Helen
In 2021, my bank account was hacked and all of my savings disappeared and the most humiliating part of this was I helped, I thought I was talking to the bank but I was actually talking to the hacker.
When something like that happens, it is not just a financial loss, it shakes something much deeper — your sense of safety, your self-trust, your belief that you can build something and actually hold onto it.
That kind of experience has a name. It is called financial trauma. And it is what I want to talk about today.
Just a reminder — these Wednesday newsletters are taking you behind the scenes of how I actually work with women. We started with the Money Map diagnostic. Last week we explored your earliest money paradigm and the setpoint that formed in childhood. Today we go one layer deeper — into the specific events that left a wound in your relationship with money that is still running now.
Here is how I define it.
A financial trauma is any past event that had a dramatic negative impact on your finances — and is still alive in your nervous system today. The clearest sign is this: when you look at your current money situation, you can point to a specific event and say, if that hadn't happened, I would be so much further ahead.
And ever since that event, you trust yourself less. You trust other people less. You trust the world with your money less.
Most of us when we think about trauma think about “big T” traumas however, an event is considered traumatic when at the time it happened, one has less internal and or external resources to handle it.
It could look like a business partnership that went wrong and cost you everything you had built. A divorce where you walked away with far less than you deserved. A foreclosure — one of the most shame-laden financial experiences a woman can go through, because the silence around it is almost as painful as the loss itself. Trying to get child support from a partner who made it a battle. Trusting someone with your money and being betrayed. A period of illness or injury that wiped out your savings before you could rebuild.
Women carry these experiences quietly often for years without ever naming them as trauma — because we have been taught that trauma looks a certain way, and a failed business or a foreclosure or a bad investment doesn't qualify.
But it does.
Helen, financial trauma doesn't stay in the past. It casts a shadow over everything that comes after — how willing you are to trust again, how much you allow yourself to want, how safe it feels to build something knowing it could fall apart. It sits in your nervous system as quiet proof that the worst can happen. And so part of you stops fully trying, believing and receiving.
This is why insight alone doesn't shift it. You can understand intellectually that one bad experience doesn't define you. But if the trauma is still alive in your nervous system, understanding doesn't touch it. It needs to be cleared at the level where it actually lives — in the body, through the nervous system.
As a psychotherapist for fourteen years — where eighty percent of my clients had experienced some form of trauma — and now five years as a coach bringing that same clinical depth into women's relationship with money, I understood this at a deep level. Talking about trauma helps. But talking alone rarely clears it.
When I discovered EFT tapping, I finally had a mechanism that could do what talk therapy alone could not. A way to help my clients release trauma from their body, not just make sense of it in their minds.
EFT works by stimulating specific acupressure points on the face and body while you hold a distressing memory or feeling in your awareness. This sends a calming signal to the nervous system while the traumatic memory is active. The emotional charge attached to the memory begins to release — not because you talked yourself out of it, but because your nervous system finally received the signal that it was safe to let it go.
When my bank account was hacked, I used it on myself. I worked through the experience layer by layer — first the shock, then the fear, then the sadness of what I had lost, then the anger, then finally the shame. That quiet, corrosive belief that somehow I had let this happen to myself.
Each layer had its own emotional charge. Each one released.
By the end of that day, something had shifted that talking, journaling, and strategic planning had never touched. What came after wasn't just relief. It was a reclaiming of my self-trust, my belief in what was possible, and a calling. I became a nervous system based money coach because of that experience.
EFT tapping is now the workhorse of everything I do with clients around releasing money blocks including financial trauma. It is the difference between understanding a wound and actually clearing it.
I want to ask you something, and I want you to know this is a safe place to name it.
Is there an event in your financial history — a betrayal, a loss, a decision, a season — that you can point to and say, if that hadn't happened, I would be so much further along?
Is there something you have never fully said out loud, maybe because it felt too shameful, too painful, or too long ago to still matter?
Hit reply and tell me. Even naming it in one sentence is the beginning of something shifting. I read everything. I write back.
P.S. If you want to explore your own financial trauma in a safe, supported space, that is exactly what a clarity session with me is for. We name it, we look at it together, and we talk about next steps.
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