Kate Northrup: Our mother is our first economy. This is not a blaming our mother’s conversation. This is a reclaiming our financial power conversation. What is the story that I’ve inherited that is living in my body unconsciously at times that is impacting my money? 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. Welcome to a brand new series on Plenty about inheritance.

But it’s not inheritance in the way you think. No matter who you are, every single one of us was born into something, into particular DNA, particular circumstances, particular cultural ways of being, particular heritage, and, yes, sometimes financial resources. This series is an invitation to look beyond the numbers and ask what is the story that I’ve inherited that is living in my body unconsciously at times that is impacting my money. And this is going to apply to anyone at any income level and anyone at any stage of their wealth building journey. Because if we don’t make the unconscious conscious as that Carl Jung says, it will direct our lives, and we will call it fate.

So welcome to the Inheritance series. If you wanna dive deeper into any of this, you can go ahead and go to katenorthrup.com/field where you can get my recalibration field guide for a deeper dive into diagnosing your money ecosystem state, your money leaks, the stage you’re at in the wealth stewardship pyramid, and how to get it to work all together so that your money is supporting you instead of running you. Okay. So let’s dive in. Today is about the mother wound and our money.

I did an episode a few weeks back about the father wound and money, and that is linked below in the show notes. It blew up. That thing took off. And so I wanted to follow it up with a conversation about the mother wound and money. And not even just the mother wound, but how our relationship with our mothers and how our relationship with the feminine at large impacts our relationship with money and our financial reality.

Our mother is our first economy. Every single one of us was gestated. Our bodies were created within the body of a woman. And whether or not that person actually raised you, none of us got here without coming through someone else’s body. And that body and what was going on for that person has a huge impact on your relationship with Plenty, your relationship with enough, and whether or not you feel like there is ever enough or whether or not there could possibly ever be enough for you.

I wanna say, as a mother myself, this episode is in no way a mother blaming conversation. Mothers take the brunt of so much judgment. And in our culture, we can often blame the mother for what happens in a child’s life and then what continues to happen in their ongoing lives. So if you’re a mother, know I am on your side. I am one of you.

I am with you, and this is about liberating all of us from making our mothers responsible for our lives and instead liberating us so that we can create the reality we want, and we can tap back into the truth of enough and of plenty. When it comes to our own relationship with money as it’s related to our mother wound, it’s related not only to our relationship with our individual mother, but also with the feminine at large. And the feminine has to do with nurturing care, with diffuse awareness and attention, with softness and darkness. And I will read out to you a little bit later in the episode the expressions of the healthy feminine and the expressions of the wounded feminine. So, no, this is not a blaming our mother’s conversation.

This is a reclaiming our financial power conversation. In my own relationship with my mother, I learned that financial resources were infinite, but physical and emotional presence was finite. My mom was an OBGYN, and she had a big job. And then she went on to do a lot of public facing things with speaking gigs and PBS specials and television appearances and books. And so there was a sense that I needed to share my mother with the world.

However, when it came to money, there was always more where that came from. Her one of her favorite phrases was more is more, and nothing succeeds like excess. She would pick us up on Friday afternoons. That was the special day because it was the day my mom picked us up from school. The other day, she was working in the afternoons.

She would pick us up on Fridays, and she would take us down the street to this little bakery called Gillespie’s, and I was allowed to get an apple clam, which was delicious. I grew up vegan, macrobiotic, so getting to have special treats was really, truly special. So I would get this apple clam, which is kind of like an apple turnover, but a little bit different. It’s a very main it’s a very main pastry. And then we would go across the street to the village thrift shop, and we would go shopping.

And we were allowed to get whatever we wanted. Now these items were often in the 1 to $5 range, so it’s not as though we were shopping at Gucci. However, there was this sense of abundance and plenty, and my mom would celebrate how good stuff looked on us, and she would let us refresh our wardrobe from the thrift store with what we wanted. And it was such a sweet, sweet memory of not only the abundance of financial resources, but also the abundance of her presence. And when I take my girl shopping, I think about that.

