Relationship with Money: How Attachment Styles & Abundance Shape Your Finances

Editorial Team
Apr 29
5 min read

Do you overspend, undercharge, avoid looking at your bank balance—or cling to money with silent fear? Whether you treat money like a source of safety or shame, your financial behaviours are often rooted in something far deeper than budgets or spreadsheets.

They’re anchored in your attachment style—the blueprint of how you first experienced safety, security, and self-worth in early relationships.

This psychological pattern, formed in childhood, doesn’t just influence your private or professional connections. It shapes the most taboo relationship of all: your relationship with money.

How Attachment Styles & Abundance Shape Your Finances

What Are Attachment Styles—And What Do They Have To Do With Money?

Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and expanded by Mary Ainsworth, teaches us that the way we bond with caregivers becomes our default setting for connection, security—and even survival.

There are four key styles:

1. Secure Attachment – You trust yourself with money, feel emotionally safe with both saving and spending, and believe you’re worthy of wealth.

2. Anxious Attachment – You obsess over finances, feel guilt around spending, or under-earn due to a fear of not being enough.

3. Avoidant Attachment – You detach emotionally, ignore financial matters, or avoid help—clinging to self-sufficiency.

4. Disorganised Attachment – You swing between scarcity and chaos, saving obsessively then splurging without logic, often self-sabotaging abundance.

Whether it’s panic at the checkout or guilt after a big win, the way we experience money is rarely about money itself. It’s about the emotions—and wounds—beneath it.

How Attachment Styles Shape Your Financial Future

In Your Personal Life: Scarcity, Shame or Sovereignty?

You might fear being judged for having too much—or too little. You might avoid money conversations in relationships, or over-give financially to earn love.

Securely attached people, on the other hand, approach money with confidence and calm. They understand that wealth doesn’t define them—but it can support them.

In Business and Career: Your Financial Ceiling is Emotional

Pricing, negotiating, saving, scaling—it’s all affected by your internal relationship with money.

• Anxious types undercharge or over-deliver.

• Avoidants downplay their value or avoid investing in growth.

• Disorganised types ride the emotional rollercoaster—booming one moment, burned out the next.

You don’t rise to your goals. You fall to your nervous system’s sense of safety.

In Your Inner World: Financial Freedom is Emotional Freedom

If money feels unsafe, uncertain, or shameful—it isn’t because you’re bad with money. It’s because a younger part of you learned that money meant pressure, punishment, performance, or powerlessness.

These beliefs run unconsciously—until you bring them into awareness and heal them.

The Core Calmfidence System: A Healing Path to Financial Security

The Core Calmfidence System is a four-step, parts-based approach designed to shift your financial identity from fear to trust, from scarcity to safety.

Each step helps you repair your attachment wounds and reclaim your right to abundance.

1. CAPITAL – Build Your Inner Wealth (PsyCap)

Your Psychological Capital—made up of hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism—is your emotional currency.

This step helps you identify your current money identity and the inner parts driving it. Here are some examples:

• The Overgiver

• The Saver in Survival Mode

• The Fearful Underearner

• The Avoider Who Pretends Not to Care

These parts were formed to protect you. Now, it’s time to heal them and evolve.

2. CLARITY – Reveal the Trauma Behind the Pattern

To truly change your relationship with money, you need to face what shaped it. And trauma isn’t just the big, dramatic moments.

There are:

• Big Traumas (T-Big) – e.g. bankruptcy, eviction, financial loss in childhood

• Medium Traumas (T-Medium) – chronic instability, parental guilt-tripping around money, or being told your worth was tied to achievement

• Micro Traumas (T-Micro) – the death-by-a-thousand-cuts conditioning like “money is the root of all evil” or “we can’t afford that” repeated endlessly

Each of these, over time, creates an attachment injury. Money becomes emotionally loaded with fear, shame, or confusion. This step is about gently seeing the origin story behind your financial patterns—with compassion, not blame.

3. CONGRUENCE – Align Inner Beliefs with Outer Behaviour and Relationship with Money

Here’s where real transformation happens. Once you’ve met the wounded parts and identified the trauma, you guide them into healing and integration.

Using inner child work, parts dialogue, hypnosis, or somatic processing, this phase helps your internal system agree on a new truth:

It is safe to receive.

It is safe to rest.

It is safe to grow.

It is safe to have.

Without Congruence between inner belief and outer action, abundance will always feel threatening. This step makes wealth feel aligned—not alien.

4. CHOICE – Create a New Financial Attachment

When your inner system is regulated and healed, new behaviours become not only possible—but natural.

• You charge what you’re worth, not what feels “safe.”

• You receive without guilt.

• You invest from a place of calm confidence, not fear.

• You set boundaries around giving, earning, spending, and saving—with sovereignty, not shame.

This is the step where financial freedom is no longer a fantasy—it’s your felt reality.

Wealth Isn’t Just a Number—It’s a Nervous System State

Your money mindset isn’t broken. It’s shaped by the history of your attachment and false coping mechanisms. And most importantly—it’s healable. Because money isn’t the measure of your worth—it’s the mirror of your inner world. And when you feel safe inside, abundance flows outside.

The Core Calmfidence System isn’t about forcing calm or faking confidence—it’s about integrating the parts of yourself that were once fragmented by past experiences.

When these parts feel safe, heard, and healed, true confidence emerges—not as a performance, but as a state of being.

Your attachment style isn’t your destiny. By uncovering your patterns, healing old wounds, and cultivating secure attachment with money, you step into a version of yourself that no longer reacts from fear—but responds from Calmfidence.

When you stop running from your financial wounds and start healing your inner world, you stop hustling for security and start receiving with calm confidence.

Like what you’ve read?

Get curious and SIGN UP for The Calmfidence Circle — your regular dose of holistic wellbeing and success delivered straight into your inbox.

Want to write for Calmfidence too?

Join the Calmfidence Council Network and get visibility while sharing your expertise with a global audience. If you’re passionate about holistic success and wellbeing and our approach resonates, we’d love to hear from you. Because your expertise deserves to be seen, heard, and remembered.