What if money is a relationship too?
This is where my work with relational trauma and my work with money increasingly meet.
Because I don't see money only as numbers.
I also see money as a relationship.
We interact with it.
We pursue it.
Avoid it.
Hold onto it.
Give it away.
Hide from it.
Try to control it.
Feel controlled by it.
We attach meaning to what it gives us and what we imagine it might take away.
And, just like other relationships, our relationship with money develops in context.
Long before you had a bank account, you were watching.
Who controlled the money?
Who had to ask for it?
Who was allowed to spend?
Who went without?
What happened when somebody wanted more?
Did money create freedom, conflict, secrecy, power, shame, dependence or safety?
Was receiving accompanied by gratitude ~ or obligation?
Was money used to care for people?
Or control them?
Those experiences can become part of the relational meaning we later attach to money.
So when someone tells me, “I know this doesn't make sense, but money just doesn't feel safe,” I'm interested in more than their financial literacy.
I'm curious about the relationship.
What has money come to represent?
When the relationship with money mirrors other relationships
Sometimes our relationship with money begins to resemble relational patterns we already know very well.
You chase it but never feel you have enough.
You work harder and harder trying to earn its approval.
You don't quite trust it to stay.
When it arrives, you expect it to disappear.
You monitor it constantly because taking your eyes off it feels dangerous.
You give it away quickly because having it creates discomfort.
You feel guilty asking for more.
Or you organise your whole life around keeping the relationship stable.
There can even be echoes of dynamics found in controlling, inconsistent or narcissistic relationships.
Not because money itself is narcissistic.
But because the relational pattern can feel strangely familiar.
You never quite feel good enough.
The goalposts keep moving.
You believe safety depends on performing correctly.
You become hypervigilant.
You over-give.
You minimise your own needs.
You feel powerful when the relationship seems secure and deeply unsettled when it doesn't.
You may even find yourself thinking:
If I could just get this right, I'd finally feel safe.
But “enough” never quite arrives.
That interests me therapeutically.
Because sometimes we're trying to solve a relational wound with a financial solution.
Relational rupture can happen around money too
A rupture in our relationship with money doesn't necessarily begin with poverty or financial catastrophe.
It might begin with something much quieter.
Being shamed for wanting something.
Watching a parent panic when a bill arrived.
Having money withdrawn as punishment.
Being financially controlled by a partner.
Being repeatedly told you were expensive.
Discovering that gifts came with strings attached.
Growing up believing that talking about money was rude.
Being expected to financially rescue other people.
Having your financial contribution dismissed.
Or learning that love, approval or belonging were somehow connected with what you could provide.
Later, the original relationship may be gone.
But money still carries some of its emotional meaning.
A request for payment can feel like confrontation.
Receiving can feel like indebtedness.
A boundary can feel selfish.
A fee increase can feel like rejection waiting to happen.
Having more can create guilt rather than security.
This is what I mean when I talk about relational incongruence with money.
Your adult mind may understand one thing:
“I'm allowed to be paid appropriately for my work.”
While another part of you is operating from a completely different relational rule:
“If I ask for too much, people won't like me.”
Both can exist at once.
And no amount of telling yourself to “know your worth” necessarily resolves the conflict between them.
Money can become the third person in the room
Money also enters relationships between actual people.
Between partners.
Parents and children.
Therapists and clients.
Employers and employees.
Friends.
Siblings.
Caregivers.
Money can become the place where much older relational questions get negotiated:
Who has power?
Who gets to have needs?
Who gives and who receives?
Who owes whom?
Who gets to say no?
What happens if I have more than you?
Will you still love me if I stop providing?
Can you be disappointed with me without me abandoning myself to make it better?
Seen through that lens, the invoice that makes your stomach turn may not only be an invoice.
The fee you can't increase may not only be a number.
The guilt you feel spending money on yourself may not really be about the purchase.
Sometimes money is simply the place where an older relational pattern has found somewhere new to play itself out.
Why RI-EMDR makes sense to me for money work
This is one reason Relational-Integrative EMDR fits so naturally with the way I understand money.
If I treated money difficulties only as faulty beliefs, I might ask:
What do you believe about money?
That's useful.
But a relational approach lets us go further.
Who taught you that?
What happened when you needed something?
What does receiving feel like in your body?
Which part of you becomes frightened when you charge appropriately?
Who are you afraid of becoming if you have more?
What relationship are you protecting when you make yourself smaller?
And perhaps one of my favourite questions:
Does this feeling around money remind you of another relationship or is this really old stuff (often representing intergenerational or ancestral imprints)?
Now we're somewhere different.
We're not assuming every money difficulty is trauma.
We're not diagnosing somebody's bank account.
And we're certainly not claiming that budgeting doesn't matter.
We're recognising that money can carry relational meaning and patterns can persist down the bloodline.
For someone whose history includes conditional love, financial control, inconsistent caregiving, shame, over-responsibility or narcissistic relationship dynamics, that meaning can be particularly charged.
RI-EMDR gives us a framework for becoming curious about those connections through memory, relationship, parts and bodily experience, rather than trying to argue someone out of a response their system learned for a reason.
And sometimes that is the missing link.
The problem isn't that you don't understand money.
It's that your relationship with money may still be organised around an older understanding of relationship.
