What happens to us when we grow up financially unsupported — and why it goes so much deeper than money

If you grew up in a household where money was scarce, loaded, or wrapped in anxiety — and especially if you learned early on to make yourself smaller so nobody else had to carry more — this is for you.

---

It started before you had words for it

Most of us who carry a complicated relationship with money didn't arrive here through bad decisions or poor habits. We arrived here through childhood. Through the atmosphere of the house we grew up in. Through what our bodies absorbed long before our minds could make sense of it.

When a parent is carrying everything alone meaning the earning, the childraising, the worrying and the surviving - their body communicates that weight even when their words don't. You notice it as a child from the stiffness when you reach up to hug them and they're somewhere else entirely to the sharp edge in their voice when they talk about how expensive everything is. It's in the way money is spoken about not as a neutral thing but as a source of stress, shame or resentment and most often something attached to your existence.

Your nervous system meanwhile is logging all of it. Every loaded silence. Every tense moment as a parent storms from the room. Every time the cost of living was spoken about like a kind of accusation followed by the slam of a cupboard door. Your child brain — which cannot yet understand that your parent is simply acting from their own unprocessed pain hears something else entirely.

It hears: this is because of me. I am expensive. I am the reason things are hard.

You could not have known, at that age that you were witnessing someone else's survival pattern in action. So instead it became personal. It became something stored quietly in your body, shaping the way you moved through the world for years to come.

When you also became the caretaker

For some of us, the wound goes a layer deeper still. If you grew up not just witnessing a parent's struggle but actively holding it in being the one they confided in, the emotional anchor of the house, the child who learned that their job was to absorb rather than to need then your nervous system received an even more specific lesson.

That lesson was that love and burden are inseparable. Being needed is the price of belonging. And your needs, your actual legitimate, tiny human needs — come last.

Psychologists call this parentification and it isn't always visible from the outside. Often it's quiet and ordinary, woven into the texture of everyday life and it's rarely done with any conscious intention to harm. The impact however is real and it lingers long past childhood.

How the body keeps the score

These early experiences don't simply pass through us and disappear. They get stored in the nervous system, the body and in the unconscious patterns we carry into every relationship, financial decision and moments where someone offers us something but instinctively want to give it straight back.

The nervous system isn't dramatic about this either. It doesn't announce itself instead it simply keeps a record and then quietly organises your adult life around protecting you from feeling those things again.

So you naturally become the person who cannot accept the promotion without wondering if you've really earned it or the person who can only allow yourself to make money if you've physically and emotionally exhausted yourself first — because ease feels like cheating, and rest feels like something you haven't yet justified. Perhaps you're the person who deflects every compliment, who prides themselves on needing nothing or who cannot say thank you without immediately giving something back, because receiving without reciprocating feels unbearably exposing, risky and unfamiliar.

Letting people help you probably feels like weakness and weakness, your nervous system learned a long time ago is dangerous.

This is the money wound and it goes so much deeper than just the money.

What this isn't

This isn't a story about blame. Our parents were doing what they could with what they had many of them carrying their own unhealed wounds and survival patterns inherited from the generation before them. The point isn't to assign fault it's to understand. To allow yourself to acknowledge what that experience actually meant for you but not the sanitised version, not the one where you've already forgiven everyone and tied it neatly but instead the real one. The one with the anger in it, the grief in it and the rage that you perhaps never felt safe enough to feel.

You didn't deserve to grow up before you needed to. You didn't deserve to carry what you carried and you also — and this is the part worth sitting with — get to heal from it. You get to take your power back. You get to create a new pattern now, one that is built around your own wellbeing rather than someone else's survival. One that actually serves you and the life you are trying to build.

That work begins the moment you decide to stop treating your own needs as an inconvenience.

A gentle reflection prompt

You don't need to do anything with what you've just read except sit with it for a moment. But if you'd like a small place to start, here is one question worth bringing some curiosity to without pressure and without needing to find the right answer. You might want to write your response down, or simply let it settle somewhere quiet inside you.

Think of a recent moment when someone offered you something — help, a compliment, money, care, time. What happened in your body? Did you lean in or did something in you want to deflect, minimise or immediately give something back? What did that feel like and where did you feel it?

If this has landed somewhere in you

This is the beginning of a much longer conversation. One I'm building a whole space around through counselling, creativity, writing and community because I believe this work is too important and too common to stay hidden.

Working with our hands, making things, expressing ourselves creatively — these aren't separate from healing. They're part of it and Flowers, Feeling and Frequency exists at exactly that intersection where the somatic meets the creative and where we begin slowly to come home to ourselves.

So wherever you are in this — whether you're just beginning to name what you're carrying, or whether you've been doing this work for a while and something in this piece cracked something open then know there is a next step here for you.

Free Next Steps:

If you'd like to go deeper in your own time then my free five part email series on the money wound explores exactly this — what it is, where it comes from, and what it might feel like to begin to heal it. Written from lived experience not just theory and designed to be read gently at your own pace.

→ Join the free series here

Ready To Go Deeper:

If this is showing up in your life, your relationships or your business and you're ready to look at what's underneath with someone who understands each layer of this work from the inside then my Rooted and Reflected sessions are available to book as a one-off or as often as feels right for you. There's no fixed programme or pressure to commit to more than you're ready for.

→ Find out more about Rooted and Reflected