Annie Wright, LMFT
Relational Trauma Specialist & Executive Coach
You've earned the income. Read the books. Tried the apps. And money still makes you feel the way it made you feel when you were eight.
The spreadsheet was never the problem. This course is where you find out what was.
What's driving your financial behavior has a specific clinical profile. And your recovery deserves a map that actually matches the terrain.
In my work with clients, I've watched driven, capable people, people who earn well, manage teams, run businesses, sit across from me and describe opening their bank app as something that fills them with dread. Not because there's nothing in it. Sometimes because there is.
What I see consistently is this: the standard money mindset approach helps at the surface, but something doesn't quite fit. Because the mechanism underneath financial avoidance, undercharging, overgiving, and scarcity panic is not a budgeting problem. It's a nervous system problem. It's a worth wound. It's a money script laid down before you were old enough to question it. Researchers like Brad Klontz, PsyD, clinical psychologist and pioneer in financial psychology, have documented how these money scripts, absorbed in childhood, silently govern financial behavior for decades.
This course exists because that distinction matters clinically. And your reclaiming of financial steadiness deserves that precision.
Does any of this sound like you?
These aren't character flaws. They're rational adaptations to something that felt financially unsafe.
The budgeting app was never going to fix this. And you already knew that.
- Knowing what to do with money and still feeling panic, shame, or avoidance
- Earning well while your body acts like money is still unsafe
- Over-giving, undercharging, overspending, hoarding, or avoiding the numbers
- Trying tools that address the surface and never touch the root
- Feeling ashamed that money still has this much charge at your level of success
- Understanding your money responses as adaptations, not failures
- Separating financial facts from nervous-system alarm
- Naming the worth wound underneath undercharging and over-giving
- Interrupting old money patterns with body-based awareness
- Building a grounded relationship with money from actual safety, not performance
Not another money mindset course. This is specific.
Built on financial psychology and attachment research
Most money content treats spending and saving as discipline problems. They're not. This course draws on the money script research of Brad Klontz, PsyD, clinical psychologist and author of Mind Over Money, the financial therapy framework of Bari Tessler, MA, author of The Art of Money, and Lynne Twist's work on the soul of money, and applies it to the nervous system patterns that actually drive your financial behavior.
Designed for the financial terrain nobody talks about
Money shame. Scarcity wiring in a well-resourced body. The worth wound that makes undercharging feel like safety. The IFS-informed parts work, money memory mapping, and somatic interrupt practices in this course are built specifically for driven people who look financially competent on the outside while something else is running underneath.
You work through it privately, on your schedule
There's no cohort, no group call where you have to perform your recovery. You move through 15 lessons and a 56-page companion workbook at exactly the pace that works for your life. Lifetime access means you can return to any module as many times as you need it, including the next time rates conversation makes your chest tight.
A smaller sibling to Fixing the Foundations: fewer phases, still a complete arc.
4 modules · 15 lessons · 56-page companion workbook
The gap between what you know intellectually about money and what your body feels when you open the bank app. Early money memories, inherited money scripts, and the conclusions your nervous system drew about money, worth, and safety before you were old enough to question any of it. Grounded in the money script research of Brad Klontz, PsyD, clinical psychologist and co-author of Mind Over Money, and the attachment-informed financial therapy of Bari Tessler, MA.
The scarcity brain, the nervous system states underneath spending and saving, and the worth wound in undercharging, over-giving, and not asking. Why your body doesn't update when your bank balance does, and what to do about it. Drawing on the somatic work of Peter Levine, PhD, developer of Somatic Experiencing, and the financial therapy lineage developed by Bari Tessler, MA.
The five financial archetypes, the Spender, the Hoarder, the Under-earner, the Financial Caretaker, the Self-Saboteur, as adaptive trauma responses that once protected you and may now be costing you. Money in intimate relationships. Money at work: rates, scope creep, and the somatic experience of asking for more. Informed by Lynne Twist's framework from The Soul of Money on scarcity and sufficiency as lived orientations.
IFS-informed parts work applied to money, getting to know the part that undercharges, the part that spends to soothe, the part that hides the statements. The money memory map, the 48-hour financial body scan, graded exposure to financial information, and your personal Money Without the Mayhem roadmap for continuing the work after the course ends.
Imagine this.
Three months from now, you get a request for your rates and something different happens. You don't automatically quote lower than you meant to. You don't feel the familiar tightening that makes you want to apologize for the number before it's even out. The number you say is the number you meant, and your body didn't override you.
You open the bank app on a Tuesday afternoon just to check. Not because you have to, not because an emergency is forcing you. Just because it's information. The app is not a verdict on whether you're safe. It's not proof of what you're worth. You know that now, not just conceptually, but in the part of your body that used to brace every time.
Your healing doesn't wait. But it can wait for you.
The scarcity wiring keeps running the numbers, no matter what the numbers actually say.
The nervous system that learned money was unsafe doesn't update automatically when your income does. Without a clinical framework for understanding why your body is still responding to financial information as threat, you carry that alarm into every rate conversation, every business decision, every moment of relative financial security that somehow still doesn't feel like enough.
The undercharging becomes the baseline.
Without separating the worth wound from market reality, the rate you quote is quietly determined by how much you feel you're worth, not what your work is worth. That gap compounds. In my work with driven clients who are financially competent in every professional context, I've seen the same pattern: undercharging isn't a pricing strategy. It's a trauma response that's never been named as one.
