As a psychotherapist who works with women navigating complex family systems, I've found myself paying increasing attention to conversations in wealth advising spaces. Much of the discussion centers around questions of purpose, stewardship, responsibility, and philanthropy. These are important conversations.
But when I think about the type of client I tend to work with — women who think, feel, and care deeply, and who often put the needs of others before their own — I find myself wondering if there’s another conversation we need to be having first, before I support them in how they navigate wealth responsibly, contribute to the world, or build a sense of purpose.
Because something I've often seen in these women is that they've unconsciously come to believe that, due to their financial privilege, their worthiness must be earned rather than assumed.
I’ve become particularly interested in this dynamic, not only because I see it in the clients I work with, but also because I eventually discovered it in myself.
For most of my life, I rarely talked about my family's wealth.
It wasn't because I consciously felt ashamed of where I came from. On the contrary, I'm deeply proud of my family's story. Rather, I carried a subtle but persistent instinct to keep this part of myself out of view, even in my own therapy as a client. It felt safer to be known through the parts of my identity that seemed more universally relatable: my work, my struggles, my relationships, my ambitions, my fears. In hindsight, I can see that I was anticipating a particular kind of rejection — one that felt difficult to speak about because it was not a form of rejection many people would feel inclined to sympathize with. The possibility of being judged for having privilege felt embarrassing enough; admitting that I feared being judged for it felt even more embarrassing.
Looking back now, I think I was carrying something many people from financially privileged backgrounds carry, whether they speak about it openly or not: a fear that belonging may become conditional once certain facts about us are known.
What strikes me is that I spent years looking away from this dynamic despite the fact that so much of my personal healing journey and professional work has revolved around recognizing and untangling the ways human beings learn to make belonging conditional. I simply didn't realize that my relationship with wealth was one of the places this pattern was subtly operating.
Early in my psychotherapy career, I worked extensively in the world of mind-body healing for stress-related chronic pain. My own recovery from chronic migraine led me to the work of Dr. John Sarno, and that immersion came to shape both my clinical work and my understanding of healing. Sarno observed a personality pattern common among many of his patients that he referred to as "goodism."
Goodism, in Sarno's formulation, is the tendency to organize one's identity around being good: responsible, conscientious, accommodating, selfless, easy to get along with. On the surface, these qualities appear admirable. Yet Sarno observed that the relentless pressure to maintain this identity came at a significant emotional cost.
People who feel compelled to be good can become chronically self-erasing. They suppress anger, override needs, and become hypervigilant about disappointing others. Beneath their kindness and conscientiousness often lives an underlying fear: If I stop being good, will I still be loved? Will I still belong?
Over time, I came to grasp experientially something I had long understood intellectually as a therapist: that in order to heal, human beings need unconditional positive regard not only from others, but from themselves. The relationship we have with ourselves matters. The way we speak to ourselves matters. The conditions we place upon our own worthiness matter.
One of the most important chapters of my own healing involved discovering just how relentlessly critical my relationship with myself had been. At one point during my recovery, I developed a simple exercise. It was inspired by mirror-gazing practices I had encountered in self-help literature, but it took on a life of its own because of something I noticed about my cats.
I realized that I loved them unconditionally.
I did not love them because they were productive. I did not love them because they contributed financially to the household. I did not love them because they were disciplined, thin, successful, emotionally evolved, or endlessly pleasant. I loved them because they existed. When I looked at them, I did not evaluate whether they had earned affection that day. My love for them arose naturally and effortlessly.
So, I began experimenting with looking at myself through the same eyes. Not through the eyes of evaluation, but through the eyes of tenderness. Not through the question, "Am I good enough?" but through the recognition that my worthiness as a living being is intrinsic rather than earned.
This was not a philosophical exercise. It was a physical healing process.
As I gradually changed the way I related to myself—from relentless criticism toward something closer to unconditional love—my nervous system began to change. The fear, pressure, and internal threat I had been living under started to soften. The intense migraine pain began to subside. The experience felt miraculous, not because I adopted a new belief system, but because I witnessed firsthand the profound relationship between self-judgment, nervous system activation, and physical suffering.
It taught me something that has remained foundational to my work ever since: self-acceptance is not just a nice idea. It is a biological prerequisite to healing.
And yet, despite all of this work, I recently discovered that I still had a blind spot. And that blind spot was wealth. Or more specifically, my own relationship to wealth.
But because my assumptions, shame, and biases around wealth were so deeply internalized, it took something seemingly unrelated to bring them into view: my experience as a Jew.
Over the past decade of increasing political polarization, I came to identify strongly as a progressive. Then, after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, something shifted in the progressive bubble around me. People I had long considered part of my community not only expressed a striking lack of empathy for Jewish victims of the attack, but I found myself confronted with demands that, as a Jew, I must pass a political litmus test to prove I still belonged in progressive spaces. Suddenly, acceptance of my ethnic identity felt conditional in a way I had never fully experienced before.
What unsettled me most was not simply the rejection itself. It was the realization that many of the same people who spoke passionately about diversity, inclusion, and tolerance seemed unable to recognize the conditional nature of their own acceptance. The message often felt something like this: you may belong, but first prove that you are one of the good ones.
As I reflected on this dynamic, I began noticing something uncomfortable. The contradiction I was seeing around me pointed me toward a parallel contradiction within myself. I had spent years advocating unconditional self-acceptance while unconsciously maintaining an exception clause for another part of my identity: my relationship with wealth.
I had absorbed the idea that this was the one area in which acceptance needed to be earned. That before I could feel fully at ease with this part of myself, I first needed to prove that I was responsible enough, generous enough, humble enough, socially conscious enough. In other words, I had unconsciously turned wealth into yet another arena in which I needed to establish that I was one of the good ones.
The irony was hard to miss.
After all, much of my own healing had come from recognizing that the relentless pressure to prove my worth was itself part of what was making me sick. I had learned, both personally and professionally, that self-judgment creates suffering, that chronic self-surveillance keeps the nervous system on high alert, and that healing often begins when we stop treating ourselves as problems to be solved.
Yet here I was, still maintaining one final exception.
Why did I believe that this part of me had to earn what every other part of me deserved automatically?
That question has changed the way I think about both wealth and therapy. Because when I sit with a client—regardless of their race, culture, gender, wealth, privilege, hardship, or life circumstances—the fundamental task is never helping them prove that they are good.
Therapy is not a process of constructing moral legitimacy or proving that one deserves belonging. The deeper work is helping someone discover who they are when they no longer have to earn their right to belong.
So, when my clients begin exploring philanthropy as a source of purpose, I like to pause and get curious before moving straight into action. The question, for me, is not whether generosity matters. It does. Giving can be a beautiful expression of our values and our desire to contribute to something larger than ourselves.
The question is what psychological soil it grows from. I have come to believe that the most authentic and sustainable good we do in the world emerges not from the belief that we must prove our goodness, but from the recognition that our worth as human beings was never contingent upon proving it in the first place.
Perhaps that is why the question that stays with me is no longer, "How do I become one of the good ones?"
It is:
"Who am I when I no longer have to earn my right to belong?"
Anna Holtzman is a psychotherapist in private practice. She works with thoughtful women navigating complex family systems, significant responsibility, and questions of identity, belonging, and self-trust.