I think about that a lot, and I wanna impart that same sense of flow and access to the infinite possibilities that we all have. Now at the same time, when I was being gestated by my mom, when she was pregnant with me, and I want you to think about what you know about when you were a fetus. Okay. So even if you can’t talk to the woman who gestated you, begin to ask these questions and see if there are any parallels or any ringing of truth for you around your own gestational story. So my mom, as I said, was up every few nights delivering babies on call, and she had a full practice.

And at the time, especially in the eighties, being a female doctor was still she was majorly breaking trail. And so she shared with me that she didn’t know how she was going to fit another baby into her life with her career and also with my sister who was 2.5 at the time. So there was already this sense of strapped presence and strapped resources in terms of time, energy, and emotional availability and physical availability. When she went into labor with me, she labored alone in the bathroom across the house from her bedroom because she didn’t wanna wake my dad up. He was an orthopedic surgeon, and he also was up in the middle of the night on call because, you know, motorcycle accidents don’t care about anybody’s circadian rhythm.

So so the two of them were just were were strapped time wise, and she did not want to wake him up because he was already sleep deprived. So she labored alone in the tub until it became undeniable that it was time to go to the hospital, and she didn’t have that support. It was that feeling that, you know, our whole family got from my grandmother. Her life motto was don’t ask for a lighter pack. Ask for a stronger back.

I come from a very long line of capable women who get through life by being more capable. Okay. So that’s my story, and there are ways that that has reverberated through my life. But I wanna highlight here that our sense of enough, our sense of flow, and whether or not there will be enough resources is its original embedding comes from how supported our mothers were emotionally and physically while our bodies were developing inside them. And there may actually be some evidence from an epigenetic standpoint that this may even trace back even further if we were to do these studies because the egg that we each came from actually existed in our mother’s bodies when she was four months gestational age inside our grandmother’s body.

So I know for me, my grandmother grew up in the Great Depression. There was definitely financial lack in that energetic soup. And so even though my mother didn’t grow up in financial lack, the egg that she was formed from, and therefore, the body that I originated from does have some of that thread. So think about that for your own lineage, and you may even wanna take out a journal, a piece of paper, and write out what was going on for your grandmother, what was going on for your mother, and what has been going on for you in your financial life. For me, one of the things that I have worked on a lot is being okay with asking for support.

So while I have no doubt that I have access to infinite resources through my own creation, through running the business that I run, writing the books, teaching the courses, doing the speaking, doing the workshops, investing. I know that for sure I can create that, but asking for support, asking for resources, leaning on others has continued to be a growth edge for me, and that has to do with my mother wound. What shows up for you around that? Now I wanna talk about the wounded feminine versus the healthy feminine real quick here so we can dive into that. Here are expressions of the wounded feminine, and I wanna give a shout out to doctor Deb Kern who helped to articulate this for me.

The wounded feminine and how it might show up in our financial life. I’ll just give a few examples of this, and you’ll have to get my new book that will be coming out next summer for the full thing. But victimhood and powerlessness. So this might show up as money is just something that happens to me. I’m not a numbers person.

I don’t have control over it. It just is what it is. Manipulative behavior can be a wounded feminine. I don’t trust source with a capital s for my financial safety, so I will get other people around me to behave in the way I want them to in order to get my needs met indirectly. So for some people, it might show up like it does for me where it’s a growth edge for me to ask directly to get my needs met, but I don’t do it in a manipulative way.

I will just default to handling it myself. But it can turn into getting your needs met indirectly through being manipulative. That’s wounded feminine. Another one, neediness. Other people are my source.

I don’t trust that I can get my needs met from source, so I get everything I can from whoever I’m most attached to in the moment. There’s a spectrum. Right? Asking for support, receiving support is so healthy. However, it can be too far.

