How Healing From Childhood Sexual Abuse Is Part of a Good Financial Life

*Trigger Warning* This blog post talks about sexual abuse and its impact on my life and those of the clients I have worked with. No identifying client information will be shared and important details about my experiences have been modified to protect my family.

It’s not easy to talk about sexual abuse — especially as a male survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I had no idea this was going to be part of my journey to building wealth for my family. As a young man, I knew I didn’t want to feel the financial stresses I saw in my family. I wanted to have more money than what my family had. 

Now at 42, I have a much wider view of what it means to build wealth and what it takes to accomplish that. My own journey has included many twists and turns and some very painful discoveries including the reality that I was sexually abused as a young boy by a family member. 

It has taken me many years of therapy and multiple graduate degrees to feel like I can see things more clearly now. I continue to find greater depths of healing and well-being. Life is far from perfect, but it is also far richer and more dynamic now. 

I share this blog post to provide encouragement and hope on your journey through life, healing and building financial security and wealth. 

Our trauma histories do not define us, although it often feels that way. Our trauma histories are comprised of experiences that our minds, brains, and bodies have internalized and remembered. Our complex and dynamic minds, brains, and bodies try to use these experiences to keep us safe in the future. Yet it is this very function that often restricts our ability to learn, heal, and grow into flourishing human beings. 

Now I See How Sexual Abuse Has Impacted Me

A large part of my healing journey includes listening to books and podcasts about healing. It is through listening to different voices about mental health, relationships, and trauma that I can experience a wider and deeper perspective on my own experiences of healing. It also helps me know that I am not alone in this journey of discovery and reclamation. 

Recently, I have been listening to a newly launched podcast called Now I See: Eye-Opening Stories From The Formerly Faithful. Listening to this podcast brings me deeper into the impact that religions have on our families and the way they see themselves and their roles in family life. 

The intersection of religion and sexual abuse is complex and vast — well beyond the scope of this blog post. Yet I know from years of study and work with many clients that there are many links between the teachings of religion and sexual abuse. 

One way I see this link is through the lens of dissociation and disconnection. There are many ways in which religion teaches that our bodies and sexuality are bad, sinful, and abhorrent. These teachings lead humans to dissociate from their sexuality, but it does not remove the fundamental sexuality of being an animal. 

Sexual needs then come out in manipulative and destructive ways, perpetuating profound pain on others, including children. This has happened to me. It has happened to my clients. It may have happened to you. 

Now, I see that teaching people that their sexuality is dangerous, sinful, and unwanted leads to devastating outcomes for both victims and perpetrators. The victims live with the pain of having their sovereignty and personal dignity taken from them. Perpetrators either spiral into shame and disbelief around what they have done, continue to do but struggle to find a way to come clean about it, or are so dissociated from reality that they can not see that what they are doing is abusive and violating. 

When Striving For Success Collapses 

I did not figure this out on my own. I have been figuring this out for years. Honestly, I am surprised by what I just wrote. It feels so true, and I am surprised it is me who can write the aforementioned words and thoughts. This is part of my reclamation in speaking to the powerful authority figures and structures that have devastated so many lives with their “godly intentions”. 

I have been striving for a long time to feel a sense of validity that no amount of success could provide me, at least not without a healthy sense of self beneath the success. 

As I earned more education in graduate degrees and advanced professional certifications, my insecurities crippled me. I had to show up, share my ideas, lead people, trust myself, and navigate disappointment — none of which I could do without the fear of rejection or being hurt. 

For so many of us, success has two parts that are deeply intertwined like a braided rope: social status and money. With both of those come power and influence over what happens in our world and lives — the very things we had taken from us in our experiences of childhood sexual abuse. 

This is a recipe for disaster.

When we become successful without addressing our trauma, we enact the drama triangle of either being a victim, perpetrator, or rescuer. Each of these positions has its flaws. We must find our way to authenticity and a healthy sense of self. 

As humans, we all have the ability to play and be in the roles of victim, perpetrator, and rescuer. Part of our healing and maturity is recognizing that we can and do take all three of those roles. They are not who we are at our core; they are roles we have learned to play or chosen to take on. There is a different set of roles we can take on that are empowering: creator, challenger, and coach. 

Questioning What Is a Good Financial Life

What is a good financial life? I hope we all ask this question of ourselves many times over the course of our lives and continue to refine our answers as we mature. We go through developmental steps as we sort out the meaning and role of money in our lives. I have identified and written about the five stages of money maturity in my book The Healthy Love and Money Way. 

5 Stages of Money Maturity

1. Family Understanding
2. Local Community Understanding
3. Bigger Social Reality
4. Crisis
5. Reconciliation and Integration

It is at the point of crisis that we come into contact with the conflicting messages we have heard about money and that our own initiative and understanding of applying the first three stages of financial development fails us. 

We must be willing to move beyond the compartmentalization of financial life as standing alone from the rest of life. We recognize the entirety of our lived experience shapes our relationship with money. By taking another step back, we recognize that our lives are influenced and impacted by the unfolding of history and relationships that preceded us. 

This is where we recognize the reality that our abusers are people who have been profoundly shaped by their own experiences that preceded us and the events of abuse. While profoundly painful things happened to us, we can see that it was not about us. 

Our innocence and childhood psychological makeup often lead us to personalize our abuse. Part of healing is declaring our sovereignty, reclaiming our physical bodies as the homes of our minds and sense of self. 

Sexual abuse is an act against all the major and minor features and functions of being human. It is in learning and reclaiming all of these functions that we heal. 

We need the fullness of our humanness to live a good financial life. 

Making Peace With the Financial Journey

Stage five of financial maturity is reconciliation and integration. It is a process and series of many experiences that create opportunities for our minds, brains, and bodies to heal. 

Making peace with money is an ongoing process, one that deepens into wisdom over time. We come to enjoy our own and others' journeys through life and with money. 

We know in our heart of hearts that we are worthy humans independent of how much money or income we have. We recognize that social values and needs place expectations and demands on our financial participation in society. We balance what we can control or influence and allow space for that which we cannot. 

We are no longer obsessed with money and status, but we can embrace it if that is our path. 

Our traumatic histories are just that — histories. We recognize and tend to their living legacies as we need to, but our life is no longer defined by what has happened to us; rather, our life is defined by us. 

I welcome you and join you on your journey of healing and defining for yourself what a good financial life means to you. You are the author of your life. 

Therapy-Informed Financial Planning™ helps clients just like you to answer for yourself what a good financial life looks like. Schedule a free 30-minute consultation today to learn more. 

Wishing You Healthy Love and Money,

Ed Coambs

MBA, MA, MS, CFP®, CFT-I™, LMFT