Why Am I Like This?

“Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.”

A few years ago a woman sat down across the table from me — I’ll call her Kate — and put a manila folder on the desk like it was evidence against her.

She was, on paper, doing everything right. Mid-forties. A good income, better than most people I see. A partner with a good income too. A house with a manageable mortgage, a growing super balance, a small share portfolio she’d built herself. If you’d shown me her numbers without her name attached, I’d have said: this person is fine. This person is more than fine.

But she wasn’t sitting across from me because she was fine. She was sitting there because she woke up most nights around three in the morning with her heart going like she’d sprinted up a flight of stairs, convinced — not worried, convinced — that it was all about to disappear.

“I know it doesn’t make sense,” she said. That was the first thing she told me. Not a single number. An apology for her own feelings.

So I did the thing financial advisers are trained to do. I showed her the maths. I walked her through the offset account, the emergency buffer, the diversification, the actual arithmetic of how much would have to go catastrophically wrong, all at once, for her to lose the house. It was, I thought, a very reassuring presentation. I was proud of it.

She nodded the whole way through. She agreed with every point. She understood it completely.

And then she said, quietly, “But I still feel like I’m going to end up with nothing.”

That was the moment — and I’ve had a version of it hundreds of times now — where I finally understood that I had been doing my job wrong for about twenty years. I kept handing people better maps and wondering why they were still lost. Kate didn’t have a numbers problem. Her numbers were excellent. Kate had a feeling problem, and no spreadsheet I have ever built has been able to talk someone out of a feeling.

So I stopped presenting. I asked her a different question. I asked her what money was like in her house growing up.

She went quiet for a long time. And then she told me about being nine years old, sitting at the top of the stairs at night, listening to her parents fight about money in the kitchen — the particular tone of it, the hiss of adults trying to argue without waking the kids. She told me about the year her dad’s business went under and how nobody explained anything to her, they just went very still and very tense, and one day the good car was gone and nobody ever mentioned it again. She learned, at nine, that money was the thing that could make the adults you depend on go cold and frightened. That it could vanish overnight. That you would not be told when it was coming.

Then she looked up at me and said something I’ve never forgotten. She said: “I make more in a year now than my dad made in five. And I still feel like that kid on the stairs.”

Kate’s three-in-the-morning heart wasn’t crazy. It was accurate — to 1987. She was a forty-five-year-old woman running thirty-year-old software, and the software was doing exactly what it was written to do: scan for the disappearance, and never, ever trust the surplus.

Here’s what I want you to take from Kate, because it’s the foundation of everything else in this book.

The way you feel about money was decided before you could spell your own name.

We like to think of ourselves as rational when it comes to money. We imagine there’s a calculator somewhere behind our eyes, weighing costs and benefits. And when we do something that doesn’t add up — overspend, avoid the bank app for a week, panic-sell at the bottom, refuse to enjoy money we’ve clearly earned — we conclude that we are bad with money. Undisciplined. A bit hopeless. Broken, even.

I want to offer you a different explanation, and I want to be really clear that it is not a nicer lie to make you feel better. It’s just what’s actually happening.

You are not running a calculator. You are running a script.

Long before anyone taught you about compound interest, you were absorbing a set of beliefs about money — what it means, whether there’s enough of it, whether it’s safe, whether you’re safe. You absorbed these not from lessons but from the emotional weather of your childhood home. The face your mother made when the bills came. Whether money was something the adults talked about openly or something that happened behind a closed door in a lowered voice. Whether the people you depended on were steady and reliable, or whether they blew hot and cold, so that you learned to keep one eye permanently on the exits.

Psychologists call these early, emotionally-charged beliefs money scripts, and the research on them is genuinely striking: they predict adult financial behaviour better than income does, and better than financial literacy does. Let that land for a second. You can teach a person everything there is to know about budgeting and investing, and if their underlying script says money is dangerous and I don’t deserve it, they will find a way to act that out anyway. Knowledge doesn’t override the script. The script quietly bends the knowledge to fit.