Right? There are some folks who lean too heavily on other people being their financial source and haven’t strengthened the muscle of being capable within themselves enough. So only you can know what’s true for you. Codependency is for sure a wounded feminine trait, and that may show up as I don’t feel okay if someone I love is financially uncomfortable. I overgive to avoid feeling any emotional discomfort as a result of their financial life.

That one’s really common. Do you overgive to adult children? Do you overgive to employees? Do you overgive to family members? Do you overgive because it is too painful to watch them struggle and figure things out themselves, and you just rush in to save the day because, a, you love being needed, and, b, it hurts too much to witness them be uncomfortable.

And do you do that at your own expense? I’ve seen this time and time again even amongst high earners where they can end up living giant paycheck to bot giant paycheck or giant launch to giant launch because they’re overpaying their team. They’re, paying for a bunch of family members’ lives. They are possibly even over giving to their spouse or their partner or an adult child or more than one adult child, and yet they might need to float their expenses on a line of credit. They might be scrambling at the end of the month to take care of their own needs.

They may feel uncomfortable about booking a massage for themselves, but have no problem buying a house for their mother-in-law. So these are just examples. It’s an amalgamation of a million stories, but that financial codependency one is a really big one, and I did an entire episode on that, and that also will be linked in the show notes. Also, jealousy is a wounded feminine expression. I don’t trust that there’s enough for me, and I can’t stand it when others have something I want.

So these are all examples of the wounded feminine. Just ask how those might show up in your life or how they showed up in your mother or your primary caregiver. By the way, the conversation around the fat feminine and the masculine and money dynamics or anytime we’re talking about the masculine and the feminine, it’s a Mobius strip. So a Mobius strip is, you know, a strip of paper that you twist slightly and then you reconnect it, and you can never actually get to the end of it because if you trace one edge of it all the way, you end up on the other edge of it. There is no clear beginning and end when it as it relates to masculine and feminine.

And for many people, they might have been raised by a woman, their mother, who had a lot of masculine energy. And, certainly, if you were raised by a single mom, she may have embodied both the masculine and the feminine, both the mother and the father. I know that my mom certainly embodies a lot of masculine energy as well. So it’s not so much about mother wounds and father wounds explicitly. It’s about our relationship with structure and protection, the masculine, and flow and enough and nurturing and care, the feminine.

And those can come from different constellations of different humans, and it’s not only our biological parents or the people who raised us. It can come from culture at large. We talked a lot about the way that in our culture, the masculine can often be very wounded, and so all of us have a father wound just because of being raised in patriarchy. Okay. Just don’t get too obsessed with, oh, the feminine is women.

The masculine is men. The feminine is my mother. The masculine is my father. All of us are gonna have a really unique constellation there, and I don’t want you to get caught up on gender. We’re just talking about the two energies that run everything in the universe.

The two poles that you know, on a battery, right, you have the negative pole and you have the positive pole. And between the two of them, the polarity of those things creates power. That’s why a battery can run a flashlight or a alarm clock or whatever. In many ways, our bodies are batteries as well, and we have a grounding force, and we have a current, and we have a voltage, and we have all these different things. So I’m not gonna get too deep into that, but I do wanna highlight that we’re simply talking about two opposing energies that are within all of us, that are within everything, that literally make the world go round.

It actually causes gravity and so many other things. Okay. If that was confusing, just throw it out. Now let’s talk about healthy expressions of the feminine. Unconditional love, and this might show up in finances like money is an energy that I can receive and direct towards that which makes my heart sing.

So unconditional love. Nurturing. Financial resources are one of the tools in my vast toolbox to share and receive the energy of nurturing. Money doesn’t take the place of other forms of nurturing, but it can enhance them when used wisely. Intuition is a healthy expression of the feminine.

My sixth sense is a financial asset that I hone and allow to guide me towards greater stewardship and abundance. Surrender, a healthy expression of the feminine. I trust the universe to provide even if I don’t know exactly how. So that is a healthy expression. And allowing, I open my palms, hold life with a loose grip, and I let life bless me without needing to control its flow.

