The Money You’re Allowed To Make
I’ve been sitting with something that keeps finding its way into my sessions, even when money isn’t what we’re there to talk about.
It usually comes up in a smaller way, like someone mentions that she talked herself out of asking for what the job was worth. Or she got the number she wanted, but couldn’t quite let herself enjoy it without explaining it, softening it or worrying that it’s making someone feel uncomfortable.
And the more I notice it, the less I think it’s really about money.
Here's what I actually think is going on: we don't let ourselves receive, or enjoy, a lot of things (money included) because we're too busy managing everyone else's comfort to attend to our own. That's the whole thing…it’s not a money block, but a receiving block (with money as one of its more obvious symptoms).
That reflex that we seem to know so well as women - the explaining, the softening - is the same reflex that shows up when someone compliments work and we deflect it. Or even when someone compliments a dress and for whatever reason, we immediately say “thanks, it has pockets!” or “thanks, I got it on sale!” instead of just TAKING the compliment.
The idea of making more money as a woman than what your family made is weird. But it's not weird for men. I wasn't talking about any one person when I said that. I was talking about a pattern I'd heard enough times that it had stopped feeling like coincidence.
There's actually a family version of this and a partner version. They're not identical, but they kind of run in the same direction.
The family version
The family version is about loyalty, even though nobody would call it that out loud.
Making more than the family you came from ever made can feel like you've left someone behind even when nothing about the relationship has actually changed. Nobody hands you this as a rule. It's just absorbed, the way you absorb how much space you're supposed to take up in a room, long before anyone tells you directly.
And it doesn't seem to run the same way for sons. A son who out-earns his father usually gets read as carrying the family forward. A daughter doing the same thing can feel guilty for it instead - like the success itself is the problem.
The partner version
The partner version is closer to home and a little harder to say plainly.
Out-earning a husband can feel like a slight to him, even if he's never said a word about it, even if he'd tell you honestly that it doesn't bother him at all. So instead of just holding her own life at full size, a woman starts managing his comfort instead.
Not dramatically. In small adjustments nobody would notice from the outside. She lets a raise go unmentioned at dinner, or mentions it and immediately downplays it. She takes the smaller office. She stays a size that won't require anyone around her to adjust to her.
I've heard it put almost exactly like this: out-earning him can feel like emasculating him, so she makes room for his comfort instead of her own growth. I don't think that's a comment on men being fragile. I think it's a comment on where a woman's attention goes the moment she starts to expand - whether it stays with her, or gets redirected toward keeping someone else steady.
The same instinct, everywhere
What both of these have in common isn't money. It's the same instinct, running in the background, to manage someone else's experience before you attend to your own.
Once you see that instinct clearly, you start noticing it everywhere receiving is supposed to happen:
Somebody offers to help and gets waved off, even though the help was needed.
Somebody says something kind and it gets deflected with a joke.
Somebody earns something: money, rest, recognition, an actual day off and instead of letting it land, some part of them starts calculating what it costs everyone else for them to have it.
I've watched this play out in ways that have nothing to do with income at all, which is part of why I no longer think of it as a money issue wearing a disguise.
A woman will finally take the vacation she's earned and spend half of it checking in on everyone back home to make sure nothing fell apart without her. Or she'll get a genuinely glowing piece of feedback and immediately start listing, unprompted, all the ways it could have gone better. Or she'll be handed something good and instead of just having it, she'll feel a pull to redistribute it before she's even had time to feel what having it is like.
The through-line every time is the same: the good thing arrives, and instead of staying with her, her attention immediately goes outward checking the room, managing the fallout of something that hasn't actually caused any.
I think that's actually the real pattern. Not a fear of money specifically. A fear of taking up the space that receiving anything requires. Money is just unusually good at making that fear visible, because money is countable. You can't hide from a number the way you can hide from a feeling.
This isn't a problem to fix
I don't think this is a problem to fix, and I don't think it responds well to being fixed. It responds to being noticed.