Over-giving becomes the only way you know how to feel safe.
Without working with the Financial Caretaker pattern and the parts underneath it, generosity stays entangled with fear. You keep giving beyond your capacity because saying the real number feels more dangerous than the financial cost of not saying it. That's not a character trait. It's a survival strategy, and it's costing you more than money.
What $197 actually gets you.
56-page clinical companion workbook, money memory mapping, body-based practices, and your personal roadmap
One way to get started.
Money Without the Mayhem
- 15 clinically grounded lessons
- 56-page companion workbook
- 4-module clinical arc: Mirror → Body → Pattern → Interrupt
- IFS-informed money parts work
- 48-hour financial body scan practice
- Financial archetype inventory
- Lifetime access, all future updates included
- Self-paced, no cohort required
Two composite portraits.
Mara, 38. Senior manager at a tech company. Makes $180k. Feels perpetually broke.
Mara runs financial planning for a division of 40 people. She's meticulous, respected, relied upon. She also hasn't opened her personal checking account in six weeks. It's not that the money isn't there, it usually is. It's that looking at it activates something she can't explain and has mostly stopped trying to. She grew up in a household where money was the weather: unpredictable, charged, the invisible variable that made everything else either safe or terrifying. She internalized that weather in her body before she ever had her own bank account. Now, twenty years of professional financial competence later, her body hasn't gotten the update. The scarcity wiring is still running.
She's tried budgeting apps. She's read the books. She knows what she should do. That's the wrong level of the problem, and some part of her has always known it.
Daniel, 44. Independent consultant. Charges less than half of what his peers do. Calls it humility.
Daniel is genuinely good at what he does, his clients tell him this, refer him, return to him. He also hasn't raised his rates in four years. Every time he thinks about it, something tightens in his chest and he finds a reason to wait: the market, the economy, this particular client's budget, his own uncertainty that he's really worth it. What he calls humility has a name in this work, it's the worth wound operating as a pricing strategy. It lives in the part of him that, at nine years old, watched money become a weapon between his parents. Safety meant not asking for too much. That part is still setting his rates.
Both/And: Daniel is talented and undercharging. Both things are true at the same time. This course is designed for that specific intersection.
Both/And.
"You can be financially knowledgeable and still have a nervous system that treats money as a threat. Both things are true at the same time. This course works at the level where both live."
Financial trauma doesn't require poverty. It can develop inside abundance, secrecy, unpredictability, or a home where money was fused with love, safety, punishment, or control. The shame that drives avoidance isn't irrational, it's the logical residue of what money meant when you were small and had no other framework for it.
This course doesn't ask you to think positively about money. It asks you to understand what your nervous system learned about money, and to begin, carefully and with support, reclaiming financial steadiness from the inside out.
Financial trauma doesn't exist in a vacuum. The gendered wage gap means women and gender-expansive people have often navigated a world that structurally undervalues their labor, and internalized that undervaluation as something personal, as evidence of their own worth rather than a feature of the system. Internalized scarcity is amplified at the intersection of capitalism and relational trauma: when a family system fused money with safety, and the larger culture simultaneously transmitted messages about who deserves financial security and who doesn't, the resulting money scripts are both deeply personal and structurally produced.
This course holds both. The individual nervous system work and the cultural context in which that nervous system developed. Your financial patterns are not just yours, and naming that is part of the recalibration.
- Your bank balance can be fine and your body still tightens
- You haven't raised your rates in years, even knowing you should
- You manage money for others but avoid your own statements
- You spend to soothe and then feel shame
- You're driven and competent and still feel broke in some fundamental, non-numerical way
- You want budgeting, investing, or financial planning advice
- You're in acute financial crisis and need immediate practical support first
- You believe your financial patterns are purely a discipline problem
The work speaks for itself.
"You of all people understand that my 'gift' of being so successful in my career is deeply rooted in childhood emotional neglect. SO much credit to your writings that I found my footing."
"I know I still have time, and I HAVE accomplished some things, I feel I could have done more. Been more successful. Learned how to manage money."
"These patterns affect every aspect of my life. I love that you do not sugar coat the truth, that this is hard work, long work, and worthwhile work."
"Annie's words both comfort and empower me and give me permission to stop all the achieving to prove to the world I'm worthy. Each essay is a permission slip to just BE."
"This work doesn't just reach the people who take it. It reaches the clinicians who refer it."
"Annie is an EMDR genius. She is caring and kind and brilliant. Exceptional clinician."
"I've been working on my relational trauma for a decade and recently became a therapist myself, I regularly send clients to Annie's work. The clinical framework is exactly right."
Annie Wright, LMFT
In my 15,000+ clinical hours working with driven, ambitious people, including Silicon Valley executives, physicians, and founders, I've sat across from remarkably capable people who earn well and still feel broke in some deep, pre-numerical way. Financial trauma doesn't always look like poverty. It often looks like competence: managing money for everyone else while avoiding your own statements. Earning more while still charging less than you're worth. That particular pattern, the gap between financial knowledge and financial behavior, is what this course addresses.
I'm a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach. I'm the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center I built, scaled, and successfully exited. I'm a regular contributor to Psychology Today, and my expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. I'm currently writing my first book with W.W. Norton.
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