74. The Real Reason So Many Women Struggle With Money

Dr. Vanessa Calderón: We are living through a massive transition in consciousness. Old systems are breaking down and new ones are being built. And what comes next requires a different kind of leader, one who is compassionate, human centered, and conscious, and one who has the capacity to create real change. But you cannot create that change without resources, without a time, team, and yes, money. And so many mission driven people still have an incredibly complicated relationship with money. That gets in the way of their ability to build, to hold, and to steward real wealth. In this episode, we're talking about why and how we began to heal that deeper pattern that's keeping us under-resourced because the people who are here to build what comes next need the resources to do that. Welcome to The Authentic Path. I'm your host, Dr. Vanessa Calderon, Harvard-trained physician and healer. I integrate science and ancestral wisdom to support you in creating the success you desire in all areas of your life. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started. Hello, sweet friends. Before we jump into today's episode, I want to tell you why you're hearing an episode that I've released before. Now, in all the years I've been podcasting, I've actually never re-released an episode, I made the decision to do it with this one because I believe that this conversation is even more important now than it was when I originally recorded it. We are living through a moment of enormous change. Old systems are being challenged. There's a big conversation happening right now about wealth. Power, inequality, leadership, and who gets access to resources. And in the middle of all of this, I keep coming back to this. We need conscious, ethical, service-driven people to be well resourced. We need healers, leaders, physicians, entrepreneurs, change makers who care deeply about people and the planet to have resources, to have money, power, and capacity. Because those resources in the hands of people who lead with integrity can be. An incredible force for extraordinary good. But so many of us have an incredibly complicated relationship with money. And those relationships may have so much less to do with financial strategy or mindset than what than we realize. Many of those relationships are connected to safety, survival, to our nervous system, and to patterns that existed long before we were ever born. In this episode, we're gonna dive deep into exactly why so many mission-driven people have such a complicated relationship with money. And as you listen, I invite you to think not only about how much money you want to make, but about something so much deeper. What would become possible for you, for the people that you love and the people that you're here to serve if you were able to steward real wealth? And if this episode is resonating with you as you're listening, I want to invite you to join our next healing circle called Resourced Wealth. Resourced wealth is a small, intimate, healing-centered approach to money, power, and capacity for mission-driven women. This is not a surface-level money mindset or strategy program. It's a graduate level exploration coupled with deep, embodied, integrative healing designed for mission-driven women help you expand your capacity to hold more wealth, to have a bigger impact, and do all of that without burning out. Because the work you're here to do requires resources. It requires time and it requires having the support. And yes, it requires money. And we need more conscious, compassionate women who are not afraid to hold wealth and power and who know how to use both in service of something so much bigger than themselves. Our next healing circle starts Thursday, September 24th. The link to learn more and join the wait list is in the show notes. I'd love to have you there. Okay, let's dive into the episode.

Vanessa: Today's episode is something that I've been thinking about for a really long time. And I've been letting this work sort of percolate in my brain for a while, and honestly, I am incredibly honored and humbled to be able to bring to you now. And feel very reverent about it. I feel like I've been thinking about it in a space that's been really thoughtful and... How can I best create this work for you that's gonna really be in service for you? So the series is about money and it's not about money in the way we usually talk about money. So this is not about strategies, it's not about hacks or budgets, it's not about funnels or formulas. This is gonna be a series about our inner sort of invisible and often inherited relationship that we have with money. And it's all centered around one core question that I have been sitting with for so many years now for both in my own life personally, but also in my work with hundreds of really high functioning, really smart, high achieving women. And that is this, why do so many smart, capable, service oriented women that wanna make such a big impact in the world, why do they still struggle with money? Why is it that some of the most brilliant coaches, healers, physicians, entrepreneurs, why are these leaders, why are these women who are so deeply skilled, so deeply caring, deeply competent, still feel so much tension and stress and guilt and scarcity around money? Why does it feel heavy? Why does it feel charged? And why is it that no matter how much we grow, when it comes to money, something still stays kind of tight. So today I want to start by naming something very, very clearly and with a ton of compassion that for many women, this is not a money problem and it's definitely not a strategy problem. The question with money, what we're actually holding inside is something much, much deeper. And I'm going to talk about the root cause in just a second. But before I go any further, I want to pause and I want to talk about something that's really important, which is why does this topic even matter? Why does it even matter for women to have money? Why does that matter? So from a very practical and actually truthfully well researched perspective, there's been multiple studies to show that when women have access to money and to resources, they tend to make the world a better place. They tend to invest more in their families and communities. They put more money into education, into ventures of health and well-being, they reinvest in things that improve quality of life, not just for themselves, but for others, for their communities. And generally, they use money in socially generative ways to honestly make the world a better place. So in other words, when women have money, the world gets better. And I want to be really clear. This isn't about a moral superiority or one gender being different than another gender. That's not at all what this is about. I am just naming social patterns and data. And the other thing that I think that's really important here to talk about is that money doesn't have to be about stuff. And for me personally, money has never been about stuff. I'm a pretty simple person. I've been driving the same car that I've had for the last 12 years and I'm honestly not interested in latest gadgets or gizmos. I don't try to keep up with the Joneses and just actually don't want or need stuff that doesn't drive me. So money for me isn't about having more, more stuff necessarily. For me, it's about two things. It's about capacity and it's about growth. So when I say growth, what do I mean? So you all know I'm an entrepreneur and one indicator of growth in business is financial growth. Is your business growing financially? That's not the only indicator by any means, but one indicator. And growth for me is a huge personal value. I want to always be growing. I want to be helping more people. want to becoming a better version of myself always. That's who I want to be. So it's a huge value of mine. Growth is. And second, said capacity. So money allows us to have increased capacity. Capacity to be in service to the world, to the people that we want to serve. For me, it gives me the capacity to be able to help my immigrant dad and my immigrant family. to contribute to nonprofits that I really believe in and social justice movements that are in service to creating a more equitable world. So money for me is also capacity. And for all of us, if you think about it, it's the capacity to contribute, to have choice, to not live in constant trade-offs. And this is especially important for women who are here to be in service. Many of the entrepreneurs who follow me are mission driven entrepreneurs. They're people that want to make a difference in this world. They consider themselves coaches or healers or leaders that really want to make an impact. And if the most conscious, ethical, service driven women stay under resourced, then the systems that sadly just don't care about people will always be the most powerful ones in the room. And we know that That's not what we want. So this isn't about greed and it's not about being selfish or having more. This is about impact, agency and stewardship. And being able to store money with integrity, with honesty and with love. That's what this is about. And that is what I know is women are capable of doing. are the most compassionate, caring, loving women can store money with so much integrity, with so much honesty. do right, they can do right by themselves and with others. Okay, so if money is so important and so many women are so capable, then why is it still so hard? Okay, and this is why I wanna offer the central reframe of today's episode. For many women, the real issue is not knowledge, it's not skill, it's not effort. It is what is known as a legacy wound, legacy wound. So what is legacy wounding? So a legacy wound is a pattern of stress, of fear, of survival, of protection that we inherited. So it did not start with us, we inherited it. So it lives in our body, it lives in our nervous system, and it's part of our unconscious biases, our unconscious expectations. And we know now through the science of epigenetics that trauma and chronic stress can change how genes are expressed. So those sort of stressors, those changes can be passed down through generations. So if you come from generational trauma, ancestral trauma, collective trauma, just in simple terms, your nervous system may have inherited survival responses that you probably never experienced personally. And for some of you, you may have experienced it yourself in your own lived experience. So let me give you an example. Let's say there's a grandmother who lived through poverty and financial trauma. She now becomes hyper anxious about resources. So she raises a mother who overworks and tends to have hoarding tendencies, never wants to get rid of anything. Who then raises a daughter who also works really hard and has now broken the poverty barrier. Now she's making a good living wage, but she still cannot relax around money. That right there is an example of this inherited legacy wound. And that's my story. That example I just gave you, that was my story. My grandmother lived through some really painful financial trauma and poverty and raised my mother, this incredibly compassionate soul who worked really hard and was afraid to get rid of things. Cause what if she was never gonna get it back? And raised me who, you know, by a lot of... metrics, some people would say that I was pretty successful and I learned how to be really good with money, but I still struggled to relax around money for a really long time until I learned about legacy wounding and I was able to heal so many of the wounds that I carried. Some of the most well-known studies that look at epigenetics and the how we pass down generational and ancestral trauma look at the children and grandchildren of many survivors of of surviving really deep trauma like Holocaust survivors, for example. And what they have found is they actually have different stress hormone profiles. So cortisol levels are different. Their amygdala, their fear center in their brain is actually hypertrophied. So it's larger in size than those that did not come from someone who survived a Holocaust. They're more sensitive to threat responses. So at baseline, they may run a little bit more anxious. So they may even have GI issues. So things that we call like irritable bowel syndrome, for example, IBS, having a lot of bloating, diarrhea, or constipation, that because our stomach, our gut holds a ton of our nervous system. And