How Childhood Trauma Shapes Your Relationship with Money

When I was out in India, I read Glennon Doyle's book Untamed. There's a section where she describes families on a plane, where the children are the passengers and the adults are the cabin crew - acting in a leadership role.

If turbulence hits, the children intensely watch the faces of the cabin crew to check if this is safe. The cabin crew stay calm and even smile if a passenger is freaking out. "It's fine. Just a pocket of bumpy air."

The children keep attuning to the adults, using their nervous systems as information about how to react in the moment... are we fine? Or are we not fine?

During our family lives, there will always be pockets of turbulence, right? Sickness. Job losses. Sudden moves. Relationships getting strained, for one reason or another.

But what happens if it’s not just turbulence? What happens when the metaphorical plane crashes? I wondered...

I had to put Glennon Doyle's book down when I read that page. Because that's what happened to me.

In my family, we'd been experiencing turbulence for as long as I could remember.

And then the plane crashed. Spectacularly.

My money trauma backstory…

I've shared pieces of my personal backstory over the years. On social media, in coaching sessions, in conversations with clients who were navigating their own versions of financial fear or family chaos.

But I haven't told the whole story. Not like this.

Until now.

I recently sat down with Harriet Formby - CFO, founder of Below The Line Finance, and host of *The Money Story Project* podcast.

And I spoke openly about what happened when I was a kid.
About my family losing everything. Of homelessness.
About me spending months sleeping on a floor in a London bedsit.

About me being out of school, close to my GSCE year.

Instead of studying, I was focused on how to feed 3x people on a budget of £5 a day.

I speak about the pressure and shame I felt trying to hide what was happening, whilst it being so much bigger than me.

I've spent decades either being silent, or trying to make it sound "normal" or "not too bad". I'd quickly minimise my experience by quipping things like:

"Everyone suffers."

"It's all relative."

"A lot of people have it worse than me..."

Here's what I want you to know before you listen. This isn't me parading my childhood trauma as a marketing gimmick. Nor is it a rags-to-riches story with a triumphant montage and a course to sell you at the end.

And although you may not relate directly to my story, it's actually far more about you than you might realise. That's because Harriet's work, and the intention behind The Money Story Project, speaks to the culture and psychology of money, which we swim in every single day.

Your mental stories about money

Another life-changing book I read while I was in India was Rutger Bregman's Humankind. I have this quote from media scientist George Gerbner seared into my brain:

"He who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour."

Yep. Drink that in!

Put another way, the stories or beliefs we hold shape our behaviour, and our behaviour continually shapes the world around us. This is why I am SO passionate about mindset work (and the TFAR framework).

Mindset work is where we learn to notice, understand and then evolve our beliefs. And the good news is we can do this about anything!

Including money.

Money is arguably the most powerful story we've ever collectively created. The stories we inherit - about what money means, whether it's safe, what it says about who we are - run much deeper than most of us realise. They also live in the body.

I know this, not just professionally, but intimately!

For years, any time I had to deal with larger sums of money, oh boy! I would experience intensive activation in my body, as it went into a flight-fight response - cold hands, shaking, tearfulness.

My nervous system treated money as a threat because it had learnt, very early on, that money was the thing that tore my family apart.

I've also learned over the years that healing my relationship with money has had very little to do with money. It's been about love, connection, health, self-worth and identity. About what I believe about who I am and what I'm capable of. About learning - slowly, unglamorously, with a lot of support - that I'm an adult now.

That I can make change happen! And that I don't have to do it alone 🫶

Is your past defining your bank balance?

Why am I sharing this now?

Because the parts of our story we spend years trying to hide often become the very things we're here to contribute. After more than fifteen years of working on this wound, I'm finally in the right relationship with this part of my story to share it fully.

The work I do with clients - somatic inquiry, breathwork, business and life coaching - doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists because I've lived what happens when we don't address the emotional charge sitting underneath our relationship with money, self-worth and success. I want you to know what you are not defined by your past - we certainly can be deeply shaped by it. But we don’t have to stay a victim to our past circumstances or pain.

Of course, we can try to outrun it, push through it or ignore the past (I’ve tried all of that!)

But often what happens is like an elastic band. We make progress...

...and then SNAP!

We ping back to our old self. Our old results.

This is why its so important that, if we want to make changes happen in our life, we need to get clear on our mental stories. And stories about money FUNDAMENTALLY will shape your whole quality of life!

Now, whether money is a thorny issue for you, or whether it's fear of being seen, selling your work, having the courage to go after what you want, or finally finishing the thing you keep starting...

The questions Harriet asks in this podcast are, at their root, about how we live. What we believe we deserve. And what stories are running us - often unnoticed! - that we haven't examined yet.

Those are arguably some of the most important questions we'll ever ask ourselves!

Listen to the podcast here: