Kate Northrup: Emotional blockage blocks our power. Your emotions are not a problem. Your emotions are information. Welcome to the Inheritance series. This is a four part series that’s inspired by a new book that I’m working on that’ll be out in 2027.

And part one of the book is about our inheritance, but not in the way you think. It is the inheritance that is our relationship with money that lives in our nervous system, in our psyche, and in our deeply ingrained patterns, some of which began before we were even conceived. And so this series is an invitation to look more deeply than you’ve ever looked before at what’s running underneath your relationship with numbers, deep below the spreadsheets, deep below the math, deep below the income statements, and really ask, what am I bringing to the table that I consciously signed up for? And what did I inherit that I can use? And what did I inherit that I can transform?

Episode one is about the father wound and money. Episode two is about the mother wound and money. Episode three is about money and your emotions. And episode four is all about you creating what your ancestors never had the chance to have and how they can have it through you. So check out the series, enjoy, and welcome to Plenty.

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 Plenty. Today, we are talking about money and emotions, your feelings and the figures. It’s a big topic, and it’s something that people don’t usually talk about because we have an erroneous idea in our culture that logic should be the only element at the table when we’re talking about money. People always say, it’s just business. You know, take your feelings out of your decisions.

Take your emotions out of your decisions. But what I know from having worked with over 20,000 students around their aliveness and around their resources, both time and money, is that emotional blockage blocks our power. And when we’re not feeling our feelings, it can lead to financial avoidance, overspending, under earning, over giving, or doing none of those things, but still feeling some level of scarcity. Still feeling on some level that it’s not enough no matter how much more you’ve earned year after year. If you’ve been a listener of Plenty for a while, you may have heard me tell the story, which I’ll abbreviate now, and that is that in winter twenty twenty one, my family and I moved to Miami.

We thought it was a temporary move for a couple of months. We ended up staying four and a half years because the universe always has a better plan for us. And what do they say? Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans, but something about when you say you have a plan and God laughs. Anyway, that’s not the quote, but I think I think you know what I’m talking about.

So there we were. Mike was really, really sick for the second time. He was barely functional. Certainly wasn’t participating in the business at that time. Was was participating a little bit in parenting, and I was hitting a wall.

The bill had come due on the way I had been pushing through all of the obstacles in my life by simply being more capable and simply being stronger and, in many cases, doing more. And with these layers of added stress, increased expenses, a partner who was sick, being thousands and thousands of miles from my support network and home, and then everything that was going on with the pandemic and with my family publicly, it was a lot. And I could feel every time I felt the stress of all the things that were happening in my life, I could feel this pressure build. And the way that I had always released or relieved or diffused the pressure was through being the good girl, being the responsible one, being the capable one, being a good earner, and getting things done and being busy. And I had my blood work come back, and my doctor said, your brakes are broken and so is the gas.

If you keep living this way, you are going to get sick. And this is at a time when we had a 2.5 year old and a five year old, and I didn’t have the option of getting sick because Mike was already sick. So my kids couldn’t have two sick parents. And if I hadn’t been threatened with you’re going to get sick and not be able to take care of your children and no one else will be able to too, I don’t think I would have broken the pattern. But what ended up happening is I did this experiment helped guided by my therapist for ninety days to make a menu of items that I could choose to do instead of doing the thing I had always done, which was launch a new campaign, offer a cross sell, over deliver on a program.

Basically, anytime I would feel that pressure and stress, I would go do more usually in my business and usually in order to earn more because I was feeding this kind of endless cycle of instead of feeling and just sitting with what is, I’m going to go do something that is societally validated and celebrated, which is make more money. And all signs pointed to that was a good idea. We had just overnight doubled our living expenses. Mike had very bizarre health challenges going on that required all these alternative therapies. And, oh, and now we were paying for two private schools for the first time.

So there were very real new expenses, but the survival part of me was telling a story that there was an emergency. And what actually needed to come to the surface was the true story. So my therapist and I came out with this ninety day experiment, and I had this small menu of items I could do. One was call a friend to cry. Another was to watch daytime television.

Another was to take a walk by the bay and ask the bay what it wanted to tell me. Another one was to lie on the floor, and another one was to scream into a pillow in the closet. Now several of these items, like calling a friend and crying and screaming into a pillow in the closet, were emotional release tools. Because what was actually true is that the pressure and the stress rising in my body was not a sign that I needed to go do revenue generating activities. Actually, it was energy asking to be moved.