we have seen from survivals of folks that have survived really deep trauma that at baseline, they experience different hormone profiles or more sensitive to threat responses, and they have different baseline nervous system settings. So even when someone has not personally experienced the original trauma, we've seen similar findings in descendants of people who've lived through things like famine, war, which is why when I think about all these children that are experiencing the war now, all these wars across the world now, or enslavement, forced displacement, extreme poverty, colonization, they experienced this trauma through generations. So trauma doesn't just live in memory or in a history book, it actually lives in our bodies. And it lives in bodies across generations. I wanna pause you for a quick moment and talk about why this conversation about legacy wounding when we talk about money is so important, especially in the world of entrepreneurship, personal development and wealth creation and money, because... If you're like me, you may have spent a lot of time in these spaces growing and doing your best to learn and just be a better version of yourself and you've probably heard a lot of things like all you need to do is change your thoughts about money or just stop focusing on scarcity and be abundant. Just focus on abundance or just manifest it or things like money is neutral. It's just a piece of paper. You're the one giving it any meaning or you just need to reprogram your mindset. So I actually don't disagree with all of that because money is a tool, our beliefs do matter, and our thoughts do shape our experience. But there has always been a piece that has been missing in this space. Because for many people, many people like me, we didn't have a luxury that money is just a thought. That was not a luxury that I had. That's not a luxury that many women have. Money has been an experience in our bodies and in our nervous system. And what I mean by that is that money has represented safety, survival, choices, power, protection, belonging. And those are not mindset categories. If you think about them, those are biological survival categories. And we know from neuroscience and from trauma research that, you know, very, very clearly that you cannot outthink, you cannot outmanifest a trauma response. you cannot out manifest a nervous system that is trying to keep you alive. So if your body through your own life, through your ancestors, through your, through your family's life, learned that resources disappear, that resources are going to get stolen, they're going to be extracted away from you, that stability is fragile. It's not something you can count on. That visibility is really dangerous or that having more is going to make you a target or it's all going to get taken away from you anyway. So why work harder or why make more? or that survival requires constantly being overworking and never relaxing, then no amount of just thinking differently is going to override that because your nervous system is not trying to create abundance. Your nervous system, like I've said so many times before, is here to do two things. It's here to keep you alive and it's here to do that as efficiently as possible. So what your nervous system is trying to do is create safety and safety always has to come for expansion. This is one of the reasons so many incredibly smart, self-aware, conscious women will say things to me like, I understand the mindset work or I've been doing all the journaling or I finally believe I'm worthy, but I still hit the same financial ceiling. What explains all this is legacy wounding. Legacy wounding is what explains all this. So let me talk a little bit more about legacy wounding because it's not just biological. There's also emotional inheritance, cultural inheritance, familial inheritance, and collective inheritance, what we inherit from the collective. So we inherit things like beliefs about our safety, about scarcity, about what's risky, not risky, about who we are allowed to be, and about what happens to us when you have too much. And these beliefs don't usually show up as thoughts. They'll show up as a sensation in our body, an impulse, a reflex. They might show up as the sense of hypervigilance, like, I'm so, like nervousness, anxiousness, tension. It might show up as discomfort in the stomach, a sense of over-responsibility, difficulty resting, feeling guilty when you rest, difficulty receiving. When people are even just trying to tell you thank you for something, it's like, no, no, don't worry. or a constant feeling of I'm not doing enough or I should be doing more. So I wanna just briefly share my personal experience here in case it supports any of you listening. I think most of you know if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, I'm a first generation Latina American. My mom immigrated from Mexico, my dad from El Salvador. And both of my parents, when they immigrated, they were fleeing poverty and war and famine. And they had experienced significant financial trauma, land being taken away, unjust systems. And they came here, like many immigrant families, and worked really hard to survive and to provide. And I am so, so, so deeply grateful for their journey and for how far they came so that I could now live my purpose. So what I inherited was real lived experiences of real scarcity, of what it's really like to not have enough to eat, to not have a place to live, to not have enough to take care of your kids when they get sick. And I learned that safety only came from working really hard. And though I come from a long line of ancestral healers, I chose personally to study Western medicine and become a physician. I was good at school and I wanted to help others. And I do love medicine and I love serving, but it also happens to be a profession that felt financially safe. And even as I became a leader and even as I built businesses and even as I became what most people would call successful, my nervous system for a very, very long time still carried all of these old patterns and these old instructions that I could not relax. that I could never rely on things being easy, being easy felt dangerous, that I couldn't assume that I was ever safe, which meant