You know what’s the highlight of my month? Moving money into my high-yield savings account. I’m not even joking. It’s my absolute favorite thing.
I’m a little obsessed with budgeting. I like to tally up the numbers on my budget all month, seeing if I can win the game by spending less than allotted in a category without depriving myself. Most people, I assume, love the beginning of the month when they have everything left to spend. But the beginning of the month stresses me out; I prefer the end of the month, when all expenses are in, and I get to see what’s left over.
I know that this is an unusual approach to personal finances—a high level of scrutiny, attempting to spend as little as possible, refusing to automate anything and insisting on doing every transaction manually. But given my personal history with finances, and the fear and frustration I’ve experienced around money, this high-control approach is what feels safest for me.
This is a perfect example of anxious attachment in relationship to money.
I recently read the excellent book, The Financial Feminist by Tori Dunlap, where she challenges readers to examine the emotional dynamics of their relationship with money. She asks readers to write about their earliest memory of money (this is quite similar to how therapists begin to diagnose attachment issues, by the way). My earliest memory of money—besides the birthday cards from grandparents weighted down with quarters, one for each year I was turning—is from somewhere around 3rd grade.
There was a Wal-Mart located only a few blocks from my house, and my brother and I used to walk over just to stand in the toy aisle and look at toys. One day, on one of these Wal-Mart trips, I saw a pair of kids’ walkie-talkies for sale. They were probably around $25, which was a massive price tag for an 8-year-old in the 90s who only received a small allowance twice a month. But I wanted them. I really, really wanted them.
I asked my parents if I could get the walkie-talkies; they said I was welcome to spend my allowance on whatever I wanted. So I saved up. I wasn’t a big spender even in those days, and it probably didn’t take longer than a month to save up the $25. But a month can feel like an eternity when you’re young—especially when I was daydreaming every day about all the games I’d play and all the fun I’d have once I finally owned those walkie-talkies. At last, the day came. My younger brother accompanied me to Wal-Mart with a jar stuffed with quarters and $1 bills. We raced to the toy aisle, seized the walkie-talkies, and then raced back to the checkout. I remember the cashier’s exasperation as he counted out $25 in mostly quarters, but I was too proud of myself to care.
My brother and I brought the walkie-talkies home. We ripped them out of the package, installed batteries, and played with them for a few hours. But then my brother lost interest, and went off to play with the neighbor kids. And there isn’t much you can do with walkie-talkies by yourself. By the end of the day, the magic had worn off my extravagant purchase. In my dissatisfaction, I realized I would have been much happier if I’d still had the $25 in my piggy bank. It wasn’t that I wished I could have spent the money on something else; it was that I wished I hadn’t spent the money at all.
And so my relationship with money began. To this day, I function financially rather like a dragon: I like to lay on my hoard of treasure, counting it, sifting it through my claws, guarding it…but ideally, never doing anything with it. Like a dragon napping on a pile of gold, I check my bank balances more often than is necessary, just to soothe myself with the numbers. I never have enough money to feel totally secure; I always feel like I need just a little bit more to feel truly safe. Spending money is still hard for me. Given a choice between a material possession or an expensive experience, and just keeping the money in my bank account, I would almost always rather save the money—just to be able to look at it, to know it’s there in case I need it.
As you can probably guess, I’ve experienced some scarcity and uncertainty with finances in my life, and it has left me hypersensitive to the fear of not being able to meet my needs. And uncertainty is the heart of anxious attachment.
Since I began my personal finance journey, I have begun to notice the incredible impact that money has on mental health.
Money problems are some of the most stressful issues we face in life. Shame over how we handle money, or how much money we have or don’t have, can be deeply disruptive. Experiences of financial scarcity or financial abuse can leave us with complex trauma. Money is a big deal. But as an attachment-based therapist, what intrigues me the most is how closely our relationship with money resembles an attachment relationship, just like the relationships we have with caregivers or romantic partners.
The essence of attachment is the dance of our dual needs for Safe Haven (comfort and nurture) and Secure Base (autonomy and exploration). How safely we can express these needs, how much we trust that they will be met, and how freely we are able to meet these same needs in our relationship partners (friends, lovers, children, etc.) determines the level of security in our attachment relationships. Painful relational experiences, or attachment injuries, incline us toward self-protective behaviors that, while keeping us safe, also harm our relationships and deprive us of giving and receiving mature love. Our attachment styles with money develop in much the same way as our attachment styles with humans: they are created by a combination of personal experience and modeling, or how we see the adults around us acting toward money.
