Is Your Money Anxiety Really Yours? On Inherited Stories, Nervous Systems, and Building Your Own Money Legacy

Asking for more money still makes my heart race and my palms sweat. 

Maybe this seems weird to say as someone who has been both a recruiter and now is a money therapist.  Yes, I have taken the Trauma of Money program and received my certification but the money work never stops.

Maybe like me you have tried to talk about money to a therapist before and you were met with a blank look. Especially if you were an eldest daughter in a single parent Black immigrant family who felt financially responsible for all the adult things very young.

How I found my way to this work

For about six years after finishing my undergraduate degree, I managed a seven-figure bursary fund at a university. I spent my days meeting with undergraduate and graduate students — students on OSAP, students in financial crisis, students who needed emergency funds to stay enrolled.

Every time I sat across from someone, I noticed there was something underneath what they were saying. They'd come in with a financial problem and I'd find myself sensing something else entirely — something quieter, heavier. At the time I couldn't name it. I just knew that what I was hearing wasn't only about behaviour or what people said about money. My intuition told me there were other layers.

It would be years before I understood that this was one of my first glimmers of my interest in money psychology and specifically in money trauma.

And it would take even longer to recognize the same patterns in myself — how growing up in a financially anxious single parent household had shaped everything: which jobs I took, whether I negotiated my salary, whether I let myself imagine entrepreneurship as possible. I don’t think it is a coincidence that I ended up doing not for profit work in a field where I was often underpaid and that those decisions replicated that financially anxious household.

I'm still working on some of that. 

And I started Liberated Care because I know I'm not the only one. And because the therapy room should be a place where this gets named — not avoided.

Let’s get into it.

1. Origin stories and generational patterns

Growing up, I constantly heard: "Money doesn't grow on trees." Maybe you heard that one too. Or maybe your version was silence — a collective agreement not to name how tight things were, or how uncertain, or how much the adults in the room were quietly holding.

Money was rarely talked about in all the years I went to school. If you didn't have it, you learned to hide it. You went quiet when the school trip forms came home. You watched and you calculated and you tried to look normal.

And then there are the stories that move through generations without ever being spoken directly — lessons about not trusting banks and hiding cash under mattresses. These stories don't just live in family conversations. They live in the nervous system. They shape what feels safe and what feels like a risk not worth taking.

Being surrounded by immigrant family realities, I see now that the systems we were navigating mattered. Who we are in those systems shapes what we have access to, what feels possible, what choices seem safe. Money anxiety doesn't come from nowhere. It is almost always intertwined with survival, history, and the structures we move through.

When we work together, we start here — not to assign blame, but to create context. Your money story isn't a personal failure. It is embedded in history, culture, and systems of access. Naming that is the beginning of something different.

2. The body and the nervous system

I kept feeling overwhelmed when I was in the Trauma of Money program. I wanted so badly to understand my own narratives of scarcity but my body often said that it needed a slower pace.  The somatic practices helped so much as did the storytelling.  I felt less alone for the first time and felt that the people around me had similar stories. That they got it.  

This shows up for clients in recognizable ways. Shutting down when the bills arrive. Going blank when it's time to ask for a raise. The heart rate that spikes when you open your bank app. Avoiding the numbers altogether and then feeling the shame of having avoided them.

These aren't character flaws. They are nervous system responses — ones that helped us survive and now are still running the show even when we might not be in the same situation.

Part of the work is learning to recognize these responses without judgment. And then, slowly, learning to resource the body so that the conversation with money doesn't have to feel like a threat.

3. The systems that shaped us

Here is something I think about often: almost every professor in therapy school asked whether we planned to go into private practice. And yet no one — not once — talked directly about money. No one said: if you've taken out student loans, here is what the first few years of building a practice might actually look like. No one named the gap between the aspiration and the financial reality of getting there.

The silence was its own kind of message.

I should know better. Why can't I figure this out?

So many of us have absorbed some version of these sentences — without anyone ever naming that the institutions we moved through were never designed to hand us this knowledge. That the gap between what we were expected to know and what we were never taught is not a personal failing. It is a systemic one.

Financial shame often lives exactly there — in that gap. This doesn’t mean we don’t seek out our own answers but if we acknowledge that we learn a lot from what is not said, then I think it starts to shift some of the blame. Maybe it means that some of the weight lifts. 

4. Your relationship with money

I remember being in high school at a friend's cottage for the weekend. We went out to a dinner that neither my Mom nor I had planned for.  I hadn’t brought any money with me so I spent the whole dinner feeling anxious about what I was going to say.  I didn’t say anything.  I just sat with the weight of it, trying to look like everything was fine.  They were so nonchalant and I pretended to be too. 

Funny how memories come back to you of things you had dismissed.  I realize now that what was happening in that moment wasn't just about dinner. It was about the relationship I had already developed with money by that point — one shaped by scarcity, by not wanting to be a burden, by the exhausting work of managing appearances.

Money is a relationship. And like any relationship, it has a history, patterns, ruptures, and the possibility of repair.

In our work together, we look at how that relationship formed — the early memories and their emotional charge, the stories you carry about what you deserve, what's possible for someone like you, and what it means to want more than what you were shown.

5. Rebuilding self-trust

One of the things I return to often with clients is this: money is a language. And like any language, you can build proficiency in it — even if you didn't grow up speaking it fluently, even if the early lessons were confusing or frightening or simply absent.

Rebuilding self-trust with money isn't a straight line. It involves compassion for yourself and for the people who passed these patterns down, sometimes of systems that were never designed with you in mind. Mistakes will be made.  That’s part of the learning too.  And I’ve learned that the money work never stops but I have a lot more faith that I can handle what comes my way.

But what I've seen — in my own life and in the lives of the people I work with — is that something real does shift when you stop treating your money story as evidence of personal failure and start treating it as a story that makes complete sense given everything that shaped it.

That shift is where the work begins.

If you see yourself in any of this

The specific experience of absorbing everyone else’s money anxiety while quietly managing your own is rooted in some of the roles I took on very young in my single parent immigrant household as the oldest daughter.  It’s not every Black person’s story or every immigrant person’s story. Let me be clear on that but regardless of the story or the stories that we have inherited that were never ours to begin with, you deserve a space that understands your context.  Not a space that changes the subject or expresses discomfort when money comes up.  Not a therapist who looks at you blankly when you try to explain why negotiating your salary feels like a physical impossibility.

You can do everything right on paper and still experience money dread.  I know because I still feel it too — asking for more money still makes my heart race sometimes. That's not a failure of discipline or always about what you don't know.

That might be a story emerging, asking to be witnessed.