Your Family’s Relationship With Money Affects Your Spending Decisions. How To Transform Your ‘Financial DNA’

The art of sharing these stories fosters our ability to trust strangers and enables human cooperation. Financial realities are created through the power of shared myth, specifically our stories about money. When we look closely, this point becomes much more personal. 

The more powerful the emotional engagement, the higher the release of oxytocin. By understanding the psychological and neurological underpinnings of our money stories, we can recognize the power that they hold over our financial decisions and behaviors.

Unconditional acceptance for our financial DNA

The closer we look at family patterns that don’t go away, the more obvious it becomes that we need to extend the practice of unconditional acceptance to our ancestors. Their stories are our stories. Their narratives shape our identities and guide our actions. It is crucial that we turn to the past. Having said that, I need to make something abundantly clear.

I do not believe we are responsible for our ancestors’ actions. We are not responsible for their unprocessed stories and emotions. But that does not mean they don’t influence how we relate to our wealth today. This work can be a delicate dance. There are a lot of difficult things that exist in our pasts. As challenging as these histories may be, turning away from them won’t help anyone. What happened in our familial past influences how we view and interact with the world, and we must confront it.

The hard truth is that the money traumas experienced by your parents and grandparents can have a direct impact on your beliefs and behaviors. Did someone in your family suffer a substantial financial loss from which they never recovered? Were your ancestors forced from their homeland? Maybe one of your ancestors committed harm against others or themselves, and it feels like this knowledge could overwhelm you with guilt and shame.

Financial DNA is real. If we don’t heal these traumas, they will continue to cycle through future generations of our family. It is far too easy to repeat the patterns of our shared past. If you are committed to the growth and transformation required to embody wealth, you will have to practice unconditional acceptance when it comes to the past. I have worked with clients from generations of material wealth who still experience scarcity due to being taught that wealth is only meant to be earned, not enjoyed.

Facing our financial lineage doesn’t condemn us to relive family wounds. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The sooner we digest and integrate the challenges of our ancestors, the sooner we stop paying for our past. 

The process of trauma healing involves using the embodied approach introduced in The Power of Enough to make unconscious experiences conscious. If we can find the spaciousness to be with the emotions that accompany these stories, we might find new ways to move these experiences through our body. This can open the door to feelings of empathy and unconditional acceptance, even for experiences that seem devastating to acknowledge. The goal is to find a deeper understanding and realize the hidden wealth that is born from this new potential for peace.

Epigenetics involves changes in gene expression that do not alter the DNA sequence itself but can affect how genes are turned on or off. Severe stress can lead to epigenetic modifications in our ancestral biological systems. We may inherit these epigenetic changes, leading to an increased risk of psychological and physiological issues, which can include heightened vulnerability to stress, anxiety, depression, and other health problems that were initially triggered by our parents’ or grandparents’ stress.

This research can be shocking. The suffering of our ancestors, even though it happened long before we were born, can have deleterious effects on our lives. But this knowledge can also empower us. If we are aware of the environment that shaped our ancestors and the impact it might have had on their biological systems, we have the tools to address whatever negative effects may have been passed on.

Healthy relationships can act as a buffer, allowing the children of parents who suffered traumas to mitigate or outright block the passing on of stress from one generation to another. Knowledge is power. Knowing our ancestral past regarding money can help us learn how to react to our environments in new, potentially more helpful ways.

I want you to take some time and write down as many stories related to money in your family as you can. This can be an ongoing project and in the practice below you will learn how to do this. You can start by writing down everything you know, and you can continue this practice by asking other people in your family to share their stories. You can keep an ancestral journal or make a visual collage that represents their journey. Let your imagination go wild.

The second part of the practice walks you through using the embodied approach to extend unconditional acceptance to these stories. As you might have guessed, this is not a do-it-once-and-forget-it kind of exercise. This can be an ongoing practice that you make a regular part of your life. 

Practice: Unconditionally accepting your ancestral money story

Step 1: Find the stories

Take a moment to scan the stories of your lineage. What anecdotes stand out when it comes to your family and money? What stories were passed on? What was left untold?

Choose one story to work with, and take a moment to write out what you remember in your journal. Don’t hold back. Allow yourself the permission not to recall exact details.

Step 2: Start with your heart, feel the emotions

When you are done writing, close the computer or put the pen down. Close your eyes and put both of your hands in the center of your chest, close to your heart. Ask yourself what the main emotions are that you feel after telling your ancestral story. Then take some time and let yourself say out loud, “I feel…” Use this phrase as many times as you need until your heart has been heard, and fulfilled.

Step 3: Listen to your body, feel the energy

With your eyes still closed and your hands on your heart, choose an emotion to work with. Sense the texture of the emotion — its temperature, where it is in your body, and how it feels. See if it has a color and energy associated with it. Allow that energy to expand while using your breath to keep yourself grounded in your body. Let the energy spread and see the emotion for what it is: energy in motion.

Step 4: Turn to your mind, create some space

Now let your awareness travel up to your mind center, noticing the energy that lives between your eyes. Ask your mind center to be present, then use your mind to connect the threads between your own experience with money and the familial landscape in which you were raised. Perhaps you see commonalities that feel new. Maybe you want to deepen your awareness of what has always been there. Let the connections intertwine like silk threads in the tapestry of your life. Allow your personal story and your ancestral story with money to coexist.

Step 5: Offer unconditional acceptance, an embodied approach

Now choose one moment in your money story that stood out when writing. If you skipped that exercise, instead, bring forth a money memory that had an impact on you. Ask yourself what role lineage plays in your money story. Do not edit what you hear. This is the moment you get to be the person in your lineage who offers up unconditional acceptance for what happened. 

Remember, acceptance is different from approval. Acceptance acknowledges things as they are, allowing us to cope and face the reality of the situation without resistance. Listen without resistance. Invite the connections to emerge.

As your mind creates insight, bring your awareness back to your heart. This source of unconditional acceptance can aid in updating the energetic state of our nervous system. Use your hands to put pressure on your heart center repeatedly, as if you were pumping waves of unconditional acceptance throughout your body and all its cells. Breathe in these waves of unconditional acceptance. Unconditional acceptance creates an energetic field in which you can offer your heart, body, and mind the space to accept your lineage without judgment.

This creates a new physical reference for your financial DNA. Be with this movement and the showering of unconditional acceptance for as long as you need.

Step 6: Digest, release, and integrate

Only when you are ready, release the hands on your heart and open your eyes. Take a moment to breathe in the practice. Pay attention to what feels most present. Is there a familial money pattern that needs to be released? Is there an energy of unconditional acceptance that wants to be digested and integrated?

Take time to choose and either digest or release, however that may look for you. Close this practice by feeling the energy of your ancestors behind you. Even if you have never met them, they are there. Feel into the generations of people who carried your genes and DNA. Know that you are a conduit for helping process their pain so that new futures can be written. Extend a moment of gratitude to yourself and your lineage, and take this sensation of unconditional acceptance with you throughout your day. 

If you can turn toward your financial lineage with an open heart and a connection to mind and body, you can turn your family’s old stories into moments of meaning. Unpacking your familial money stories holds important insights to help you find the satisfiers that are appropriate to you and discern which strategies are no longer effective. There are infinite riches to be found on this road to understanding and accepting where you come from.