And then finally, flow, which is fundamentally how our bodies, our nervous systems got imprinted by our relationship with mother will define our relationship with flow, our relationship with Plenty for better or for worse. And there’s a lot of nuance here. So flow is I trust resources coming into and out of my life. I know that money is meant to flow. So do I have a real true sense that there is enough?

Your relationship with mother is going to define your relationship with enough. That’s the crux of this entire episode. I wanna be super clear. This does not need to be about your personal mother. For many people, healing with their individual mother may not be available.

Perhaps she’s passed away. Perhaps she’s simply not somebody where repair is available, where meaningful conversations are available. But I want you to know that any amount that you invest in repatterning the matrilineal line actually heals seven generations back and seven generations forward. I had a great episode where we dove into this more deeply with Regina Thomas Hauer and her book on our knees that has a robust section on the mother wound, and we went deep in it there. So if you missed that episode and you’re interested to dive more deeply around how healing our relationship with the mother actually heals our mother and all the people that come after us, you can dive in there.

One of the things that I’ve done to help reset my sense of plenty when it comes to presence, emotional nurturing, care, and attention, and attunement is connecting with the great mother as represented by Mother Earth. When I feel like I need mothering, I go lay on the grass. I go lay on the earth. I allow myself to unburden myself as though I was talking to my mother and telling her all the things that are hard in the way that, you know, my 10 year old tells me when I tuck her in for bed at night at that time when the lights are out, all of a sudden, she just has so much. She wants to unload.

And I am one woman. I am one human with my own limitations and my own capacity, and I try to receive as much of her as possible. But sometimes I need to say to her, okay, honey. That’s enough for tonight. It’s time to go to sleep.

But the earth has no limit in terms of the amount that she can receive and compost of us emotionally and energetically. Of course, she has a limit in terms of actual physical things and taking care of her and not dumping on her and all of that is a separate discussion. But this is a conversation about feeling held by the great mother. So I lie on the earth. I hug a tree.

When I am feeling depleted and I need mothering, I put myself to bed, toddler early. I I get in bed with a novel. I get in the tub with Epsom salts. There are so many ways that we can feed ourselves and remother ourselves so that we are not passing along the wounded feminine over and over and over again in every relationship we have, including our relationship with money. So this conversation is not something we tie a bow on.

Right? There’s not a clear three step framework to healing your mother wound as it relates to money. But my intention is to open up a thought process, to open up a line of questioning and inquiry, and for you to begin to notice where your relationship with the feminine shows up in your relationship with plenty with enough as it relates to money and also as it relates to anything else. This can show up in your dating life. This can show up in your friendship life.

This can show up in terms of opportunities and jobs. So anywhere where you’re feeling lack and scarcity, that is your relationship with feminine flow. And when we repair our relationship with the feminine, when we go back and repair the mother wound, we open up to true infinite resources, and we open up to true plenty. So that’s the payoff of doing this work. And, again, if you wanna dive more deeply into how your unconscious patterns are showing up with your money, and this applies at any income level, I know people who are 8 figure earners who struggle in these areas, and I know people who are barely getting by who also struggle.

So this applies to you across the board no matter how much you make and how much you have. You can go to katenorthrup.com/field, and that recalibration field guide is going to help you to diagnose where your hidden money ecosystem is at, what money leaks are operating in your life and how to plug them up, and also which stage of the wealth stewardship pyramid you’re at right now and where to go next. It’s an incredibly helpful resource. It’s completely free, and you can get it over at katenorthrup.com/field. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next time for the next episode in the Inheritance series so we can continue to make the unconscious conscious.

See you next time. Thank you for listening to this episode in the Inheritance series. This is a four part series. And if you want to access all parts of the series, you can go to katenorthrup.com/inheritance. So katenorthrup.com/inheritance.

It will walk you through all four parts so you can make sure that you don’t miss any of them. That link is also in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.