Avoidant attachment occurs when a child’s emotional needs—particularly the need for Safe Haven—are chronically disregarded or unmet. An avoidant child learns that comfort and safety will not be there if he needs it, so he’s better off just not asking for it in the first place. I have no needs. Emotions don’t matter. I’m fine. Avoidant attachment with money can be characterized by similar thoughts: It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. I’ll just spend the money. I’ll never be able to retire anyway, so I might as well enjoy myself now. Avoidant attachment with money can lead us into lack of planning, debt, and denial of our long-term needs—not because we are lazy or careless, but because we’re trying to numb our feelings of powerlessness and deprivation.
Anxious attachment occurs when a child’s emotional needs are met inconsistently—sometimes a parent comforts her when she cries, but sometimes that same parent just yells at her or ignores her. This leads to anxiety, hypersensitivity to rejection, and unconscious strategies designed to get or keep an attachment figure’s attention, such as people-pleasing or overachieving. Anxious attachment with money can look like fearfulness about whether you’ll have enough or not, self-deprivation through saving every penny or over-working to earn as much as you can, and being controlling or hypervigilant about money. The thinking behind this goes something like, If I can just do it perfectly, I’ll have everything I need; if I can control my money, I’ll never have to experience pain again.
Avoidantly attached people think very little about emotional connection with others, to shield themselves from the pain of feeling disconnected; anxiously attached people think about emotional connection literally all the time, to try to prevent the pain of feeling disconnected. People who are avoidantly attached with money may act as though money doesn’t matter or that “money just grows on trees,” to numb the unbearable pain of never feeling that they can meet their financial needs. On the other hand, people who are anxiously attached with money can seem absolutely fixated on money and controlling money, to ward off the unbearable pain of not having their financial needs met. Both of these strategies are ways of managing scarcity.
Secure attachment, on the other hand, is an essential trust that our needs will be met, because for the most part, they always have been.
Securely attached children don’t have their emotional needs met perfectly, but—and this is crucial—they have their needs met just enough to develop basic trust in both others’ responsiveness and in their own self-efficacy. A secure attachment with money does not require wealth; it just requires trust and self-efficacy. Having a secure relationship with money means trusting that you can manage your money, that there will be enough if something happens, that you can enjoy today and plan for tomorrow at the same time. Secure attachment with money develops in children whose caregivers have protected them from adult concerns about scarcity, and who have modeled not only good financial habits but also a sense of trust, self-control, and grace for mistakes.
In moving human attachment relationships toward greater security, the goal is to find healthy ways to express when we have attachment needs, to self-regulate when our attachment figure is unable to immediately or perfectly meet our needs, and to be able to engage in repair when we fail to meet one another’s attachment needs. By braiding these three skills together—communication, self-regulation, and rupture-and-repair—we heal our attachment wounds and shift our relationships onto a steady foundation that supports wellness, fulfillment, and ongoing growth.
So what does it look like to move our attachment relationships with money toward greater security?
If you didn’t have caregivers who taught you that you are capable of managing money, or who modeled a secure relationship with money, then this will be hard work. But just like healing from any other childhood wound, it is absolutely possible. It’s also a normal task of adulthood, something to be proud of yourself for finally tackling, rather than something to be ashamed that you have to do in the first place.
If you want money to stop harming your mental health, or if you’re ready to start healing your relationship with money, here are a few suggestions:
Write down your earliest or most formative money memories, and see if you can identify what type of attachment relationship you have with money, and what experiences created it.
Start reading personal finance books. This will do three things: 1.) It will provide you with knowledge and skills, so you will no longer have the excuse of saying, “But I don’t know where to start!” 2.) It will increase your sense of self-efficacy around money. And 3.) It will help you identify your unhelpful money beliefs.
A few suggestions are, I Will Teach You to Be Rich (Sethi), The Psychology of Money (Housel), and The Financial Feminist (Dunlap).
(I started with Dave Ramsey, but even though he has some good advice, I don’t recommend him—for many reasons, but primarily because he uses shame-based tactics and seems willfully ignorant of the impact of systemic oppression on people’s finances.)
Open a High-Yield savings account and build an emergency fund of three months of living expenses. This is more doable than you think, and is absolutely essential to financial health. If your first thought is, “I can’t save! I don’t make enough money!” please remember, this is Toxic Capitalism speaking, trying to scare you into subservience to his system. If you let him be the boss, he will enslave you to scarcity, powerlessness, and debt for the rest of your life.
If you tend toward over-spending, create a budget that will help you prioritize saving and long-term planning. If you tend toward self-deprivation, create a budget that will hold you accountable to using money to enjoy life now, rather than living in fear of the future. Figure out how to balance the needs of “today” and “tomorrow,” and how to neglect neither enjoyment nor stability.
If you have trauma around money, consider seeking therapy. I guarantee you, it’s impacting way more areas of your life than just how you manage or don’t manage your money.
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