Some argue that when it comes to money decisions, you should use your head, not your heart. While emotions get in the way of clear decision-making, emotions and money are often deeply interconnected. (Heck, Marketplace has a whole show about it.)

Chantel Chapman is a financial expert and former mortgage broker who despite her resume did not have the best relationship with money. She ended up creating an educational program called Trauma of Money, which focuses on the intersection of money, emotions and pain.

Chapman spoke with Marketplace’s Sabri Ben-Achour about how trauma plays out in our saving and spending habits and how we can set more sustainable financial goals. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Sabri Ben-Achour: How does trauma of one kind or another shape our relationship with money?

Chantel Chapman: So we believe at Trauma of Money that any type of trauma that someone experiences, whether they experience it in their lifetime or it’s passed down generationally, has the ability to impact the relationship with money, even if the original trauma had nothing to do with money. And the reason why we believe this is because, at its core, trauma is when something happens or doesn’t happen that leaves us feeling unsafe, not secure, or not worthy. And what does money represent in our society? It represents worth and it represents security.

Ben-Achour: What does that look like when we talk about a relationship with money? Are we talking about things like spending too much, you’re not spending enough, for bingeing or what does that look like?

Chapman: Yeah, it’s all of the above and more. It can manifest in multiple different ways. So it can be overspending, it can be compulsive spending in the way of like a dopamine addiction, it could be even underspending. So we’ve seen a lot of folks who have financial anxiety, so they’re very afraid to spend any money. It could be excessive risk-aversion, it could be risk-taking, it could be gambling. There’s so many different ways that it can show up.

Ben-Achour: You have your own experience with a troubled relationship with money. What did that look like?

Chapman: Yeah, so I would always say that I would use my money like a “please love and accept me” fund. So what that translated to is I would be overspending and all my spending went toward being accepted — so racking up credit card debt in order to do that, spending money on friends and relationships and family. And then also, at the same time, not being able to advocate for myself when it came to money. So I had a hard time setting financial boundaries. I had a hard time charging, you know, even like competitive pricing in my business. I would undercharge. I would give discounts all the time. You know, I wouldn’t like renegotiate contracts when they were definitely be due to be renegotiated from a financial aspect. So everything for me was really tied to this financial codependency.

Ben-Achour: So how did you figure out or make the connection between your relationship with money and your own personal experience of trauma?

Chapman: So I was working in the finance world at a very young age. And I knew early on that I had a challenged relationship with money, even though I was working in the finance world. And I attributed that to my lack of financial literacy, exposure, and I thought, ‘Oh, you know, if they only taught financial literacy in high school, I wouldn’t be in this position and neither with so many people.’ So I actually pivoted my business, and I started a financial literacy education business. And after many years of teaching it, I would have like behavior shifts for the short term, but then I would constantly fall back into these old patterns.

I had an experience in my life where someone very close to me was going through addiction recovery, and I really threw myself into their recovery process. And as I was there showing up for them, I started to notice some similarities with the way I was interacting with money and the way they were interacting with the substance they were using. And the similarity was kind of coming down to the intention of why they were doing it. And the reason why they were doing it is for acceptance and to turn off that thought in their head that they’re not good enough, they don’t belong — and so I felt so connected to this person. And I was like, “Wow, I’m using money and I’m using my lack of boundaries in order to soothe myself. That is essentially my addiction.” And so then I started to want to unpack like, why? Where’s this voice coming from? Why do I feel such a great sense of unworthiness? And I started going to trauma therapy and started to unpack some of the, the things that I went through as a child.

I grew up in poverty. I was exposed to addiction quite a bit. It was a pretty chaotic environment that I had lived in as a child. And in the trauma therapy, we would work through some of that trauma, but then I would bring up money and the trauma therapists would be like, “Willpower! Willpower!” Like it’s almost like they didn’t really have any strategies as soon as I brought up money, and I was like, “This is very interesting.” So I started exploring with asking around many different trauma therapists and doing some research, “Do you get trained in money?” And there was a very similar reaction across the board, where it’s like, “No, but I need help with money. You know, I’m struggling with money and so are my clients.” And I saw this massive gap in training for the mental health practitioners. That’s where the idea of putting Trauma of Money together and creating an accreditation program for mental health and financial professionals came to be.

Ben-Achour: What kinds of trauma leaves a mark on our relationship with money?

Chapman: I mean, all types of trauma — it can really be anything. You know, even like being a survivor of sexual abuse. You know, the stats say that one in three women have survived sexual abuse, and, you know, a survivor of sexual abuse, they might have deep feelings of unworthiness. And when it comes to advocating for, you know, the financial life that they want to have, that sexual abuse trauma can arise, especially if they’re interacting with male authority figures in the finance world. So it can be it can be trauma like that. It can be microaggressions that you might experience through racism. It can be growing up in scarcity. It can be your ancestors experiencing scarcity. It can be immigration. There’s so many examples of how different traumas can show up. And we don’t get too much into what is the specific trauma; we are we more categorize the traumas in groups. So we would say like generational trauma, relational traumas, societal trauma and systemic trauma — those are kind of the main umbrella buckets of trauma that we explore. And then within those, there’s so many examples.

