When Your Financial Baggage Is Inherited and Is Not Your Own

When I was struggling with depression; a friend of mine asked me a very interesting question:

“How do you know that the depression you’re struggling with is your own?”

He explained that since traditional therapy hadn’t worked for me, it was possible that my depression could be from my ancestors and from 400 years of oppression.

He advised me to start connecting with my ancestors and to consider ways of healing my ancestors, at the same time I was healing myself.

It would take me years to fully grasp the power of that conversation. That conversation opened up a whole new way of healing for me and got me to start exploring inherited financial trauma.

How trauma is passed down from one generation to the next

A while back in the Wealthy Money Facebook group, I shared an article from a psycho therapist who talks inherited trauma.

In the article, the therapist talk about a patient of his who suddenly developed insomnia at the age of 19 and started having an irrational fear of freezing to death.

Nothing could help him, he’d gone to therapist and psychiatrists and still the fear persisted, until he (the therapist) looked at this patient’s family history and learned that this patient’s uncle had passed on 30 years ago. His uncle had frozen to death at the age of 19.

Somehow this client had taken on that ancestral memory of his uncle and at the age of 19, the age when his uncle passed on, he’d started having these fears of death.

Turning 19 had triggered the ancestral memory.

In the article the therapist also talks about a woman who started having a desire to kill herself by incinerating herself.

When they looked back at her ancestral history they found that her entire family had been incinerated during the Holocaust.

That trauma had been passed onto her, she’d taken on this ancestral memory and made it part of her.

How financial trauma is passed down from generation to generation

We tend to think of trauma as something massive but that’s not true, when we talk of financial trauma we’re not talking of horrific events, like people freezing to death at the age of 19 or entire families being incinerated during the Holocaust.

Financial trauma can be something as simple as your mom losing her high paying job, leaving the family broke and struggling.

Suddenly you don't have say the same access to the things that you like and you can't afford the same things as you did before.

If this happened at a critical age, like your early teens, when you're becoming more aware of material things and how these material things influence your social circle, this can be considered a financial trauma, because this event has the power to change the way you interact with money.

It’s not uncommon for an event like this to leave anyone feeling like they can’t trust money because money can leave and abandon them.

If you experienced such an event and started feeling like you can’t trust money, there are 2 ways this belief can change your behavior with money:

1. You get rid of money as soon as you have it, you spend it as fast as you earn it because you’re subconsciously rejecting money, before money rejects you.

To the outside world it seems like you’re wasteful and financially undisciplined, but that’s not true. The problem isn’t lack of financial discipline, the problem is that you don’t feel safe with money and so you don't trust money.

But your children will sense this need to get rid of money, they may even take on this fear of money and may also find themselves rejecting money and spending it as fast as they make it, without knowing why.

2. You hold onto money too tightly, you can’t spend money on anything or take risks with money because you’re scared that money will leave and never come back.

To the outside world your behavior may look miserly and may even be interpreted as selfish, but this is a symptom of a deeper fear.

Your children will sense this fear and may get the idea that spending money on anything, taking risks or following their passion is risky because they may lose money.

So they also end up holding onto money tightly.

One traumatic event around money, can shape an entire family’s relationship with money for generations to come.

There are reasons why we’re scared and petrified of having money and we need to understand where these fears come from so we can heal them.

I always tell clients that they can't expect to do affirmations and visualizations and get the same results as someone else because they don't know other people’s ancestral stories and traumas.

Some of us have deep money traumas that travel through our bloodline affect everyone in that bloodline differently; our healing depends on us healing these traumas,

The first step to healing ancestral money trauma

In the #MoneyMagic course I have several meditations to help us heal ancestral trauma around money.

But you don’t have to be enroll in the course to understand your ancestral money trauma and how it plays out in your finances.

You can simply map out your family’s financial history for yourself and look at your parents’ relationship with money and how their relationship with money mirrors their parents.

And then look at how your relationship with money mirrors your parents’ relationship with money.

That simple awareness can help you start healing.

Click play on the video below to learn more about this topic:

When you look at your family’s history with money, do you see how that may have impacted your relationship with money?

Share your insights in the comments section below.