When it came down to actually sitting here and writing this letter to you about how I—as an ambitious, driven woman—have money trauma, I literally didn’t know where to start.
Summary
Money trauma isn’t a financial problem—it’s a nervous system problem with financial symptoms. Annie shares her own complex, layered money story: from being set to grow up upper-middle class to losing most of that foundation, and the thousand different origin stories that explain why she still flinches at certain numbers even now. If you carry your own money story in your chest, this is for you.
Financial Trauma
Financial trauma refers to the lasting psychological impact of early experiences with money — scarcity, secrecy, control, or chaos in your family’s financial life. It shapes your nervous system’s relationship with earning, spending, saving, and receiving, often in ways that operate far below conscious awareness.
Nervous System Dysregulation
Your nervous system is the body’s threat-detection apparatus. When it’s been shaped by relational trauma, it can get stuck in patterns of hypervigilance (always scanning for danger) or hypoarousal (shutting down to cope). Nervous system dysregulation means your body’s alarm system fires too easily, too often, or not at all — regardless of what your conscious mind knows to be true.
I feel like the content I have around this could fill a book. And in fact, it’ll probably be part of my memoir someday, because the examples and the extremity of this relationship are so vast, so complicated, so layered that a single letter couldn’t possibly hold it all.
But I want to try. Because if you’re reading this with your own complex money story churning in your chest, you deserve to know you’re not alone in the messiness of it all.
Table of Contents
The Before and After
Broad strokes, without all the details I’ll save for that memoir:
I was set to grow up financially secure, possibly upper middle class, until about age 6. Then my biological father—who I was disowned by—completely blew up our lives and left my mother with four daughters under the age of six.
Just like that, security became survival.
From there, my life became one of poverty and extreme financial insecurity. It slowly got better over time, but never a lot. Never owning our own home. Never not worrying about the next bill.
Here’s what made it even more complicated: I grew up on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine, where the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies all built their “summer cottages” at the turn of the century. (Spoiler: these weren’t cottages. They were mansions.)
On top of this, every summer, new money would flow up from other well-to-do places, flooding our small island with Land Rovers and families with yacht club, swim club, and tennis club memberships and kids my age who went to Phillips Exeter and had trust funds bigger than our entire town’s annual budget.
I grew up in these highly bifurcated worlds in the same small village. There were the locals and there were the summer people. Summer people had wealth. The locals usually worked for them—cleaning their houses, maintaining their gardens, serving their lobster dinners, babysitting their kids.
We were the locals.
Attachment Style
Your attachment style is the relational blueprint your nervous system built in childhood based on how your caregivers responded to your needs. It shapes how you pursue closeness, handle conflict, and tolerate vulnerability in adult relationships — often without your conscious awareness.
Relational Trauma
Relational trauma is the psychological injury that results from repeated experiences of feeling unsafe, unseen, or unvalued in significant relationships — particularly early ones. It doesn’t require a single catastrophic event; it accumulates through patterns of emotional neglect, inconsistency, or control in the relationships that were supposed to teach you what love looks like.
The Mind-Bending Reality of Performative Wealth
When my father left, my mother went back to work, doing whatever it took—whatever it took—to feed her four daughters. The slow progression to stability was hard-won, but we never achieved real security. Never owned anything.
My estranged biological father, on the other hand? He maintained a lifestyle with art galleries in Manhattan and Palm Beach. Drove Rolls Royces. Sold ludicrously expensive pieces of art.]
And yet never contributed to our health insurance. Never paid child support.
This man would eventually go to jail for his crimes—the details of which I’ll save for another time—but the psychological impact of watching someone perform wealth while abandoning their actual responsibilities? That stays with you.
My relationship to money, to put it lightly, has been a tremendous source of trauma and growth. Early on, I developed both magical thinking when it came to money (“Maybe it will just appear somehow”) AND complete catastrophic thinking (“We’re always one step from ruin so I must work myself to the bone”).
When Poverty Becomes Visceral
By the time I got to Brown—on a full ride because we were so poor—I had moments of such profound financial insecurity that they’re branded into my body’s memory.
Like the time I literally didn’t have enough money to transfer between airports to catch a flight home. I was at the wrong airport and had to somehow make my way to the other one with nothing (I didn’t have a credit card back then). The panic of that moment—standing there knowing I had no one to call, no safety net to catch me—lived in my nervous system for a long time.
When I got kicked out of the house after Peace Corps (another story for another time), I was 100% on my own. No financial safety net. Nothing. No family umbrella to catch me if I fell. That lived in my nervous system for an even longer time.
So much of my workaholism—at least in the early days—came not just from personal mission (though I love my career deeply), but from also from total financial terror. The kind where you work yourself to the bone because you know, viscerally, what it’s like to have nothing and no one.
