Why Recognizing and Working With Rigidity Matters in Financial Work

Clients rarely come to you with a simple “math” problem. More often, you’re seeing the effects of deeply held beliefs, rules, and emotional histories that shape how they interact with money. For many individuals and couples, rigid rules provide a felt sense of safety: Always save 20%. Never touch principal. Debt is evil. Generosity means never saying no.

These rules can be protective in one stage of life — and constraining in another. Professionals who fail to notice this risk colluding with rigidity or pushing against it without compassion. Both responses miss the deeper opportunity: guiding clients toward greater flexibility and psychological safety with money.

Rigidity Across the Spectrum

We often associate rigidity with conservative financial, religious, or political traditions. But research shows it emerges across all spectrums:

• Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt): Conservatives may absolutize loyalty/authority/purity, while progressives may absolutize fairness/justice/inclusion. Either side can become rigid.

• Ideological Rigidity and Cognitive Style (Salvi et al., 2023): Rigidity is linked to black-and-white thinking and reduced flexibility, regardless of political identity.

• Moral Absolutism (Tsitseli et al., 2023): People across ideologies hold “sacred values” that resist negotiation.

• Clinical Research on Rigidity: Rigid coping correlates with lower resilience and higher anxiety (Bonanno & Burton, 2013; Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010).

For professionals, the lesson is clear: don’t assume rigidity only lives on one “side.” It can show up in any client, in any belief system, and yes — in yourself.

Rigidity, the Nervous System, and Felt Safety

Rigidity is not just an intellectual stance it’s an embodied one. Polyvagal theory (Stephen Porges, Deb Dana) teaches us that our nervous system constantly scans for cues of safety and danger, a process known as neuroception.

• When clients feel unsafe, their sympathetic system (fight/flight) or dorsal vagal system (shutdown, collapse) may dominate.

• Rules and rigid financial beliefs can act like scaffolding, creating a temporary sense of safety when the body doesn’t trust its environment.

But true flexibility requires helping clients access the ventral vagal state — where safety, connection, and curiosity are possible. In this state, clients can bond, reflect, repair, and experiment with new ways of relating to money.

Creating Relational Safety Around Money

This means our role as professionals is not simply to deliver financial expertise. It is to create new relational experiences around money, where clients feel safe enough to loosen rigidity and explore new options.

• Safety in Conversation: Using attuned listening, pacing, and validation to regulate clients’ nervous systems.

• Safety in Planning: Framing decisions as experiments rather than permanent verdicts (“Let’s try this for six months and see how it feels.”).

• Safety in Identity: Affirming clients’ worth and competence so they can step out of “I’m not capable” or “I can’t figure it out.”

These small, repeated moments of safety build clients’ embodied capacity for flexibility. Over time, they replace rigid rules with adaptive, values-driven choices.

The Expert Trap: Professional Rigidity

It’s not only clients who get stuck in rigidity. As professionals, we can fall into the trap of needing to have “the right answers.” Holding too tightly to the expert role can unintentionally:

• Reinforce clients’ own rigid beliefs (“I can’t do this without someone telling me what to do”).

• Block clients from becoming experts in their own lives.

• Reduce the relational safety needed for authentic exploration.

Instead, the invitation is to shift into a collaborative stance: helping clients articulate what matters most to them, and then supporting their process of discovering how to live that out financially.

Practical Strategies for Professionals

1. Name the rule. Gently reflect back when you hear absolutes (“always,” “never,” “good,” “bad”).

2. Validate its function. Explore how the rule once provided safety.

3. Check the body. Ask, When you think about changing this rule, what do you notice in your body? (tension, breath, posture).

4. Introduce flexibility. Encourage small, low-stakes experiments that expand tolerance for uncertainty.

5. Model collaboration. Resist the urge to be the sole expert; empower clients to co-create solutions.

Reflection Questions for Professionals

• What financial rules do I hold most tightly in my own life?

• How do these rules serve my sense of safety? How do they limit me?

• In what ways might my professional identity depend on being the expert?

• How can I intentionally create relational and psychological safety for clients when discussing money?

• What does my own nervous system do when clients challenge or resist my advice?

Closing Thought

Financial rigidity is not simply a cognitive problem. It is a nervous system adaptation an embodied attempt to feel safe in a world that has not always been safe. As professionals, we can help clients honor these adaptations while gently building capacity for flexibility.

But we can only do that well if we are also examining our own rigidity  in beliefs, in identity, and in our professional roles. When we create safe, collaborative experiences around money, we don’t jus