Kate Northrup: The way you handle money may actually not be a personality trait. When it comes to our money, we often think we have an organization problem or a structure problem, but actually what we have is a father wound. Welcome to Plenty, a weekly recalibration of power, money, and safety for high capacity humans. I’m Kate Northrup, best selling author and creator of Relaxed Money, and this is where neuroscience meets ancient wisdom meets real wealth strategy. This is the sacred conversation at the intersection of money, the body, and the life you’re truly here to live.

If you’re ready to reimagine what’s possible for yourself and for the world, you’re in the right place. Let’s go. The way you handle money, how structured or diffuse you are, how controlling or disorganized you are, may actually not be a personality trait. It probably has nothing to do with how good you are with numbers, and it has everything to do with your relationship to your father. When I was starting out in my early twenties, I made an above average income for someone right out of college my age, and yet I could not manage to keep any of it.

I felt allergic to budgets, which, by the way, I still don’t love that word. I call them spending plans instead. I had no idea what I made. I had no idea what I spent. I was always overspending.

There was no structure. I didn’t even have a savings account. There was no real long term planning. I did put some money here and there into a Roth IRA. But in general, it was diffusion, the state of diffusion to the max.

Now if you want to identify your hidden money ecosystem state, that what I just referred to is the state of diffusion, which is one of four hidden money ecosystem states. All you need to do is go to katenorthrup.com/field, and you can download a free guide that’s gonna help you identify what state your hidden money ecosystem is in. So I was in a diffusion state for years and years and years and years, and it really wasn’t until I became a mom. Actually, this is all kind of coming together as I’m recording this episode. It was not until I had a baby, and that baby was about one year old, that I started to seriously install engineered structure with my money, where there were certain accounts for certain things, where I knew what percentages went where, and where there was a ritual weekly that my husband and I would sit down and handle our money in a sophisticated way.

Not complicated, but sophisticated. Now it’s important that that happened as I became a parent. Because when I was growing up, my relationship with the masculine, with provision, with authority, with structure, was built around some degree of inconsistency, emotional collapse from time to time, and some role reversal in my parents’ roles in terms of, like, who was the traditional masculine father energy and who was more the traditional feminine mother energy. I am not gonna get super deep into my own father story here, but I will just say anybody who was raised in our culture, no matter how amazing your personal dad was, is going to have some kind of imprinting in their relationship with the masculine where they were imprinted by the wounded masculine. Because our entire culture from thousands of years of patriarchy is largely foundationally rooted in the wounded masculine.

What do I mean by the wounded masculine? The wounded masculine is inconsistent. It is reactive. It is controlling. There can be some real scariness in there.

So if you had any interactions with men growing up where there was instability, where there was chaos, where there was addiction, where there was inconsistency, where there was emotional collapse instead of emotional presence, where you were not able to be received in all of your own emotional expression and that was received with either anger or violence or emotional collapse, you for sure have a father wound. And when it comes to our money, we often think we have an organization problem or a structure problem, but actually what we have is a father wound. And our bodies developed in an environment where we weren’t able to allow ourselves to feel held by structure, by authority, by provision. Those are all the things that the masculine would provide because our models of the masculine, whether they were within our home or out in culture, were operating in their wounding. And so it will actually feel unsafe to feel held and supported, which is such a mind trip and because the very thing we long for to feel safe, to feel held, to feel supported, supported actually reads as a threat to our body.

Have you ever felt stressed out and on edge and, like, super prickly and your partner comes over and gives you a warm, sweet hug and you feel irritated? Everything in your body desperately needs to feel held and loved and cared for. And yet the very thing that’s showing up to deliver that is, like, ugh. Get away from me. That’s because many of us have a nervous system that developed in those sorts of relationships with the toxic masculine.

So what do we do about it? Well, before we get into what we do about it, I wanna make something very clear. The father wound is not necessarily about you and your dad on a personal level, which I think I made clear. It really is about your nervous system predicting what is and is not safe. And oftentimes, when we had compensatory strategies that we developed as a child in response to the environment we grew up in.

Those strategies worked in childhood. But now that we’re adults with bank accounts and investment accounts and jobs and income, those compensatory strategies are now a child’s nervous system running our financial life, falsely predicting what is and what is not safe. So the pattern you swear is just the way you are or the pattern you’ve been trying to overcome through changing your thoughts or just changing your behavior, it’s because you are wired to be making a particular prediction based on history, not based on what is current and what is now. I also wanna be really clear for those listening who were socialized as girls. This goes so far deeper than just your relationship with your father or even your lived experience in this lifetime.

We have been living in patriarchy for thousands of years. And to be clear, patriarchy is not like men oppressing women. Patriarchy is a system that lives within us just as much as it lives within our institutions, and that system has the core belief that male is superior and that the masculine traits are more valuable. Under patriarchy, women have not had financial power or financial ownership. It was only the year 1975 where women in The United States were allowed to have a line of credit in our own names without a male cosigner.

What that means in plain English is it was just barely over fifty years ago that a woman was trusted with her own resources. And depending on your different intersectionalities, this will be more extreme. But the for thousands of years, women really were considered property instead of being able to own and steward property. So your body’s not only metabolizing your relationship with your father, it’s metabolizing thousands of years of a wounded model, a wounded system that says women and the feminine are less than and not to be trusted. That in fact, on some level, we are dangerous, and we need a man there to control us.