I’ve come to call the whole bundle a person’s Financial DNA — the money scripts you inherited, tangled up with something even deeper: the way you learned, as a small child, to feel about safety and trust in general.

Because there’s a second layer under the money stuff, and it’s the one that explains Kate’s heart at 3am.

When you’re very young, you’re running one enormous experiment, and the question the experiment is trying to answer is: Can I count on this? When you cry, does someone come? When you’re frightened, are you soothed? Is the world, on the whole, reliable? If the answer is mostly yes, you build what psychologists call a secure base — a bone-deep sense that the ground will hold, that resources will be there, that you can relax. And a person with a secure base can look at a market crash, or a scary credit card bill, and feel the fear and stay steady, because underneath the fear is a floor.

But if the answer to can I count on this? was inconsistent — if the people you depended on were loving one day and overwhelmed the next, if the good car disappeared and nobody explained why — then you don’t build a floor. You build a radar. You become exquisitely, permanently tuned to the possibility that it’s all about to be pulled away. And that radar doesn’t switch off when you grow up and start earning well. It runs in the background of a nurse and a millionaire alike, and in the surplus it still reads deficit, because the radar was never measuring the bank balance. It was measuring the threat.

This is why the number in the account so rarely fixes the feeling in the chest. Kate’s brain, in the small hours, was not doing arithmetic. It was doing something much older and much faster. A part of her that was permanently nine years old was checking, one more time, that the adults weren’t about to go cold.

Now — I know what a certain kind of reader is thinking right now, because I used to be that reader. Fine. So it’s my parents’ fault. Great. What does that actually get me? And I understand the impatience. Blame is a dead end; I’m not interested in it and neither should you be. Your parents were almost certainly running their own inherited scripts, handed down from their parents, most of whom lived through things that would tune anyone’s radar. This is not a courtroom. Nobody is on trial.

But here’s the thing that makes it worth understanding, and it’s the reason I’m starting the whole book here.

You cannot change a pattern you can’t see.

As long as Kate believed her 3am panic was just “how she was” — a personality trait, a character flaw, evidence that something was wrong with her — she was helpless in front of it. It felt like the truth. It felt like weather, like something happening to her. The single most powerful thing that happened in that room was not my spreadsheet. It was the moment she said the words “I still feel like that kid on the stairs” out loud and heard herself say it. Because in that instant the feeling stopped being the truth about her finances and became a piece of information about her history. It moved from something she was to something she was carrying. And the moment a thing moves from your identity to your hands, you can finally look at it, turn it over, and decide whether you still want to hold it exactly the way you have been.

That’s the whole game. That’s what this book is going to do, chapter by chapter. Not hand you better maths — you can get maths anywhere, and I suspect part of you already knows the maths and it hasn’t been enough. What we’re going to do instead is make the invisible script visible. We’re going to find the nine-year-old at the top of the stairs, and introduce them, gently, to the adult you’ve become — the one who, it turns out, is far more capable and far safer than the software was ever updated to know.

You are not bad with money. You are coded. And I’ve watched enough people do this work now to promise you the one thing that matters: code can be read. And anything that can be read can be rewritten.

Kate still wakes up sometimes. But now, when she does, she knows who’s knocking. “It’s the kid on the stairs,” she told me, months later, almost fondly. “I just tell him we’re okay now. And most nights, he believes me.” That is not a maths result. You won’t find it on any statement. But it is, I’d argue, the most valuable return she has ever earned.

Before we go looking at the four specific stories people tend to inherit — that’s the next chapter — I want you to do a little bit of excavation of your own. Not analysis. Not fixing. Just looking. Feeling before fixing: that’s the order we do everything in from here.

This is an extract from an independent personal project. It is general, educational content about the psychology of money — not financial product advice, and not therapy. Names and identifying details in stories have been changed.