I always had to work harder, I always had to be overly responsible, and I always had to stay vigilant. So this was not a mindset problem, this is a legacy wound. So legacy wounding often now, in this modern time will show up with women. So I'm going to name some of these and I want to tell them and I want you to just start checking in with yourself. Do any of these sound like me? So in high functioning women, the way legacy wounding now shows up is overworking to stay safe or continue to feel worthy. I constantly have to be doing something overworking, undercharging for your services because you need to stay invisible to be safe because being too visible might mean that you might be in danger. or undercharging for your services because you want to be acceptable. You don't want to rub anybody the wrong way. Difficulty receiving, even if it's, I have this awesome client, she's incredible, and it's hard for her to receive, it's even hard for her to receive a testimonial. If somebody's just telling her, you changed my life, that's hard for her to receive. Why? Because you don't want to be a burden or guilt around wealth. You start... finally breaking the poverty barrier that your family may have experienced and you have guilt around wealth. You don't want to feel like you're leaving your family behind. You don't want to feel like you're leaving your community behind and you definitely don't want to feel like you're out of touch or you can't be relatable anymore because you have this deep loyalty to your family and your community and you have a deep fear of being seen, fear of being judged, fear of being targeted and fear of being rejected. So I wanna say this very, very clearly, everything I just named, if you experience any of that, those are not character flaws. In fact, what they are is incredibly intelligent survival strategies. They've helped someone somewhere in your lineage, maybe even you when you were younger survive. But now, right now in this moment, they may be limiting your capacity to thrive. to live a life that feels fulfilling, that feels full of joy, to live a life that you can just feel so happy in. If you struggle to experience joy or that word just feels too powerful, like I don't even know what joy means, it could be because it was never safe for you to experience joy. It was never safe for your family to experience joy. So it's really important for you to understand that even though those survival strategies are intelligent and they were supportive for a very long time. they may now be limiting your capacity to thrive. for so many people, the energy of money ⁓ lives in our nervous system. think this is really important because biologically, ⁓ money is not just money. for a lot of folks, didn't have the luxury to say money is neutral, it's just this piece of paper. ⁓ Money is not just money, it represents safety and survival and stability and choice and protection and power. And our nervous system's job is very simple. I'm gonna keep you alive and I'm gonna do it as efficiently as possible. So if anywhere in your personal and your ancestral and your collective history, money was associated with loss or danger or instability, if it was associated with shame or threat, your nervous system probably learned that having more is not necessarily safer. that being visible is not necessarily safe and that your resources can get taken away or they can disappear. So even if today you are objectively safe, which is so many of the high functioning, highly productive women I work with, they're objectively safe in their bodies. Their bodies might still be living in history. I'm sharing all this with you again because I think it's really important for us to fully understand what's happening inside of our bodies. So I want to leave you with two questions to gently sit with this week. Before I do that though, let me just share one more thing. It doesn't have to be like this. This is not the way you always have to be. I'll tell you for a long time, there was nothing I could not understand why I felt so uncomfortable, so hyper-vigilant, so anxious, so overwhelmed. Every time I'd even just sit and look at my business numbers, and this is up until recently, up until like four or five years ago, I... Until I actually sat down and really explored and healed this legacy wounding that I carried, I could not sit with safety. And now I'm finally at a place where, yeah, money does feel neutral to me, but that's because I've done my work and I've been able to heal so much of that work. And so it doesn't have to be like this. There's a different way that's possible. You could create safety around money when you do your own legacy wound healing. So I'm to leave you with two questions to gently sit with this week. What financial stress, scarcity, or vigilance might your body be carrying that did not start with you? And what might become possible if you no longer had to live from that inheritance?

Dr. Vanessa Calderón: Okay, sweet friends, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. And if it landed with you, if it deeply resonated with you, want to invite you one more time to check out our next healing circle. It's called Resourced Wealth. Resourced Wealth is a small, intimate, healing-centered approach to money, power, and capacity for mission-driven women. This is not a surface level money mindset or strategy program. It's a graduate level exploration coupled with deep embodied integrative healing designed for mission-driven women to help you expand your capacity to hold more wealth, have a bigger impact, and do that without burning out. And we know it's incredibly effective. You can learn about the experience of other students who have come through the healing circle already on our website. The link to join the wait list and to learn more is in the show notes. Because listen, friends, the work you're here to do, it's gonna require resources. It requires time, it requires support. And yes, it requires money. And we need more conscious, compassionate women who are not afraid to hold both wealth and power and who know how to use that in service of something bigger than themselves. Our next healing circle starts Thursday, September twenty fourth. I would love to have you there.