When I was in eleventh grade, I took an AP art class with a wonderful teacher, Mr. Do. To my surprise, part of the class involved figure drawing with a nude model—an adult woman who stood in the center of the room while a group of deeply uncomfortable high school students attempted to draw her.
After our first session, Mr. Do walked around looking at our work. Then he pointed out something that mortified all of us. Most of the body had been drawn with one consistent pencil weight. But when we reached the breasts and genitals, something changed. Some of us had pressed far too hard, rendering those areas with an intensity completely out of proportion to the rest of the body. Others had done the opposite, barely sketching them at all.
Because those parts were taboo to us, we couldn’t simply see them as parts of a whole. We exaggerated or erased. We pressed too hard or barely touched the page.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how often we do the same thing with money.
Money and sex occupy strangely similar places in our culture. We’re not supposed to talk about them, and yet they’re everywhere. They drive enormous amounts of human behavior while remaining shrouded in shame, fantasy, judgment, and secrecy. And both subjects invite all-or-nothing thinking.
With sex, you can either be too much or not enough. A slut or a prude. Too experienced to be respectable or too innocent to be cool.
Money carries its own impossible binaries. If you have too little, people may look down on you. If you have too much, people may resent you. We want money but don’t want to be associated with wanting it. We criticize the rich while fantasizing about becoming rich ourselves—and then, should we actually acquire wealth, we may go to great lengths not to be perceived as wealthy.
Different people become sensitized to different sides of that divide. For me, the more charged side was wealth—or, more precisely, what my own family wealth might say about who I was.
A Hidden Inheritance
My grandfather came to the United States as a Holocaust survivor and eventually built wealth through furniture manufacturing, which he then invested in commercial real estate. He was always generous with his family, and after he died, my mother inherited part of what he had created.
For most of my life, I didn’t think of myself as an inheritor or a beneficiary of generational wealth. Those words conjured families I read about in books or saw in movies. I didn’t associate them with my own real, messy, everyday family.
And, if I’m honest, I didn’t particularly want to.
I didn’t want to be perceived as spoiled or entitled. I didn’t want my parents to think I was overly interested in what I might someday receive. So one way I protected myself from those identities was simply not to look too closely. I didn’t ask many questions, and because I didn’t ask questions, I didn’t learn very much about money.
Then, in my late forties, circumstances forced me to engage with this part of my life more directly. My parents needed me to become involved in some of the administrative work surrounding the family assets, and suddenly I was dealing with accounts, transfers, accountants, filings, and advisors whose roles I barely understood.
I found the whole thing enormously overwhelming. At first, I interpreted that overwhelm as evidence that I just wasn’t good at this stuff. Maybe I didn’t have the kind of brain that understood finance, investments, or legal structures.
Eventually, though, I began to understand that something more emotional was happening. I wasn’t simply learning a set of unfamiliar tasks. I was being asked to inhabit a part of my identity I had spent years keeping at a distance. My nervous system seemed to experience that rupture in self-concept as a threat, and I froze.
What made that realization especially striking was that I’m a therapist. By that point, I had spent years shining a light on the hidden rooms of my own life: family dynamics, relationships, trauma, ambition, shame, and the stories I carried about myself. I thought I’d explored them all. And yet here was an entire room I had somehow left in the dark.
When the Room Became Visible
The shift began when my mother suggested I meet with a real estate advisor she had worked with for years. I’d heard his name many times but had almost no idea what he actually did. I pictured an old, stuffy man in a suit. Instead, when he appeared on Zoom, he was younger than I was, informal and warm.
“I’ve been waiting for this moment,” he told me. Then he started using language I had never heard before: “You’re the rising generation.” “You’re essentially running a tiny family office.” “You’re part of the great wealth transfer.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, so afterward I Googled everything. I’m something of a research nerd once a subject becomes personally relevant, and soon I was falling down a rabbit hole. I found books, podcasts, advisors, researchers, conferences, and entire communities organized around the psychological and relational experience of wealth.
It felt like someone had turned on the lights in a room where I had already been living. The room hadn’t suddenly appeared. I could simply see it now.
And once I could see it, I began to understand something else: looking away from money had never made me less affected by it. It had simply made me less able to engage with it consciously.
When Looking Away Costs You Agency
Nine months before that conversation, my husband had been asking me to meet with a financial planner. He wanted to think seriously about retirement: whether it was possible, when it might happen, and what kind of future the two of us could build together.
I agreed that this was important. And then somehow, for ages, I didn’t make the meeting happen. I didn’t experience myself as refusing. I wasn’t consciously thinking, I don’t want to talk about money. It was more like: Yes, absolutely, we should do that. And then I never prioritized it.
