💌 New here? This is part of a 9-essay series on why good girls undercharge, and how to stop. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one, and start from Essay 1: Your Prices Were Set by a Seven-Year-Old if you're joining late.
I can tell you the exact moment I learned that money was something you didn’t talk about.
I was small. Young enough that I don’t have the edges of the memory, just the middle of it. There was a bill on the kitchen table and a particular quietness in the room, the kind of quiet that isn’t peaceful, the kind a child reads instantly even when she can’t name it. Nobody said anything to me. Nobody had to. I understood, the way kids understand things long before they have the words, that money was a thing that made the people I loved go tense. And tense people were people I needed to manage.
So I got good at not adding to the pile. Not asking. Not wanting things out loud. Being the easy one.
I didn’t decide any of that. A little girl doesn’t sit down and form a money philosophy. She just learns the weather of her house and adjusts.
Here is the thing almost nobody tells you about your relationship with money.
You did not choose it. You inherited it. And you inherited it before you could read, before you could argue, before you had a single tool to question whether any of it was true.
By the time most of us are seven, the nervous system has already written its first draft on money. Not a belief in the way we usually mean the word, something you could debate or change your mind about. Something older than that. Something that lives in the body. A felt sense of whether there is enough, whether wanting is safe, whether asking gets you closer to people or further away.
And we absorbed all of it through the women who came before us.
The mother who said “we can’t afford it” in a voice that closed the conversation. Or the one who bought you the thing and then carried it like a debt you somehow owed her. The grandmother who saved every elastic band and washed out the cling film and made you feel, without ever saying it, that taking up resources was a kind of greed. The aunt who married for security and called it love. The women who worked themselves grey and called it devotion. The women who never once, in your whole childhood, said the words “I want” without immediately apologising for them.
You watched all of that. You were a tiny anthropologist studying the only culture you had access to. And you learned the rules of money the way you learned everything else at that age, by watching what kept the people you needed close, and what made them pull away.
For a lot of us, what kept them close was being good. Being easy. Not needing too much. Making yourself cheap to keep.
That is where it starts. Not in a money mindset course. In a kitchen.
I want to be really clear about something, because this is the part the industry gets wrong.
This was not a flaw in you. It was not a lack of discipline, or a bad attitude, or a limiting belief you should have been smart enough to override by now. It was a child’s nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do, which is keep her safe in the conditions she was actually living in.
If money made the room go tense, then a part of you decided money was dangerous, and that part was not wrong. It was responding to something real that was actually happening in your world. It found a strategy that worked. Stay small around money. Don’t ask. Don’t want too loudly. Be the one who needs the least.
It worked. That is why it stayed.
The problem is that the strategy never got the memo that you grew up. That you run a business now. That the room you are in is not the room you learned in. So the same nervous system that kept you safe at six is quietly setting your prices at thirty-six, and it is setting them low, because low is what felt safe, and safe is the only thing it was ever trying to give you.
You are not bad with money. You are loyal to a little girl’s solution to a problem that is no longer yours.
This is the work I do, and it is so much gentler than the money mindset world wants you to believe.
We do not need to bully you into “abundance.” We do not need to drag you across hot coals or get you to repeat affirmations your body doesn’t believe. We need to go back to the kitchen. We need to find the moment she learned it. And we need to help that part of you understand, slowly and kindly, that the danger has passed. That wanting is allowed now. That she is safe to set the thing down.
She has been carrying it for so long. She deserves to know she can stop.
If this landed somewhere tender, that’s the work starting
I built a free tool for exactly this moment. It’s called the Money Story Generator, and it does the thing this essay is really about. It helps you name your money archetype, find where it came from, and gently rewrite the belief you didn’t choose. It takes a few minutes and it tends to make people go very quiet in a good way.
👉 Try the Money Story Generator, free
No performing. No fixing yourself. Just finally seeing her clearly, so she doesn’t have to work so hard anymore.
Next in the series: Undercharging Isn’t Generosity (It’s Protection). The thing that looks like kindness, and what it’s really protecting you from.
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About Me
I’m a psychospiritual therapist, an astrologer with receipts, and the founder of Moon & Soul.
I spent the first half of my life winning gold stars, managing everyone else’s emotional climate, and perfecting the art of self-abandonment until my nervous system finally staged a full-blown revolution.
Now, my job is to help you stop treating your survival patterns like a personality flaw. Using a mix of somatic nervous system safety, subconscious belief work, and birth chart mapping, I help recovering Good Girls drop the armour and learn how to feel safe enough to be real.
When I’m not untangling subconscious codes or mapping planetary transits, I’m in the trenches of motherhood, building this business, and practicing the exact unbothered babe boundary work I preach.
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Let’s hang out on the daily: 📸 Come find me on Instagram @moonandsoul_coach for daily somatic reminders, unfiltered reality checks, and a front-row seat to what retiring the Good Girl role looks like in real life.