Our emotions, our feelings are simply energy in our body that needs to be moved, and Einstein said energy can never be created nor destroyed. So when we have energy in our bodies, we will often turn it into productivity. But what actually needed to happen in my life and may need to happen in your life is that energy needs to be turned into and transformed into life force. Right? Any emotion stuck in our bodies is aliveness that we are not able to feel.

Now what does this have to do with your money? You may be asking. Our money and our relationship with our money because know that my work is not just about the nuts and bolts of money. If you wanted that, you would probably be listening to a different podcast. Though we do get into those things in my programs, and they are very practical.

People save a bunch of money. People make a bunch more money. People invest and get incredible returns on their money. However, it’s all within the context of understanding the greater relationship with money, which is actually an emotional and spiritual relationship. So everything that happens with our money is created from our behavior for the most part.

Now, obviously, it’s also within the context of systemic forces that are beyond our control. But in terms of the things that are within our control, what happens with our money is based on our choices and our behavior. Now I used to make the mistake and think that our behavior was caused by our emotions, which were caused by our thoughts and beliefs. Okay? So I used to think, oh, I feel a certain way because I’m thinking a certain way.

And I wanna be clear, this is a bit of a two way street, so it’s not black and white. But what I learned from doctor Anita Phillips in her incredible book, The Garden Within, is the following. She says, emotions are not the result of our thinking. Emotions begin in the body, not the mind. So it reframed the money logic that I always had had, which was, oh, my mindset about money is creating my emotions.

Actually, what’s true is our nervous system is responding to every stimulus around us and within us, and our nervous system is mitigating the sensations in our body, including our emotions. Our emotions live in the body and the brain, not just the brain. If you watched Inside Out. So there’s a two part, you know, pick Pixar movies, Inside Out one, Inside Out two. And in Inside Out two, unfortunately, it’s an adorable movie, but it paints the picture that our emotions live exclusively in our brain.

It doesn’t bring in the body. I wanted to go write a letter to the creators of that movie and say, you got this wrong. You’ve left out a huge piece because if our emotions were only in our mind, then we would be able to change the sensations in our body only with our mind, but it doesn’t work that way. Have you ever told yourself to calm down when you’re in a panic just with your mind? Oh, calm down.

Does that work? No. It does not. Because your body, the animal of your body, is experiencing a flood of chemical reactions and molecular reactions and physiological interactions that cannot just be logically and intellectually thought through and changed. It doesn’t work that way.

Those sensations, that energy wants to move. It needs to be metabolized. So what I need you to understand or what I’d like you to understand first is that our emotions are mitigated by our nervous system. Our nervous system rules the unconscious, and from our emotions, our mind then comes on board and starts to make sense of the physiological sensations. So a physiological sensation gets labeled as a specific emotion like anger or sadness or anxiety or whatever it may be.

But those emotions live in the body as well as in the brain, and then we begin to think thoughts about them. I’m sure you have said before or have heard someone say before, my body knew before my mind did. We’ve actually I don’t do this research, but people, researchers, have done the research. And what’s wild is that our heart rate will go up, and our respiration will go up like a millisecond before a loud bang. Right?

So if there’s a loud stimulus, we will have a physiological response to it that very slightly predates the stimulus itself. Our body knows before our mind does, which is so wild, and I’ll put the citation for that in the show notes if you want it. Now it’s also important to know that we live in a culture that, in general, enforces emotional suppression. And I got the chance to see Gabor Mate live in Miami, and he is the author of a variety of books, but his most recent one is called the myth of normal. And he talked about in his practice being able to track three particular indications that someone would become ill.

So when he had all these patients, he was able to pattern recognize and see three indications that over time someone was going to become sick, and here they were. Number one was selflessness and self sacrifice. Number two was not expressing healthy anger. Not expressing healthy anger. And then number three, overcontrolling their own behavior to meet social roles.

So there are several cited data points about that From King’s College Hospital, they did a study linking anger suppression to cancerous breast lumps, and the Journal of Psychosomatic Research on anger suppression and, oh, showed a link to prostate cancer. And the Lancet Oncology report also had a whole study on unprocessed grief, and there are books, hundreds of books written about this pattern. So suppressed emotion, when we don’t feel an emotion, it’s not neutral. There is a very real cost, and the very real cost is that it gets locked into our wiring and gets locked into our nervous system, and we get stuck in dysregulated states. So money avoidance is actually a really common either money avoidance or any sort of dysregulation that impacts our relationship with money.