Building from Nothing, Together
My husband also grew up with relational trauma and was very poor. He didn’t attend college, which limited his income potential. But together—together—we built something from nothing. Two traumatized people with no safety nets, figuring it out bit by bit.
In 2011, I signed us up for Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. I know, I know—Dave Ramsey. But when you’re drowning, you’ll grab any life raft. And that did become the start of my healing journey around money.
And then, in 2012, I discovered the budgeting software YNAB. And instead of avoiding those catastrophically high student loans which were coming due now that I was out of graduate school—all $150,000 worth of them—I started tracking them. Every penny. Every payment. For the first time, I looked the monster in the eye instead of pretending it wasn’t there.
For the last 13 years, I’ve been on what I call a financial sobriety journey. A financial realism journey. This meant:
- Processing money trauma with my EMDR therapist
- Working through it with my long-term relational therapist Carol (14 years and counting)
- Building actual skills to manage money soberly, grounded in reality
- Developing enough self-worth to start charging higher rates
- Launching a company
- Eventually selling that company
The two things in tandem—trauma healing AND skill building—took my husband and me from paycheck-to-paycheck terror with $150,000 in debt to a quite financially secure place now.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
EMDR is an evidence-based psychotherapy that helps the brain reprocess traumatic memories so they no longer trigger the same emotional and physiological distress. It uses bilateral stimulation — typically eye movements — to help the nervous system move stuck trauma from a state of active threat into integrated memory.
I say this not to brag, not to impress, but to impress upon you how damn long this journey has been.
Continue Your Healing as a Driven Woman
You’re reading part of a larger body of work now housed inside Strong and Stable—a space for ambitious women who wake up at 3 AM with racing hearts, who can handle everyone else’s crises but don’t know who to call when you’re falling apart, who’ve built impressive lives that somehow feel exhausting to live inside.
All new writing—essays that name what’s been invisible, workbooks that actually shift what feels stuck, and honest letters about the real work beneath the work, and Q&As where you can ask your burning questions (anonymously, always)—lives there now, within a curated curriculum designed to move you from insight to action.
If you’re tired of holding it all up alone, you’re invited to step into a space where your nervous system can finally start to settle, surrounded by women doing this foundation work alongside you.
Step Inside
If you’re ready to go deeper, I work one-on-one with driven, ambitious women through relational trauma recovery therapy and trauma-informed executive coaching. And if this essay resonated, there’s more where it came from — my Substack newsletter goes deeper every week on relational trauma, nervous system healing, and the inner lives of ambitious women. Subscribe for free — I can’t wait to be of support to you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is money trauma and how do I know if I have it?
Money trauma refers to lasting nervous system responses to early or repeated experiences of financial fear, scarcity, or instability. You might have money trauma if: you check your bank balance compulsively even when there’s plenty there, you feel physiological panic when a large bill arrives, you struggle to spend on yourself even when you can afford to, or financial conversations with your partner consistently escalate beyond what the numbers warrant. The response is the signal.
How does childhood financial instability affect adult money behavior?
The nervous system learns from what it survived. If childhood included watching parents fight about money, experiencing sudden financial downturns, or absorbing the anxiety of financial precarity, the body encoded that information as threat. As an adult, anything that resembles those original conditions—even mild financial decisions—can activate the same alarm system. The math is different. The body’s response to the math isn’t.
Can you have money trauma even if you’re financially successful now?
Absolutely. Financial success doesn’t overwrite the body’s memory of earlier scarcity or instability. Some of the most financially successful women Annie works with carry the most intense money anxiety—because achievement became a way to manage the fear rather than resolve it. The success keeps the fear at bay, which means it never actually gets processed.
Why do I freeze when it’s time to raise my rates or ask for more money?
Because somewhere in your history, asking for more had a cost. Maybe it created conflict, maybe it was framed as greedy, maybe you watched someone get punished for wanting too much. Your nervous system learned that asking for more is risky—and that learning doesn’t check your current bank balance before it fires. Understanding the connection between early money stories and adult money behavior is the first step toward changing the pattern.
Is money trauma the same as anxiety about money?
Anxiety about money is common and can have many sources. Money trauma specifically refers to nervous system responses that were shaped by early experiences of financial danger or instability—responses that persist even when the external circumstances have changed significantly. If your anxiety seems disconnected from your actual financial situation, or if it has a quality of something old and familiar rather than something responsive to current reality, that’s worth examining.
This is part of our comprehensive guide on this topic. For the full picture, read: Money, Trauma & Your Worth.
DISCLAIMER: The content of this post is for psychoeducational and informational purposes only and does not constitute therapy, clinical advice, or a therapist-client relationship. For full details, please read our Medical Disclaimer. If you are in crisis, please call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line).
You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.