You can imagine how that might show up in your relationship with money and in your father wounds as it relates to your relationship with money. What I’m about to say is a really big one, and I think you’re gonna recognize it in yourself. And that is this. The wound often doesn’t actually show up as scarcity because often for people who have a strong father wound that’s showing up in their money, one of their compensatory strategies from not having been able to trust in provision has been to become the sole provider and to have related their own ability to be capable, to perform, to perform well under pressure, to show up, to, you know, basically, like, make the donuts, oftentimes for those with a father wound, they have become the sole provider because they didn’t have a provider that they could trust. And so receiving actually will feel like a threat.

So there’s a real block to letting good things in, and those good things might be financial. It might be love. It might be compliments. It might be support in general. It might be opportunities.

I remember for myself, I had an experience where I got a book deal from Hay House. Louise Hay herself said, we would like to publish your book. And I went into such an emotional breakdown. I could not let it in. My thoughts were spinning about why I didn’t deserve this, why this wasn’t okay, why someone else should have it instead.

I went into guilt and shame. I had, like, a full panic almost in my body, and I couldn’t stop crying. This was not in front of her. Of course, it was at a cafe across the street. But that was a really good example of I was being given this incredible opportunity.

It was provision. Right? I was getting paid. It was a door opening, and my whole system shut down because receiving felt fundamentally unsafe. So for high capacity humans who didn’t have a safe provider who have become the provider, it can actually feel not only unsafe, but on some level impossible to receive support, money, opportunities, gifts, love, because our nervous system developed in an environment where those things were inconsistent or where they were paired with control or violence or anger or inconsistency.

So if that resonates, just know you’re not alone. If you have a tendency towards a diffusion state where it’s hard for you to install engineered structure with your money, where it’s hard for you to stay organized, where it’s hard for you to keep a system going, and you just feel like, I’ll just make more money. I don’t wanna look at the money. I just wanna make more money. If that’s you, know that that is actually your nervous system often responding to your relationship with the masculine and the fact that structure and consistency and predictability were actually coupled with a threat at some point in your life.

But the good news is you can use installing engineered structure with your money as part of the healing balm that not only helps you make, keep, and grow your money, but also helps you heal your nervous system at the same time. And one of the revolutionary things we do in Relax Money is we have a particular way we sequence nervous system healing and financial engineering so that the two go hand in hand. When you install structure in your money, it actually gives your emotional landscape and your nervous system the evidence that masculine structure can hold you and that that sort of engineering and that kind of support actually is safe. And you can build it in small bits over time, and you don’t have to do it alone. One of the most healing balms, one of the fastest healing and corrective agents, especially for people who’ve developed hyperindividual capability as a result of their wounding and their nervous system patterns, is doing things in community with support.

Doing things alone is okay, and you’re probably pretty well practiced at that. But doing it with support and guidance and knowing you don’t have to figure it all out on your own is incredibly powerful. A, it’s more efficient because you make way fewer mistakes along the way, and there’s a proven path. And, b, it actually heals your nervous system in the process, so you get a better result faster, which is why we have laid out in our live cohorts of relaxed money support along the way. You don’t have to do it alone.

Having structure installed with your financial life and then having the support to help you install it actually heals you at two different levels. When it comes to money and your father wound, the move is not to heal with your individual father, although, certainly, that work is incredibly valuable. I’ve done a lot of it myself. I will continue to do so. But what you’re actually doing is healing your relationship with safety itself.

Healing your relationship with support and provision and protection itself so that you can actually feel safe to be held, so that you can actually let yourself finally soften your edges, so that you can let in the help that’s always been available but that you just couldn’t see or receive because for so long, your body associated support with a threat. But the cool thing is it doesn’t have to be that way. And when you heal your relationship with safety itself, everything changes. This is the terrain that we live inside of in relaxed money and in this world. If you have ever found that sticking with financial discipline is hard, that installing a system, that you you just wanna run from it, or you’ve had trouble with consistency in earning or keeping or investing or stewarding, I want you to know that is not because there is something wrong with you.

It’s because at some point, your nervous system learned that it was not safe to be held by support. But the good news is when you layer properly and when you use the right sequencing and the right methodology, that can change. And you can absolutely upgrade and update your relationship with money regardless of what father wounds you came in with or what you developed along the way. You can be held. You can feel safe.

And the way to start is to reparent yourself through installing healthy engineered structure in your financial life while signaling safety along the way. Thank you so much for listening. I hope this was helpful, and I’ll see you next time for Plenty. What if managing money felt effortless? You’ve worked so hard to earn money, so why does it feel stressful?

Well, I wanna introduce you to something brand new that I’ve created called the money reset because abundance starts in your body, not in your bank account. This free audio experience will help you rewire your nervous system for wealth, stop the money in, money out cycle and create a foundation for true wealth and relax into a new relationship with money. Plus, it comes with the five minute calm cash flow ritual, so you can have financial clarity and magnetism anytime you want. All you need to do to get the free money reset is go to katenorthrup.com/reset.