So I would just say disordered money behavior, which is not necessarily correlated with earnings. I wanna be super clear. I have worked with many wealthy people who have disordered financial behavior, and that is due to an unhealthy relationship with money. And when we have an unhealthy relationship with money, in many ways, we have an unhealthy relationship with power. And one of our powers is our emotional landscape.

Yet we were raised in a culture that told us that it’s illogical to feel your feelings, or they’re dangerous, or they’re crazy, or they’re not to be trusted. And, yes, while we don’t want to lead our entire lives with every emotional whim that comes through our bodies, there is a wisdom in listening to and allowing the emotional energy to move so that it can stop keeping us stuck where we are. Now the next thing that will happen is for many people when we haven’t been taught to healthfully express our emotions, and so instead we are repressing them, which is when you aren’t even aware that you’re having them, or when you’re suppressing them, which is, okay. I’m aware I’m having an emotion, and now I’m gonna suppress it. And one of the most common ways that we suppress emotions is through numbing behaviors.

And numbing behaviors often have a very direct impact on our money. So numbing behaviors are when you start to feel something, and then habitually, you push it down by doing a variety of things. One of them could be online shopping. Another one could be going to Target and filling your cart with way more than you walked in there for and suddenly having a bill for $400 as you walk out the door and all this extra stuff that you didn’t need in the first place. Another one is gaming can be a numbing behavior, binge watching television, scrolling on your phone incessantly.

Obviously, alcohol, drugs, sugar, sex can be a numb numbing behavior. There’s, you know, there’s a whole slew of them. And by the way, not all of these behaviors are bad. It has to do with the amount and the timing and whether we’re using it for pleasure or whether we are using it for numbing and whether we’re turning to it because we don’t wanna feel or we’re turning to it to feel. So a lot of this is contextual, and I’m not here to tell you what to do with your life.

But in my own life, what I have found is the more I can sit with an emotion that I’ve been avoiding, the more quickly it turns into something new. I wanna say a word, though, on titration. For many people, it was not safe to feel a feeling in your household. Right? There may be past histories of physical abuse or certainly emotional abuse or simply being yelled at or being shunned if you were having a full emotion.

And I know listen. I have small children. It takes a lot for me to be with them as they’re having their full emotional expression. But just this weekend, one of my daughters was having a very big meltdown, and I was able to sit with her and not need to fix it and not need to make her wrong. I just sat with her as she wailed in bed, and I said, yeah.

You’re having a lot of big feelings right now. And that was it. I didn’t need to do anything else, but it’s taken practice. And so I have a lot of compassion for parents who can’t get there, for our parents, you know, from generations before who really genuinely didn’t have time for, didn’t have the resources for, didn’t have the education around what emotions actually are and were, and so a lot of compassion for the whole thing. But know that if suppressing emotions or repressing emotions was a strategy for your survival in childhood, it may take a little more practice and doing some reps to thaw out the frozen parts.

And so you can do small bite sized pieces by allowing yourself to feel just a little bit and then reregulating using one of your favorite nervous system healing tools to signal to your body that you are safe. And then you can just do small bits more every time. Not everybody has the nervous system capacity to go all the way into a huge anger expression on your first day out or to go into a full wailing grief expression on your first day out. So know that titration is there to do small doable bits over time, and you can use your nervous system tools to help you to reregulate when you’re up against your edge. And this is the very same thing as getting stronger glutes or stronger quads or stronger biceps.

You just do a little bit more each time as you get stronger, as you grow your capacity. So inside Relax Money and some of our other programs, we teach specific nervous system healing tools, and we teach you how to assess which ones work best for your nervous system so that you can build your own nervous system healing toolkit, and you can feel your feelings and then titrate over time to a more full emotional expression. I myself have had a lot of practice doing healthy emotional expression in a safe container. And so if I’m feeling something, I feel pretty great about going all the way into it and letting myself feel the whole feeling, whether it is anger, whether it’s grief, whether it’s fear, whether it’s something else. And usually, if I fully give myself over to that feeling for about ninety seconds without trying to tell a story about it, without asking why, without trying to suppress it or numb it or make it wrong or judge it, just actually being present with the sensation in my body, usually after about ninety seconds, the feeling shifts.

