The Key to Financial Freedom Is In Healing Our Trauma
Like most people, I used to think that trauma is a devastating tragedy like war, abuse or death.
The truth is, trauma is an event or experience that we were unable to integrate or process.
This event or experience then shaped our outlook on life, ourselves and/or the world.
The event can be big or small.
Trauma isn't about the size of the event or the experience, it is about our ability to process what’s happening to us or around us in that moment
For example, a two year old being shouted at for demanding a toy at a shop, can store that event as a money trauma.
How and why?
Most two-year-olds don't understand the idea of not having money.
So when they want something and we shout at them and tell them we don't have enough money, they don't have an understanding of what's going on in that moment, and they interpret that experience differently to an adult.
Some two-year-olds may interpret it as, "it’s wrong to ask for something I want.”
Others may interpret it as, "when I ask people for something, it makes them angry and threatening."
There are many different ways that they can interpret this event, but whatever the interpretation is, it starts to shape their view of the world, forms part of their belief system and the vows they make.
If the two-year-old interprets the event as, "asking makes people angry and threatening" and the grown-ups around them keep reinforcing this belief by behaving angrily or violently whenever this child asks for something, this worldview is reinforced and becomes a belief.
This belief will play out in their finances (as an adult) as:
a fear of asking for money owed to them
a fear of asking for a raise
fear of invoicing clients etc.
In fact, the idea of asking for anything may cause them to freak out and panic as adults.
This fear of asking is a childhood trauma that, on the surface, has nothing to do with money, but is actually affecting their finances.
Traditional personal finance would bombard this adult with financial information in an effort to increase their confidence around money or may even tell them to affirm the fear away, by giving them an affirmation that elevates their courage.
But that’s still working on the symptom and isn't healing the two-year-old self, the sub-personality, that sees asking as scary or bad.
Unresolved trauma is stored in the physical body and in the energy body, so this adult may find themselves attracting the same experience around money and asking, and may find themselves reliving the fear, over and over again, because we tend to attract what is within our energy body, which in turn reaffirms our views of the world.
Trauma keeps us in a loop, so we keep repeating financial cycles
Every time we’re triggered (reminded of the trauma at a subconscious level), the version of us that was traumatised, comes to the surface and deals with the trauma in the way they know how - the way that kept them alive - the way that we dealt with the trauma as kids or teens.
Most of us are currently dealing with our finances from the perspective of our 2, 8, or even 15-year-old selves because our subconscious mind believes that that behaviour kept us alive. And the subconscious mind only has one role - to keep us alive.
This is also why we find ourselves financially sabotaging or recreating the same financial cycles as our families, no matter how hard we try to change them, because our subconscious mind registers our physical survival as proof that those behaviours kept us alive, so it overrides our conscious mind, to keep us from changing the pattern because a new pattern is untested and could be fatal.
This is also why we feel uncomfortable charging beyond a certain amount or having more than a certain amount of money in our bank accounts - because that is foreign and the subconscious mind registers the new amounts as dangerous.
And because trauma can be passed on from generation to generation (epigenetics inheritance), we can find ourselves creating the same financial cycles as our parents or grandparents or even great grandparents
