Financial trauma:
Real stories
Single Incident
Closing your
business
Bankruptcy
Ongoing
Poverty
Inability to retire
Chronic illness
Burnout
Capitalism/ neoliberalism
Societal culture
Financial abuse
inherited/ nature
From our time in the womb (epigenetic)
Inheritance as control
Immediate family
Siblings
Modelling our parents
Intergenerational
Oppressed ancestry
It shows up in more ways than we name.
Because this conversation is overdue.
As a trauma-informed money coach, and the first certified Trauma of Money practitioner in Southeast Asia, I've spent years watching how financial experiences shape the way people earn, spend, save, avoid, and relate to money.
After a 2-hour interview with The Straits Times for a feature on money trauma, I came away knowing there was more to say than any article could hold. I didn't want people to think money trauma = "bad money things that happen," or "not having enough." Or "I won't have money trauma since I have lots of money."
As featured in The Straits Times, September 2026
It's more varied than that, and also far more common than most people expect.
Sometimes it doesn't look like crisis at all. Sometimes it's a pattern that's run so deep, so long, you've stopped questioning it. This series fully unpacks what else I didn’t get to say in that interview.
Before you browse the episodes below: this isn't a checklist, and it isn't a diagnostic tool. Whether or not you recognise yourself in anything below, what every story here has in common is the internal world, the way a money event shapes how we feel, think, decide, avoid, and relate, sometimes for decades after the event itself is over.
When financial trauma hits, the nervous system responds the way it responds to any threat. You might recognise yourself in one or more of the 5Fs:
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FIGHT — anger, defensiveness, the need to control
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FLIGHT — avoidance, busyness, escape
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FREEZE — paralysis, the inability to act or decide
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FAWN — people-pleasing, self-abandonment to keep the peace
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FLOP — shutdown, dissociation, collapse
Most of us move between them. None of them are character flaws. All of them make complete sense given what happened.
This series is my attempt to name what I've witnessed, so more people can recognise it in their own lives, and know that what they carry has a name, and a path through.