Can a psych-based finance course help women, non-binary, and trans people heal from the trauma of COVID’s economic crises?

This journalism is made possible by the Future of Good editorial fellowship on women’s economic resilience, supported by Scotiabank. See our editorial ethics and standards here.

When Lystra Germaine Sam finished a Trauma of Money course exploring the false promise of marketing strategies and how they contribute to consumers’ pain and loneliness, she had to ask herself: “How do you be anti-capitalist and still want to be a business owner or entrepreneur, and do good things within that?” 

As someone working in the travel industry, she says she’s realized she’s part of the problem of extractive capitalism – but is also in a position to contribute to solutions. 

In addition to her travel agency QmooniTi, Sam (who also goes by Lystra professionally) leads healing retreats with her organization Sisters Leading Sisters, and does consultancy work for anti-racism, diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and healing. 

Sam hires women and feminine-identifying people from racialized and Indigenous communities to help facilitate her work. One day, she realized she’d reached the limit of payments she could make because of how many transfers she was making to the staff. She says she wept because of all the money flowing in the community that would continue to help people in her community and those she cared about. 

“We could mitigate harm and hurt to other people, other cultures and the environment if we would stop just trying to do business for money,” says Sam.

This was one of the key takeaways Sam had from finishing the Trauma of Money (TOM) course in September 2020. 

TOM founder Chantel Chapman, opened the program for enrollment in December 2019, a class she describes is for “anyone who wants to imagine a different way outside of exploitative capitalism.” 

TOM is an online financial literacy program Chapman created to teach students about the trauma and its relationship with money. 

The first TOM cohort included 45 people in March 2020. The pandemic’s lockdown was enforced shortly after, and TOM’s already-virtual class suddenly had another layer of economic turmoil to drive demand. 

Today, the program’s largest cohort is 175 students, and it’s growing. Since the start, the majority of TOM students are women and non-binary people. 

In addition to marketing strategies, course modules teach about how to shift from instant gratification to finding deeper meaning in life, the relationship between finances and trauma, what shapes behaviours with money, looking at money from the lens of marginalized communities, debt payback strategies and credit score secrets, divorced women and money, and how time impact relationships with money.

But what exactly is money trauma and how can learning financial skills help students struggling with financial crises?

The fear of scarcity 

Trauma is an emotional response that changes someone’s ability to cope with daily challenges and has a lasting impression on their future experiences. Stress is an emotional response that can affect immediate behaviour, but does not necessarily affect one’s ability to cope with future challenges. 

One of TOM’s modules teaches how a scarcity mindset can limit someone’s ability to have a healthy relationship with money, which can be a product of trauma and stress. According to Web MD, a scarcity mindset is when one’s mind is preoccupied with what it lacks to the point that it limits brain function, such as being unable to plan, start, or finish a task.

“Something that we really focus on is teaching everybody these core basics of, essentially, the neuroscience around trauma and scarcity and what the typical responses are,” says Chapman. 

Some responses range from anger and anxiety, to dissociating from the problem and an inability to make choices to produce solutions to your problem. 

TOM teaches students how to confront these feelings from a healthier state of mind and body. Chapman says learning about disorders identifies problems within the individual, but when TOM introduces the psychology around money disorders, they consider the environment. 

TOM’s website acknowledges the elephant in the room when it comes to poverty and financial literacy: creating financial plans is not the whole solution to poverty. 

Around 70 percent of Canadians are concerned about their ability to pay their bills and loans, and 28 percent of women-led households are in core-housing need. 

“Maybe the disorder is extractive capitalism, maybe the disorder is consumerism, maybe the disorder lies within the dominant culture, and the behaviour,” says Chapman. “So the secondary issue might be your overspending or your financial avoidance. Maybe that’s just how you’re coping with the pain that’s out there.”

Chapman says once people have that information, they can separate themselves from the shame.

“A lot of teachings are about identifying the narrative, separating ourselves from the narrative, so we’re not carrying the shame, and then basically finding that regulated state in our nervous system,” says Chapman.

