Why Does Every Woman in My Family Struggle With Money?

Because money beliefs get handed down the same way accents do. Nobody sits you down and teaches it. Nobody signs anything. You absorb what the women around you believed about money before you were old enough to question any of it, and then you spend thirty years running a program you never chose.

I call them Poverty Treaties. And if you look at your mother, and her mother, and the aunt everybody worries about, you'll usually find the same three or four clauses running through all of them.

Where mine got signed

My mom waitressed at a truck stop. We were very, very poor. The kind of poor where the lights get cut off and dinner is plain bread and nobody makes a comment about it. She used to pay people to take my sister and me to church because she couldn't get us there herself.

Nobody handed me a pen. But somewhere in that house I signed my name to a few things:

Money is scarce. Money is stress. People like us don't get to have it.

I didn't decide any of that. I was a kid. I watched a woman I loved brace herself at the end of every month and my nervous system wrote it down as fact.

Why it doesn't go away when you make more money

Then I went and did the thing you're supposed to do. Seventeen years on air. Radio, television, real markets, my face on billboards across Atlanta. From the outside I made it out.

The treaty came with me the entire way.

Here's the part I need you to hear, because it's the part that confuses women who are already earning well. A Poverty Treaty does not care what you make. It caps what you believe you're allowed to keep. My income changed and my body never got the memo. I still checked prices I had no reason to check. I still felt that quiet bracing at the end of the month like the lights might go out tonight. I could run a room of thousands of people and I still couldn't say a number to a client without my voice going up at the end like I was asking permission.

That's what makes it so hard to spot. You think a raise will fix it. Then you get the raise and the feeling is still sitting there in your chest, so you decide the problem must be you.

The clause that keeps you stuck the longest

Loyalty.

Having more than your mother feels like leaving her behind.

Nobody ever says this out loud, and almost every woman I work with is carrying it. If the women who raised you went without, then doing well starts to feel like a betrayal of them. Like you're saying their whole life was a failure by succeeding at the thing they couldn't.

So you find a way to give it back. There's always a mechanism. A business you sabotage at month eight. An investment you don't research. A relative who needs it right when you got ahead. A price you drop before anybody asked. You will stay level with the women who came before you, and you'll do it without ever once making a conscious decision.

The second signature

For a lot of us there's another one, and it happened in a building with a cross on it.

Somewhere along the way poverty got rebranded as holiness. Nobody stood up and preached it. They just praised the woman who went without and got real quiet around the woman who did well. They taught you that service is unpaid, that a good woman is available, that asking for anything is the opposite of a servant's heart.

So now you've got the family clause and the church clause reinforcing each other, and both of them feel like virtue.

Poverty is not a spiritual gift. It's just broke with better branding.

How to tell a treaty from a conviction

This is the test I give women and it works every time.

A conviction survives you looking straight at it. You can hold it up, turn it around, examine where it came from, and it holds. It also gives you instructions. It tells you what to do next.

A treaty falls apart the second you examine it, and it never tells you anything. It just parks on your chest and stays there.

So ask yourself two questions about whatever you believe about money.

Who handed me this?

And was that person free?

That second one takes people apart. Look at whoever taught you how to feel about money and ask yourself honestly whether you'd trade lives with them. If the answer is no, you're carrying something that didn't work for the person who gave it to you either.

What actually clears it

Deciding to believe something different does not reach this. I know because I tried it for years after I knew better. I could recite every scripture about abundance and still feel my stomach drop when I said my price.

It doesn't live in your logic. It lives in your body. That drop in your stomach is the whole thing, and it's the floor it has to come out from.

What works is finding the actual sentence. Not the vague feeling, the sentence. Mine was "people like us don't get to have it," in my mom's kitchen, around age seven. Once I had the words and knew whose voice they came in, it stopped being a fact about the world and started being something that happened to a little girl a long time ago. That's when it moves.

And here's the reason I keep doing this work. A treaty runs both directions. Break it and you break it for everybody downstream. I have three daughters. They are not signing what I signed.

I taught a free class on exactly this. It's about an hour of my life and about thirty-five minutes of yours, and it walks through where this got installed and how it comes out.

Watch the class

And if you want to keep going, The Inheritance is where women do this work with me every month. You bring the belief. We take it out at the root, live.

Come see The Inheritance

Shannon Rose McVey is a faith-based wealth and identity coach, ThetaHealing® practitioner, and host of Dichotomy with Shannon. She spent seventeen years on air in mainstream media before walking away to do this work. She helps Christian women clear the religious and generational conditioning behind their money blocks. Learn more at ShannonRoseMcVey.com.