that sounds weird, but 80% of the nerves in your body go from your in. Your being go from your body to your brain. And only 20% go from your brain to your body.

Which means your body is giving signals to your brain. Whether or not you’re safe, whether or not you can relax, whether or not this is a good opportunity for you, et cetera. And so if your body has tension in it, even if your brain thinks, gee whiz, this sounds great, and your body’s going in all tight, well, your body is giving your brain the signal that this isn’t safe to you.

And so we have to enter it through mind processes and body processes, which is why it’s a mind body approach, a holistic approach that really digs deep into trauma, that addresses the whole person and not just money mindset. So part of this is working with people who specialize in trauma, who can really dig deep and who understand how to not make these traumas retraumatizing and instead releasing them so that they’re no longer keeping you stuck. I have a program called Empowering Wealth where we do exactly this, where we talk about trauma, chronic stress, the nervous system, limiting beliefs, emotions building up that belief and that confidence and that worthiness and all of that beautiful.

Stuff that helps us create a new level of wealth and break through those income barriers, break out of that money set point that we’ve been stuck at. I really want to encourage you to check it out. If you are ready to move through your own financial traumas and experience a new level of freedom and fulfillment and joy that having more money and feeling like you are relaxed and comfortable and feeling good about money will bring you.

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