Teachings like these were especially helpful for Sam. “I do not go one single day without absolutely making sure to regulate my nervous system before I step out into the world.”

Sam meditates, watches nature, and practices breath work, a stress-reduction technique to bring physical relaxation.

“You’ll understand that nothing is off limits for you,” says Sam. “You do end up feeling limitless, quite frankly, in what you can offer in your industry or in you and your community.”

Chapman says TOM students learn about the neuroscience around trauma and scarcity, which can eventually help them relate to money in a healthier way – whether they are the ones struggling financially or are the ones working with people who may be struggling.  

Addressing negative experiences with money to overcome barriers to wealth

According to Statistics Canada, Canada’s consumer prices have increased by 6.8 percent, most of which accounts for food and shelter costs. Though women’s average personal income has increased over the past 40 years, they are still more vulnerable to low income than men. 

Chapman says many TOM students are therapists or work in the social impact space, such as grantmakers and consultants: “When we look at their relationship with money, we see some patterns of underearning and undercharging.”

Chapman says harmful relationships to money — like feeling powerless to or controlled by money — can be tied to generational, relational, societal, systemic trauma.

Chapman says people who are in poverty are “actually professional budgeters” because they are constantly in the mode of trade-off thinking since money is scarce. 

Though it is unclear if individuals struggling from low-paying occupations can learn to leverage enough money to create a livable wage with TOM, students who use TOM to inform their work have had success.

Take Arianne Shaffer, a philanthropy consultant and facilitator. She works at the Kindle Project, a grantmaking organization that works with individual donors, foundations, and philanthropic institutions who are shifting power to communities they fund to make decisions about how the money will be used. Shaffer says TOM has impacted the way they work with donors they are intentional about building strong relationships with to facilitate a trusting grant process.

She and her boss attended the course, became TOM facilitators, and now share what they learned with wealthy donors, who Shaffer says can also experience a scarcity mindset at times. 

“It’s not to say that everyone’s the same,” says Shaffer, noting the differences between people living in poverty compared to those who are wealthy. “It’s very easy to bucket wealthy people in a certain way that I think actually doesn’t serve a transformative approach to making communities better.”

Shaffer says a particular cohort of donors are meeting and learning about the trauma of money together, which has helped them donate to the Indigenous Women’s Flow Fund without even meeting the women who are moving the money into the community. 

This came after the Kindle Project facilitated a peer-learning process among donors that focused on how to give from a place of trust. Shaffer says it is important to create those spaces for donors to learn and develop together. 

Shaffer says before they give, donors unpack the meaning behind their worldviews, like “their own healing, their own unpacking of assumptions, their confrontations [of] themselves about what ceding power looks like, why that’s important, how they can keep doing it. What are their learning edges? What’s uncomfortable?” 

Shaffer says to get anything out of TOM, you need interest in social justice and should want to understand how to unpack trauma around money. 

“It’s a really honoured and privileged position that we’re in, at our organization, to be the bridge between donors and communities,” says Shaffer. “The relationships that we have in our networks really mean a lot to us, and for me, really affirm that this kind of relationship-centered work is how money should move. I feel really strongly about that. And the course really affirmed that.”

Choosing reciprocity over extraction

Most of TOM’s participants have done previous work to improve their relationship with money. 

For those who are new to this work or need financial assistance to attend, TOM offers some scholarships paid in full and others offered at 50 or 30 percent off. 

TOM recently changed their scholarship model to be more reciprocal, where students can even reduce enrollment costs by offering their talents, like leading meditation for faculty, connecting people to different networks that will help their personal or professional lives. 

The reasoning?  “To help get them into a place where they’re receiving, we need to see more participation in reciprocity,” says Chapman. 

This helps TOM demonstrate what reciprocal business looks like, while still making enough profit to pay their faculty, who are also mostly women and non-binary. Given women’s emotional capacity and the amount of work women do within their communities, Sam says providing this financial education will strengthen communities in the future.

“Especially if you give her that [education] in a trauma-informed way, we are the ones who have the capacity to pass that on to not just our children, who are girls and boys and everything in between, but also our partners and businesses in the area.” 

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