This is IFS-informed work, which is a fancy way of saying: there's a part of a person that built this whole management system a long time ago, for a good reason. It's not going to stand down just because someone tells it to. It stands down when it's actually listened to - when someone asks it, with real curiosity, what it's protecting and what it thinks would happen if it let go.
Could you really receive right now?
So when I sit with this in a session, I'm not handing anyone a strategy. I'm asking a much slower question: what would it mean to actually receive something whether that’s attention, money, help, praise, without immediately managing how it lands on everyone else in the room?
Most people have never actually tried that. Not because they're incapable of it, but because the part of them that manages comfort has been running the show for so long that receiving cleanly doesn't even feel like an option anymore. It feels like an oversight waiting to be corrected.
What this isn't
I know talking about money and receiving can start to sound a lot like money coaching, and that’s not where I’m going with this.
I’m not here to tell you that you have a wealth block or that there’s one belief standing between you and everything you’ve been longing for.
What interests me is what’s underneath all of it. The part of you that wants something and, at the very same time, feels afraid to fully have it. That feels much closer to the work I already do around grief, calling, longing, and all the other places where we’re asked to be present with something we may not completely understand yet.
There isn’t a quick answer I want to give you there. I’d rather stay with the question long enough to hear what it’s really asking, because that’s usually where something begins to open.
Where to start
If any of this is landing for you, I'd start small and slow.
Notice the next time you catch yourself downplaying something good, before it's even finished landing. Don't correct it in the moment. Just notice it.
That noticing, done enough times, starts to loosen the grip on its own — not because you argued your way out of it, but because the part running the whole operation starts to trust that you're actually paying attention to it now, instead of overriding it or pretending it isn't there.
There's no timeline on this, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who gave you one. Some weeks you'll catch it three times a day. Other weeks you won't catch it at all, and you'll only notice in hindsight, a month later, that you took the raise and didn't apologize for it once.
That's not backsliding. That's just how a part learns to trust something new - slowly, with a lot of evidence, and no interest in being rushed.
How this actually shows up in sessions
This isn't a separate “service”. It's not something I sit someone down and say "let's talk about your money block" for. It surfaces the same way everything else does in spiritual direction - inside the conversation someone actually came in with, about vocation, or grief, or a decision they're stuck on.
The work is mostly listening and asking. What did you feel right before you downplayed that? Whose comfort were you managing just now? What is that part of you afraid would happen if you just let the number sit there, unexplained? I'm not handing her an answer. I'm helping her ask her own parts questions she's never thought to ask them.
Sometimes this happens once, in a single session, and it's enough to open something. More often it's something we come back to over months, the way you'd come back to any real pattern in someone's life - a thread that shows up again in a different form, and gets a little more familiar, a little less powerful, each time it's named out loud instead of managed in silence.
This is why it lives inside two things I already practice, rather than becoming its own program:
Inner Awakening: because underneath it, this is a question about longing and what we let ourselves want.
Contemplative Practice: because the method is the same one I use for everything else: slow down, get curious, pay attention instead of trying to fix it.
What I keep coming back to
The question was never really about the money.
It was about whether you'll let yourself have something without first making sure everyone around you is comfortable with you having it. That's a much bigger question than a raise, or a paycheck, or anything with a number attached to it. It's a question about what you actually think you're allowed to receive.
I don't know that I have anything more useful to offer than that, honestly. Not a five-step process or a worksheet or a reframe you can repeat to yourself until it sticks.
I just have the observation that most of us learned to manage everyone's comfort but our own so early and so thoroughly that we mistook it for a virtue.
And maybe the first real step isn't doing anything differently at all. Maybe it's just letting that be true for a minute and acknowledging it, without immediately trying to fix it or explain it away.
If you read this and feel like it’s you…a specific moment, a specific relationship, a specific number you've never said out loud, that's usually a sign there's more worth looking at, not less.
You don't have to figure it out on your own, and you don't have to have it sorted before you reach out. That's actually the point of this kind of work! You bring the part that's still managing everyone else's comfort, exactly as it is, and we look at it together.
If that's where you are, book a session with me and let's start there.
