For Professionals: Trauma-Informed Love and Money: A New Lens for Professionals Working with Couples and Money

Why Professionals Need a Trauma-Informed Lens

If you’ve ever found yourself in a client meeting thinking, “Why are they reacting so strongly to this?” or “They seem stuck, and I don’t know how to help them move forward,” you’re not alone.

Working with couples around money is never just about numbers, logistics, or financial goals. It’s about nervous systems in relationship, histories of emotional pain, and the deeply personal meanings people assign to money, safety, and self-worth.

At Healthy Love & Money, we call this framework Trauma-Informed Love and Money—a lens that helps professionals understand the adaptive responses their clients bring to emotionally charged financial decisions.

Trauma Isn’t Always Obvious—But It’s Often Present

Trauma is not limited to catastrophic events or clinical diagnoses. As Bessel van der Kolk explains in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma lives in the body and shapes our brain’s ability to regulate, respond, and connect.

Clients who appear controlling, avoidant, rigid, indecisive, or emotionally distant may be showing signs of developmental or relational trauma. These responses are often activated in moments like:

• Merging or separating finances

• Managing wealth differences in second marriages

• Family conflict over estate planning or inheritance

• Career changes, loss, or financial instability

• Decisions around how much is “enough”

Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory helps us understand these behaviors as protective strategies, rooted in the autonomic nervous system’s drive to find safety.

When financial professionals recognize trauma responses as adaptations, not dysfunctions, they are better equipped to hold space for complexity without pathologizing clients—or themselves.

Expanding the Lens: Identity, Culture, and Intergenerational Trauma

Trauma-informed practice also includes acknowledging the cultural and systemic dimensions of financial life.

In Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, Joy DeGruy explores how racialized trauma continues to shape family and economic systems. Thema Bryant’s Homecoming reminds us that healing is spiritual and embodied, especially in communities that have faced historical exclusion or oppression.

Resmaa Menakem’s work on racialized trauma in My Grandmother’s Hands calls for somatic healing across all cultural bodies. When clients are navigating interracial partnerships, immigration stories, or family legacies of scarcity or assimilation, these influences shape how they view money, safety, and partnership.

Professionals who account for identity and culture help clients feel seen in ways that numbers alone never can.

Core Concepts in Trauma-Informed Love and Money

1. Polarization is Protection

Many couples present with opposite financial styles. One wants to spend, the other to save. One dreams big, the other insists on playing it safe. What looks like conflict is often a pair of protective responses, shaped by personal history. One client may be fawning, the other freezing. Both are trying to protect themselves from emotional overwhelm.

2. Differentiation and Co-Regulation

From family systems theory, we draw the idea of differentiation—the ability to stay emotionally connected while holding onto one’s identity. Trauma often reduces this capacity. The path forward for many couples involves building co-regulation—learning to feel safe together again in the presence of financial vulnerability.

3. The Somatic Money Story

Money lives in the body. Clients often feel physical discomfort when facing decisions about debt, wealth, giving, or boundaries. Bari Tessler’s Art of Money and Gayle Colman’s The Body of Money invite us to slow down and notice how our clients’ financial behaviors are somatic expressions of long-held emotional truths.

What This Means for You as a Professional

Whether you’re drafting estate plans, reviewing investment portfolios, managing business cash flow, or mediating between spouses, you’re engaging with a relational and emotional field—not just financial facts.

A trauma-informed approach helps you:

• Stay steady in the presence of client dysregulation

• Invite curiosity instead of blame

• Recognize when emotional content is blocking decision-making

• Build rapport with both partners

• Know when to pause, refer, or reframe the conversation

This lens is not just for therapists. It’s for any professional who holds space for complex, relational decision-making around money.

A Professional Self-Check: Trauma-Informed Practice in Action

Before, during, or after working with a couple, ask yourself:

• ✅ Can I recognize the difference between a trauma response and a values difference?

• ✅ Do I slow down when a partner becomes emotionally overwhelmed?

• ✅ Am I listening to what their behaviors are protecting—not just what they are doing?

• ✅ Have I explored each partner’s money history and identity formation?

• ✅ Do I feel regulated and grounded myself? Am I practicing co-regulation?

You Don’t Have to Be a Therapist to Be Trauma-Informed

Being trauma-informed doesn’t mean diagnosing or diving into clinical treatment. It means becoming fluent in the human experience beneath the financial behavior.

It means creating a safer space where couples can begin to soften their protective patterns, and step into deeper understanding of themselves and each other.