Ben-Achour: I wanted to ask you about the idea of generational trauma or societal trauma, and how that, you know, pops up in an individual’s behavior or approach to money. How does that work?

Chapman: So let’s think about generational scarcity. So we’ve found in our research around the psychology of scarcity, that when a brain believes it’s in scarcity, the brain reacts in a similar way to a trauma response. So we really look at scarcity as another form of trauma. And let’s say your ancestors have experienced extreme scarcity. And maybe the children of your great great grandparents watched their parents in extreme scarcity and they learned certain ways to be around money, and then they passed that down to their children and passed that down to their children. And so you can have trauma and scarcity passed down through nature and nurture. And we will often see people interact with their money in the same way that was like a top pattern through their ancestors. And that top pattern might have come out of survival at one point, but they no longer need to be in that state. So a lot of the work that we do is identifying some of those patterns that we no longer need to play out and trying to adapt a new pattern that is helpful for our relationship with money.

Ben-Achour: If we are shaped by our experience and the experiences of those around us, how do you get control back?

Chapman: One of the ways to get control back ironically is to depersonalize it. I had found just working in the financial literacy space for so long that there was quite a bit of shame in traditional financial literacy approaches. So we’re often told, like “If you do things this way with your money, you’re good. If you do things that way with your money, you’re bad.” And it was very much like a lot of black and white this or that thinking ways to be. And in environments like that, it can create a lot of shame. And we know through our work around shame that shame becomes debilitating when it comes to money. You know, when we experience shame, it’s very likely for us to get on something we call the destructive-shame cycle, where we have shame, we feel like we’re gonna be abandoned, we isolate ourselves, and that’s quite painful. So we reach out to something to soothe that pain, and often what we reach out to might be something like avoidance or, you know, even something like spending to soothe that pain. And then we just really get into this cycle.

And so when we can say something like, “Whose shame is this? Whose financial shape is this right now?” And we can start to unpack what the source is, we can say, “Oh, well, you know, some of this is societal trauma.” Like, we live in an environment where there’s a massive wealth gap. You know, there’s a lot of economic issues — there’s affordability issues and there’s a lot of stuff going on. So I get that I have individual control to make some change, but also all of this shame and pressure is not mine. And the moment you can start to depersonalize it, you’re giving yourself some space to take a different path to do something different. You know, it’s very helpful for people to be like, “The financial world is very challenging to navigate. The majority of people in North America struggle with money over not struggling with money, so I’m not alone in this.” And through that, I can find acceptance and belonging. And when you can find acceptance and belonging, you’re more supported — your nervous system is more supported to move forward and take the next right action.

Ben-Achour: Do you find that — you know, approached in this way — changes in behavior stick better?

Chapman: Oh, yeah. I see it all the time in our community. We’re a professional certification program, but we always have all the professionals go through and apply the work to themselves. And we hear amazing stories, like, “I’ve been avoiding my taxes for four years, and I finally did them,” or “I got on this plan. And you know, I moved out of that feast-and-famine cycle that a typically went into, and I was able to create a more sustainable plan for myself that’s more in alignment with my values.” So what we’re doing here is we’re teaching them how to move out of the trauma response and create sustainable action plans to create wealth for themselves or whatever their goal is. And that’s another thing, we have them define wealth for themselves: What does that mean to them? And then they create a plan from there and their plan becomes more sustainable, because it’s not rooted in trauma, and it’s not rooted in scarcity.

Ben-Achour: If someone were looking to, you know, improve their relationship with money, what are some first steps you might give them?

Chapman: We always orient in working with shame first, and working with shame has us identify what’s really here, like what’s happening? What’s the narrative that’s showing up that I feel shameful about or that I feel like I’m doing something wrong about when it comes to money? And then we meet that narrative with radical honesty. We ask whose shame is this, we try and depersonalized where it came from. And then we meet ourselves with compassion, empathy. And we encourage folks to try and find a community or friends where they can have conversations about what’s happening with their relationship with money, because one of the antidotes to financial shame is connection. And then from there, I would say, get very clear on what the vision is that you will want for your life. And once you’ve identified that vision, you may notice that there’s some things that you’ve done in your life that do not match that vision, and guess what’s going to happen again?

Shame is going to arise, but now you have a way to interact with that shame, and a lot of this work is done on repetition, because trauma and scarcity might sit more in the subconscious, and the way to work with the subconscious is more from a repetitive approach. Because we’re trying to break the patterns that we fall into so quickly and so easily, because they’re so ingrained in our brains. You know, there’s a lot of great resources out there. There’s financial therapists, there’s Trauma of Money-certified professionals you can talk to, there’s even free resources in Debtors Anonymous, for example, if that’s something that you’re experiencing. Within the Debtors Anonymous world, there’s a meetings for people who are underearners; there’s like underearners anonymous. So there’s a lot of great resources out there if you’re looking to go on a path of healing the relationship with money.

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