So the energy turns into something else. And often, there was actually some life force energy, some aliveness stuck in there, whether it’s erotic energy or enthusiasm or joy. So I definitely recommend working over time to increase your capacity to feel emotions. One of the things that we do inside Relaxed Money is the emotional metabolism practice. So there’s a specific sequencing that you can walk yourself through to begin to increase your capacity to feel emotions in a healthy, safe way so that they don’t get stuck.

Because this isn’t about swimming in your emotions all day long and getting lost in your emotional landscape and just being in the waters of, you know, free floating emotion all the time. It’s actually about knowing when, where, and how much you can feel at any given time and how much is appropriate. Right? Because too much emotional liquidity can actually repel opportunities and people and money, but not enough emotional liquidity can do the same thing. And this is one of the things I’m working on writing about in my new book that I’m working on that will be out in 2027.

So you can keep an eye on that. In fact, this series, the one I’m this is episode three in the Inheritance series, and episode one was on the father wound. Episode two was on the mother wound, and this is episode three, money and emotions. And this is all about what we inherited that we came into this world with regarding our money, not necessarily in terms of what have we inherited financially, but what are how are we patterned from our lineage in terms of our relationship with money and power and life itself and the divine? And then how can we use that inheritance to make new choices to either use it and make the most of it or to transform it.

As I said, we have the emotional metabolism practice in Relaxed Money, and that is something you can get access to anytime on demand. If you’re interested in that, you can go ahead and send me a DM or email our team info@KateNorthrup.com. You do not have to wait until we have a live cohort of Relaxed Money going on. You can join that signature program anytime in an on demand capacity. Let’s bring it home.

Your emotions are not a problem. Your emotions are information. Your emotions are energy in your body. And when you know how to listen to them, you know how to work with them, you know how to feel them and move them in a nervous system healthy way, you actually can free up so much expression that is going to help you to navigate your financial life so that you’re making smarter choices, so that you are investing more clearly so that you are a magnet to more opportunities for earning and compounding that money, and so that what you have actually begins to feel like enough. When we’re emotionally suppressing and emotionally repressing, we are across the board numbing our experience of life.

Brene Brown says you cannot selectively numb. Anytime you are numbing the negative emotions, you’re automatically numbing the positive ones. And so when it comes to living a life of abundance, one of the things we really wanna work towards and open up is being able to enjoy what we already have. You’ve heard it a million times. Happiness is wanting what you have, not having what you want.

And while I absolutely believe in desires and going after what you want, there’s so much available to us right now, right in front of us. But when we are suppressing our emotions, we keep ourselves stuck in nervous system dysregulation so that we actually can’t we’re not only not feeling the negative things, we’re also not feeling the positive things, and then that keeps us in a loop of scarcity, thinking that there’s never enough money. There’s never enough achievement. There’s never enough visibility. And somehow at some other future threshold or future goal marker, we’re gonna finally feel the aliveness that we’ve been craving this whole time.

And I am here to tell you, if you can’t feel that aliveness now because you’re not feeling any of your feelings, you will never be able to feel the kind of abundance and prosperity that you’re hoping is going to arrive for you at the next milestone. It never will. So practice now. Practice now. Use what you’ve learned today in this episode to really trace back what is my emotional inheritance from my lineage.

What did I learn about emotions from my caregivers, from my parents? What have I learned in culture, and how is that keeping me stuck, if at all? And how could I use what I’ve learned today to liberate the energy in my body and in my life and in my finances to move and multiply. To move and multiply towards more aliveness, more prosperity, more personal power. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Plenty.

If you enjoyed it, pass it along to a friend, and make sure that you follow or subscribe. Again, this episode is part three of the Inheritance series. We started with the father wound episode. We followed it up with the mother wound episode, and now we’re on money and your emotions. And the next Inheritance series episode, episode four in this series, is coming up.

So make sure you’re subscribed to Plenty so you don’t miss it. And I will see you next time. If you’re the capable one, the responsible one, the one that everyone else depends on, and yet you don’t feel held when it comes to your finances, imagine this. Ninety days from now, your money could be a place that you thrive from instead of a place that drains you. Answer a few simple questions, and you will receive a fully customized one of one ninety day relaxed money road map based on your numbers, your emotions, your story, your goals, and the way you actually do money.

Not the version you show the world, the real picture. And from there, you will have a plan to upgrade your financial life in just one season. Go to katenorthrup.com/roadmappod to run your road map right now. 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.