How do you work with someone who has somatic trauma patterns around money?

When someone comes to me with what they call a “money block” and we start to actually look at it, what we usually find isn’t a belief — it’s a body that goes cold every time a number gets named out loud. You’ve done the work. You’ve read the books. You’ve maybe even rewritten your money story on paper a dozen times. And still, when the invoice goes out, your stomach drops, your shoulders climb toward your ears, and your hand hovers over the send button for longer than you want to admit. That isn’t a character flaw. It’s not you being lazy or under-committed or secretly attached to scarcity. It’s a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do a long time ago, in a much smaller body, with much less power than you have now.

So when I’m asked, on a podcast or in a session, how do you actually work with somatic trauma patterns around money? — the honest answer is: slowly, and from the body up, not the head down. Let me walk you through what that looks like in practice.

First, we stop trying to think our way out of a body problem

The first move is the hardest one to make, because everything in the personal development world has trained us to reach for another mindset reframe. New affirmation. New belief work. New journaling prompt. And the people I sit with have already tried all of it. They could probably teach a class on abundance. They’ve done EFT, NLP, the inner-child meditations, the wealth consciousness courses. And the somatic pattern is still there, untouched, because the somatic pattern was never about a thought.

A trauma pattern around money is usually a survival pattern that got attached to resources at a very young age. Maybe money meant fights. Maybe it meant someone left, or someone drank, or someone got cold and distant. Maybe wanting things was punished. Maybe having things made you a target. The body remembers, and it built a quiet little rule: this is dangerous; stay small here. You can’t argue with that rule. You can only meet it.

So the first thing we do together is take the pressure off thinking. I’ll often say something like: “We’re not going to solve this conversation today. We’re going to feel it.” That alone changes the room.

We find the exact moment the body checks out

The second move is precision. Somatic patterns are not vague — they have very specific triggers. So we trace the actual money moments in someone’s week. Not “money” as a concept. Specific micro-events. Pricing a new offer. Looking at the bank balance on a Sunday night. Reading a client’s reply to a quote. Sending a refund. Receiving a large deposit.

And for each one, we ask: what happens in your body, right here, in the half-second before your mind starts narrating?

Most people are surprised by what they find. It’s not always fear. Sometimes it’s a freeze — a numbness across the chest, a fog in the head. Sometimes it’s a fawn — a sudden urge to apologise, to add a bonus, to soften the number. Sometimes it’s a flicker of rage that gets quickly buried under guilt. Sometimes it’s pure dissociation: the screen goes blurry and they realise they’ve been holding their breath for ninety seconds.

Naming the exact somatic signature matters, because a block in the body needs a different intervention from a block in the mind. If we don’t know which one we’re dealing with, we’ll keep prescribing the wrong medicine.

We rebuild a body that can tolerate having money

Here’s the part most money work skips. The goal isn’t to push through the discomfort. The goal is to slowly, patiently expand what the nervous system can hold without going offline.

I’ll give you a concrete example. A client of mine — I’ll call her Priya — ran a beautiful coaching practice and consistently under-charged. Every time she raised her rates, she’d get a wave of nausea and a few days of insomnia, and within two weeks she’d quietly offer someone a discount to make it go away. On paper, she had every reason to charge more. In her body, charging more felt like a threat to her belonging.

We didn’t start with pricing. We started with much smaller doses of “having.” Holding her phone and looking at her bank balance for sixty seconds without doing anything. Then two minutes. Then receiving a small, planned payment and staying with the sensation in her chest as the notification came through, instead of immediately moving money around or opening another tab. We were teaching her body that resources could land in her field and nothing bad would happen.

Only after several weeks of that did we touch the actual pricing conversation. And by then, her body had a slightly bigger window for it. The number she eventually named — and held — wasn’t pulled from a strategy book. It was the highest number her nervous system could honestly stay present with. That’s a very different kind of pricing decision, and it tends to stick.

We integrate the body work with the business work

The last piece — and this is the one I care about most — is making sure the somatic work doesn’t become its own island. I’ve seen people do years of beautiful nervous system work and still have a stuck business, because the inner work never got connected to the outer structures. The pricing, the offers, the sales conversations, the systems — none of it got upgraded to match the new internal capacity.

This is why we hold the body work, the identity work, and the business mechanics as three pillars that have to move together. A regulated nervous system without a clear offer is still going to struggle. A clear offer delivered by a dysregulated nervous system is going to leak revenue. And a healed money story that never gets tested in a real sales conversation isn’t actually healed — it’s just rehearsed.

So somewhere in the work, we always come back to: what’s the next real money moment in your actual week, and what does your body need from you so that you can show up to it without leaving yourself? That’s the question. That’s most of the practice.

What to remember if this is you

If you recognise yourself in any of this, please hear me say: you are not behind, and you are not broken. A somatic pattern around money is one of the most common legacies of childhood adversity, and the fact that it has resisted every mindset intervention you’ve thrown at it isn’t evidence of failure. It’s evidence that you’ve been trying to solve a body-level problem with mind-level tools, and your body has been patiently waiting for you to come downstairs and meet it where it actually lives.

If you’d like to do this kind of work in a small, trauma-informed community of conscious entrepreneurs who are quietly untangling the same patterns — the body, the business, and the bridge between them — you’re welcome to come and sit with us inside the Miracles For Me community on Skool. There’s no urgency. The work waits for you, and so do we.