Unpacking Money Trauma with Shannah Game

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (0:00)
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You may hear details in this episode that remind you it's from another time, but I guarantee that the advice you get will be as crisp and meaningful and the stories as resonant as before. If you have a favorite episode of the show, let me know. I'd love to air it again or even re-record it for you fresh. Enjoy this classic Anxious Achiever episode.
Today's guest says that our relationship with money is often fully formed at a young age before we can even be conscious of it.
But our relationship with and our hangups around money can have negative impacts on our work, our families, our self-concept and more as we grow into adulthood. We've talked on the show before about how money is often more about emotions than it is about dollar and cents.
Shannah Game is a personal finance expert and she specializes in thinking about money trauma. She looks at the irrational fears that surround the way we all interact with money and what we can do about them. And she helps us figure out how to play detective around the things that trigger us about money. It's a super helpful and I think really realistic approach that I just love. She's also a podcast host and author of the book, Unraveling Your Relationship with Money. Here's our conversation.
The first part of your book is called Why is Your Relationship with Money So Messed Up? Which is a rhetorical question, I assume, but I'm gonna ask it to you like it's a real question. Why is our relationship with money usually so messed up?

**Shannah Game** (4:43)
There is so much that goes into how we interact with money that we're just not thinking about, right? I talk about in the book that by age seven, our money personality, our money habits, our money beliefs are pretty much set in stone, right? It's what we learned or didn't learn as kids around money. And so that just kind of operates on this unconscious basis. So every time we spend money or we interact with money, that story is playing out, right, whether we're conscious of it or not. For example, I was just working with a client and he was like, you know, I like, I can't figure out how to make the numbers work. And I really want to hit the school.