Money and Manipulation: Trauma Healing with Contemplative Somatics
Money is more than currency. In today’s world it is connected to our sense of safety, autonomy, identity, and relational dynamics. In the context of trauma within family systems, money can sometimes become a tool of control, manipulation, and domination. Financial manipulation arises when a person—often a parent, partner, or elder—deliberately uses economic resources to exert power, enforce compliance, or restrict another’s independence. This can manifest in many forms: withholding financial support, fostering dependence to dictate behavior, leveraging money to shame or humiliate, or creating financial instability to reinforce dominance.
The trauma resulting from such manipulation runs deep. When money becomes a vehicle for control rather than support, it leaves lasting emotional, psychological, and even physical imprints. These impacts often remain long after the controlling relationship ends, shaping an individual’s nervous system responses, financial behaviors, and self-worth.
The Psychological and Somatic Impacts of Financial Manipulation
The outcomes of financial trauma are far-reaching. Survivors often report chronic anxiety, internalized shame, and a pervasive sense of helplessness and powerlessness, especially around money and decision-making. Self-trust is deeply eroded, leading to confusion, self-doubt, and difficulty asserting financial boundaries or making independent choices.
From a somatic perspective, the nervous system is conditioned to associate money with danger. According to Polyvagal Theory, financial manipulation cues the body to respond as if it were under constant threat, triggering persistent sympathetic arousal (fight-or-flight) or dorsal vagal collapse (shutdown and dissociation). This trauma response can significantly narrow the window of tolerance, making it harder to remain emotionally regulated during financial or relational stress. Over time, this dysregulation can present as avoidance, compulsive spending, financial hoarding, or over-identification with scarcity and survival-based narratives.
A Real-World Example
Consider the example of a grandfather who uses money as leverage to ensure his children conform to his values and expectations. He may withhold financial support or threaten to alter his will as a means of coercion. He might pit siblings against one another, using inheritance as bait for loyalty and submission. Over time, his children become ensnared in a web of dependency, fear, and internalized shame. If these dynamics go unexamined and unhealed, they are likely to repeat across generations, perpetuating cycles of financial trauma and emotional enmeshment until someone chooses to interrupt the pattern.
Contemplative Somatics: A Pathway to Financial Healing
Contemplative Somatics offers a gentle path for those seeking to untangle the embodied residue of financial trauma. It integrates somatic awareness, mindfulness, and compassion-based practices through a structured seven-stage process:
1. Meditative Resourcing
Cultivate internal safety through grounding in soothing imagery or bodily sensations. This establishes a stable inner foundation independent of external financial circumstances or control.
2. Meditative Interoception
Develop awareness of bodily cues associated with financial anxiety or relational dynamics that trigger past trauma, empowering individuals to detect and respond to subtle signs of distress.
3. Meditative Breath & Regulation
Use conscious breathing to calm the nervous system, regulate emotional responses, and restore access to the prefrontal cortex, which is essential for clear, rational financial decision-making.
4. Meditative Compassionate Approach
Bring self-compassion to past experiences of financial trauma, reducing internalized blame, shame, or self-criticism, and fostering a space for emotional release and forgiveness.
5. Meditative Threshold Engagement
Gently explore stressful financial memories or manipulative relational dynamics in short, tolerable doses. This allows for increased capacity and resilience without overwhelm.
6. Meditative Somatic Expression
Allow the body to release stored tension and unexpressed emotion through movement, sound, or creative expression. This supports the completion of protective responses that were once interrupted.
7. Meditative Integration
Consolidate new insights and bodily experiences into empowered patterns of financial autonomy. This includes redefining boundaries, restoring self-trust, and aligning financial decisions with personal values and dignity.
Through this process, individuals can begin to reclaim their power, re-establish self-trust, and transform their relationship with money from one of fear and control to one of clarity, sovereignty, and empowerment. You can find more about Contemplative Somatics in my book here or book a session here.
The Broader Picture: Systemic and Intergenerational Financial Trauma
It is essential to acknowledge that financial trauma does not only occur in personal relationships. On a societal level, systemic financial oppression perpetuates trauma for individuals and communities. Marginalized populations, especially those impacted by racism, colonialism, ableism, and class-based discrimination, experience economic injustice through policies that deny equitable access to resources, education, housing, and employment.
This collective trauma often mirrors individual experiences of financial manipulation, embedding a sense of scarcity, survival, and unworthiness that becomes intergenerational. The path to healing requires not only personal work but also community solidarity, embodied education, advocacy, and collective action to dismantle oppressive economic structures.
Reclaiming Financial Dignity and Liberation
Healing money trauma is not just about budgets or financial literacy. It is about restoring dignity, autonomy, and relational integrity. Through Contemplative Somatics, individuals are guided to reclaim their inner authority, listen to the wisdom of their bodies, and build a relationship with money that reflects their values, not their trauma.
By healing at the intersection of the personal and collective, we move toward a world where money is no longer a tool of control, but a resource for connection, empowerment, and liberation—for ourselves and for generations to come.