The Money Goes Right Through You
If money arrives and immediately gets spent, given away, or locked down, the pattern may be asking for more than a better budget. This essay explores the hunger and old scarcity learning that can make abundance feel unsafe to hold, and offers a gentler question to bring to the next impulse.
You made good money this year. You know you did. And yet when you look at your savings account, the number there doesn’t quite match the year you had, and you can’t entirely trace where it went. Not to anything dramatic. Not to anything irresponsible. It just… went. The subscription that’s been running for three years on something you no longer use. The restaurant that was easier than cooking after the long week. The online cart at 11 PM that felt like relief and cost $340. The hundred small dissipations that felt, each time, like giving yourself something you needed.
Or maybe for you it’s more specific than that. Maybe it’s the way money feels slightly dangerous when there’s a lot of it, the spending that accelerates precisely when the account is full, as if the fullness itself is the problem that needs solving. Or the way a good month produces an almost reflexive generosity: the round of drinks, the friend’s rent, the picking up of every tab before anyone else can reach for it. Not because you want to. Because the money sitting there feels, in some way you’d struggle to explain, like a weight that needs redistributing.
Or maybe it’s the opposite: the hoarding. The account that’s substantial and that you cannot touch. The money held in a grip so tight it never becomes anything. Not invested, not spent, not allowed to become the life it could fund. Just held. Gripped. Kept close enough to check.
What all of these versions share: the money doesn’t rest. It doesn’t settle into security the way it should. It arrives and it immediately does something, gets spent, gets given, gets gripped, gets counted and recounted, and none of those somethings quite add up to feeling like enough.
Not a budgeting problem. Not a discipline failure. Not evidence that you’re bad with money in the way that phrase usually means. This is an old hunger wearing a financial face. And understanding the hunger is the only thing that’s ever changed the relationship with the money.
i need to be successful to gain enough milk and honey
to help those around me succeed, Rupi Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers. Andrews McMeel Publishing.
Why the Money Doesn’t Rest
Here’s what I want us to think about together. The proverbial house of our financial lives, the budget, the savings strategy, the income, the spending patterns that we either defend or feel vaguely ashamed of, is built on a foundation that has almost nothing to do with money. It’s built on the emotional architecture of our earliest years: the template for what resources mean, whether they’re safe to hold, whether abundance is a state that can be trusted, and, underneath all of it, whether the self receiving the money is the kind of self that deserves to receive it and keep it.
That foundation doesn’t update automatically when the income increases. What it learned about resources, that they’re scarce, that they’re temporary, that they require management or redistribution before they can be lost, or that holding them too close is a dangerous kind of pride, continues to run. Every financial decision we make is made from inside that template, whether we know it or not.
When Abundance Feels Dangerous
She mentioned it the way you mention something you’ve decided not to feel too much about.
(Names and all identifying details have been changed for confidentiality.)
What she mentioned was that she was turning forty next month and she had $14,000 in savings. She made $210,000 a year. She had been making close to that for six years. She was not in debt. She was not a spender, she said, she wanted to be clear about that. She didn’t have a shopping problem or a gambling problem or any of the things that might explain the gap. She just couldn’t quite figure out where the money was. It arrived and then it wasn’t there.
Priya was thirty-nine, a product director at a tech company in San Jose. She’d grown up in a family that had been comfortable enough until it wasn’t, her father’s business had failed when she was eleven, and the three years that followed had been defined by a specific kind of household tension she still felt in her body when anything financial went wrong. Not poverty, but the proximity of it. The particular education of a child who learns that the floor can open without warning. She had spent the twenty years since then making sure her floor was reinforced.
But the money kept not staying. When we started mapping it, what emerged was a pattern she hadn’t named before: the spending accelerated at the end of good months. When the account was full, something in her went slightly frantic, the subscriptions, the upgrades, the gifts, the picking up of every check. The fullness felt like exposure. Like something that needed to be moved before it could be taken.
“I don’t do it consciously,” she said, the afternoon we found the pattern. She was looking at a spreadsheet of the past two years’ spending. “It’s not like I decide to spend. It’s more like…” She trailed off. Looked at the columns. “Like I’m redistributing before someone else can. Before it can leave on its own terms.”
Her voice was careful when she said that. The way you speak when you’ve just named something true that you haven’t let yourself name before. The thing underneath the thing.
“The starving woman endures famine after famine. Unfortunately, the loss of treasure and the deep memory of famine may cause us to rationalize that excesses are desirable.If something looks like it will fill the yearning, a woman will seize it, no questions asked.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves. Ballantine Books.
The Famine Memory
What Priya was doing has a name in the clinical literature, though not usually in the financial section. I found the most precise description in Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ work on the aftermath of famine, not physical famine, though that too, but the famine of the emotional environment, the household where resources were unpredictable and the message absorbed was: if it’s here, use it now, because it will be gone. Estés describes how a woman shaped by that famine loses her “dulled perceptions about… the financial boundaries required for survival”, not because she’s careless, but because the famine memory makes abundance read as a crisis that requires immediate response. Full accounts feel dangerous. Depleted accounts feel familiar. The nervous system learned to manage the feast as a prelude to the next famine.
