Photo by Rūdolfs Klintsons

The Mother Wound and the Money Wound: Why Your Money Patterns Start With Your Mom

Money is rarely just about money.

Notice what happens when you read that word. Money. You might feel your chest tighten, or catch a thought you didn’t choose. Maybe you feel a small wave of dread, or a flicker of shame. You didn’t decide to have that reaction. It came up on its own, and that’s the point. Most of what we feel about money runs in the background, below our awareness, until something brings it to the surface.

So let’s bring it to the surface.

What Comes Up for You Around Money?

Get curious about what happens for you when you:

• Look at your bank account
• Spend money on something just because you want it
• Receive money, a gift or help
• Charge for your work or ask for what you’re worth
• Spend on your kids versus spend on yourself

For a lot of us, money touches everything at once: safety, worth, scarcity, control, deserving, trust and the ability to receive. That’s why it feels like such a loaded subject.

There’s a lot written about money mindset. But here’s what I’ve seen again and again in my own life and with the mothers I work with: our mindset comes from our body set. How we relate to money lives in our nervous system and in our body, and our thoughts follow from there.

The Mother Wound Is the Money Wound

I often say that the mother wound and the money wound are the same wound.

In my own work on my relationship with my mother, and in my work with clients, I keep seeing the same thing. The patterns we carry from our earliest caregiving relationship look a lot like the patterns we carry with money. Not feeling good enough. Not feeling worthy. Struggling to receive. Feeling like we have to earn it first.

Your first relationship shaped what you came to expect about having needs, receiving, depending on others and being enough. So it makes sense that those same expectations show up when money is involved.

Here are some questions to sit with:

• Was it safe for you to need something?
• Could you receive love or praise without having to earn it or prove yourself?
• Did you have to be easy, helpful, successful or low-maintenance to be cared for?
• Did you learn that taking care of yourself was all on you?
• Was support reliable, or did it come and go?

And then: what did you watch your mother believe about money, work, depending on others and receiving?

If you learned early that you had to earn care, prove your worth, not need too much or handle everything yourself, of course that’s going to show up in how you relate to money.

The Money Messages You Inherited

One simple way to see your money programming is to notice the phrases that echo in your head. You know the ones:

“Money doesn’t grow on trees.”
“We can’t afford that.”
“Rich people are greedy.”
“You have to work hard for money.”
“Don’t depend on anyone financially.”

Each of these is a seed that was planted, watered and grown in you. On top of what you heard, there’s what you saw. Maybe one person in your family controlled all the money. Maybe your mom sacrificed herself and never spent a cent on her own needs.

These patterns don’t just live in our heads. They live in our bodies, and they reach beyond our own families. In many places women have only been able to open a bank account in their own name for around fifty years. That’s a blink of an eye in history. So we’re working with what our own lineage handed us, and also with what women and mothers as a whole have carried.

Why Knowing Isn’t the Same as Changing

This is where a lot of us get stuck. You can know logically that you can afford something and still feel unsafe spending the money. You can know what your work is worth while your body screams that you’re being unreasonable and someone is going to reject you. You can know you don’t have to do everything yourself, and still feel guilty, uncomfortable or ashamed paying for a cleaner, a nanny or support.

Knowing the money belief isn’t the same as changing the pattern. Insight matters, but the pattern lives in the body, so that’s where the change has to happen too.

What Relationship With Money Do You Want to Model?

Once you can see what’s running in the background and where it came from, the next question is a hopeful one:

What relationship with money do I want to practice?
What relationship with money do I want to model?
What relationship with money do I want my daughter to have?

I don’t think any of us want to hand down scarcity and fear. I think we want something that feels supported, safe, trusting, well-resourced, generous, discerning and open to receiving.

That matters for you, because you have a lot of life left to live, and a healthy relationship with money is part of living a full one. It also matters for the generations after you. If you’re like me and the mothers I work with, you care deeply about leaving a legacy of flourishing. Your money pattern is something you can consciously rewrite, giving your daughter a different blueprint.

Rewiring Money Together

Money brings up a lot of shame for many women, which is exactly why talking about it together is so powerful. That’s a big part of what we do inside REWIRE.

You don’t have to bring money as the pattern you work on. But whatever you do bring, your relationship with money will probably shift anyway. Our patterns don’t live in isolation. When we heal one, the whole nervous system feels it, and that ripples into everything else.

Imagine what your life could look like with a relationship to money rooted in trust, safety, confidence and the ability to receive. Now imagine that for women, daughters and mothers everywhere. The whole world would change.

REWIRE: What You Keep Repeating is open for enrollment through October 15th, and we begin October 27th. Learn more HERE.

🎧 Listen to the full episode, the final one in the Let’s REWIRE series, on the podcast.

💬 Have a thought or question? Send me a voice note HERE.