Famine memory is a trauma-informed way of describing how past experiences of emotional or material scarcity can make present abundance feel temporary or unsafe.
In plain terms: when the account is full, part of you may rush to move the money because it learned that what is here now could disappear.
I found a companion framework in bell hooks’ All About Love, when I was trying to understand the spending that takes the form of generosity, the women I work with who give money away the moment it arrives, who cannot hold resources without redistributing them to everyone around them. Hooks writes about women who, having been “wounded in the space where they would know love during childhood,” learn to substitute the pursuit of material giving for the emotional intimacy they didn’t learn to trust. The money leaving becomes an expression of love that feels safer to extend than the vulnerability of being loved. She gives before anyone can ask. She picks up the tab before anyone can feel the burden. The money moves because the money is doing the relational work that feels too dangerous to do any other way.
And Bessel van der Kolk describes the mechanism underneath both patterns: a nervous system that learned that stillness was where the danger was. When the account is full and the spending slows and there’s nothing to manage, what surfaces is exactly what the constant movement was managing. The fear. The old hollow. The version of not enough that has nothing to do with the number in the account and everything to do with the number that was there when the world was first calibrated.
Nervous system activation is the body’s protective shift into alertness or urgency when stillness feels unsafe.
In plain terms: spending, giving, or checking may keep you moving when a full account makes old fear surface.
How and why did we identify finance as a target?
In the action, we explained how we spend all day managing our accounts
to ensure there is enough money, how we go into debt to finance daily life.
We described our experience of ambivalence, of wanting to achieve
economic autonomy and negate austerity in the here and now., Verónica Gago, Feminist International: How to Change Everything. Verso, 2020.
The Giver’s Role
Here’s the structural ground this was growing on.
Priya’s spending pattern, the redistribution, the picking up of tabs, the generosity that preceded any accounting, didn’t emerge only from her father’s business failing. It emerged from a culture that has always had a specific use for women’s financial anxiety. Gago describes how financial systems identify and exploit women’s “relationships of trust and kinship”, the way a woman’s social network, her family loyalty, her inability to hold resources while others are in need, becomes the instrument through which debt and dependency are maintained. She gives because giving is what she learned love looks like. And the financial system, the cultural system, the family system, all of them are counting on her to keep giving.
Kate Manne’s framework names the structural piece precisely: the woman structurally positioned as the giver is expected to offer her resources, financial, emotional, physical, to others as a condition of her social belonging. The spending that empties the account is not only a nervous system pattern. It is the behavioral expression of a role she was assigned. She gives because the giver is who she was taught to be, long before she had any money to give.
I’m not saying the generosity isn’t real. I’m not saying the spending is simply pathological. I’m not saying the hunger underneath it is something to be ashamed of. I’m not saying any of this resolves with a different savings strategy. I’m not saying the reckoning requires an answer tonight.
What I am saying: the money going right through you is not about the money. The hunger it’s feeding is real AND it was formed in conditions that had nothing to do with your bank account. The redistribution is an act of love AND it is also the wound trying to express itself through the only language the culture gave you to express it. Both things. Same woman. Same account.
What becomes possible, when the famine memory begins to update: the account can hold something. Not everything, not all at once, but something. The check at the end of the month shows a different number. Not because the income changed, but because the impulse to move the money before something could take it loosens, slightly, and then slightly more, as the body learns that the abundance is allowed to stay. That full doesn’t mean exposed. That the floor isn’t going to open just because the account is.
…a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us,
the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist, I’ll take it all., Ada Limón, “Instructions on Not Giving Up,” The Carrying. Milkweed Editions.
The next time the impulse fires, the spending that accelerates when the account is full, the generosity that empties before you’ve noticed it happening, try this first:
Before the transaction, before the tab, before the cart: place one hand on your sternum. Hold it for one breath.
Then ask, very quietly, without judgment: Is this hunger or is this need? You don’t have to answer it perfectly. You don’t have to answer it tonight. You just have to notice that there’s a question.
The hunger is real. It’s just not located where the money is.
If you’re willing, I’d love to hear: which version is yours, the money that moves before you can hold it, the account you grip so tight it never becomes anything, or something else entirely?
Q: Why does money disappear even when I earn well?
A: The essay suggests that spending, giving, and holding money tightly can be responses to older hunger and scarcity learning rather than simple failures of discipline.
Q: Why can a full account make me want to spend?
A: Abundance can feel exposed or temporary when your nervous system learned that resources might disappear, creating urgency to move money first.
Q: Is generosity always a problem?
A: No. The essay treats generosity as real love while also asking whether money has been asked to do relational work that feels too vulnerable to do another way.
Q: What is the famine memory?
A: It is the learned expectation that what is available now will soon be gone, which can make it difficult to let money rest.
Q: What can I ask before I spend?
A: Before a transaction, pause with a hand on your sternum and ask whether the impulse is hunger or need, without demanding a perfect answer.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
“Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.”
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist with 15,000+ clinical hours since 2013 and an EMDRIA Certified Therapist. She’s the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she successfully exited. She’s currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). Her expert commentary has appeared in Psychology Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. She draws on psychodynamic and somatic approaches alongside EMDR, and she is licensed in 15 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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