That’s one of the strange things about avoidance. It doesn’t always announce itself as avoidance. It can feel like distraction, busyness, procrastination, or something that mysteriously never makes it to the top of the list.
Eventually, my husband got me into the planner’s office. Almost immediately, I felt myself disappearing.
The planner began talking about finances, and I was afraid I wouldn’t understand him. I felt the familiar urge to space out. Then he started asking us direct questions about our assets and income, and I became evasive. I qualified. I circled. I minimized. I struggled to answer straightforward questions straightforwardly.
Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, I finally understood what was happening. I was ashamed.
Naming my family wealth clearly meant confronting forms of security I hadn’t earned. It meant acknowledging that I had protections my husband didn’t have. It brought up guilt, unfairness, privilege, and all of the moral meaning I had attached to those things.
Until that moment, I had hidden those feelings so effectively from myself that I didn’t even know I was hiding them. But the cost of keeping them hidden had become obvious.
My husband and I were sitting in an office trying to imagine our future together. What did we want our life to look like? How much did we want to work? What mattered enough to spend money on? What kind of freedom or security did we want to create?
And instead of showing up as a full participant—someone who knew what she wanted, could say what mattered to her, and felt entitled to help shape the life we were building—I was dissociated and evasive.
The money I had avoided examining was running the meeting.
That experience changed the way I thought about money shame. I had previously imagined it as something private and emotional: an uncomfortable set of feelings I might or might not decide to unpack. But looking away had consequences. It had left me less able to participate actively in decisions about my own life and the life of my family.
The Stories Women Learn About Money
As I began examining this dynamic in myself, I also started recognizing versions of it in my therapy clients.
For the sake of client confidentiality, I won’t tell any individual client’s story here. But across years of clinical work, I’ve encountered recurring patterns in how women’s fears about what money might say about them can shape their relationships to financial agency.
There is the woman who marries into significant family wealth and fears being perceived as a gold digger. She keeps her distance from the money, avoids becoming fully acquainted with the couple’s finances, and hesitates to ask questions about decisions that materially shape her own marriage and future.
There is the woman whose inheritance is controlled through structures that require a trustee’s approval before she can access money—sometimes while male relatives have been given far more direct control over comparable family assets. Over time, passivity can become adaptive: if someone else ultimately holds the authority, why invest deeply in understanding a system you’re not empowered to control? Often it isn’t until well into adulthood that she realizes she can hire her own advisor, educate herself, and begin asserting herself more actively.
And there is the woman who inherits wealth but builds an adult identity inside professional or social cultures where wealth itself is treated with deep suspicion. Privilege guilt can become so entangled with morality that using her resources in service of her own ambitions begins to feel suspect, even as male relatives with similar advantages may feel freer to fund businesses, make investments, or pursue opportunities of their own.
Each of these scenarios illustrates a way that women can encounter moralized stories about what their interest in money might mean.
Asking questions can risk looking greedy. Wanting access can feel entitled. Using financial privilege toward personal ambition can collide with an identity built around goodness. Looking away offers protection from those feared identities, but it also comes at a cost.
And this is where the subject becomes much bigger than financial literacy.
Money Is One Place We Practice Wanting
I’m not arguing that every woman—whether or not she is a beneficiary of generational wealth— should become fascinated by investing, maximize her net worth, or make accumulating money a central life goal. Money isn’t the only resource that gives us choices, and it certainly isn’t the only ingredient in a meaningful life.
But money is one of the places where our desires become concrete.
Where do I want to live? What kind of work do I want to do? How much do I want to work? What do I want my days to feel like? What support do I need? What am I willing to tolerate? What do I want to give my children? What do I want to create? What do I want to say no to? What would enough look like?
Those aren’t fundamentally financial questions. They’re questions about a life. But whether we like it or not, money intersects with almost every one of them.
And if a woman has learned that asking about money makes her greedy, that wanting makes her selfish, that knowing too much makes her calculating, or that asserting herself makes her entitled, it becomes very easy to keep one whole category of wanting vague.
That vagueness doesn’t necessarily stay confined to money. The same capacity that allows us to say, I want to understand this account, or I want a voice in this decision, is closely related to the capacity to say, I need more support. I disagree. This arrangement isn’t working for me. I want something different. This matters to me.
Money is not the whole story of agency. But it is one of the places where agency gets practiced.
And agency, to me, means more than independence. It means being sufficiently connected to yourself that you can know what you want and need, tolerate knowing it, communicate it to other people, and make choices that move your life in that direction.
That is why turning toward money has ultimately felt less like becoming “more financial” and more like becoming less divided from myself.
Giving Money Its Proper Weight
Since beginning to explore this part of my own life, I’ve also met more women willing to speak openly about theirs: women who inherited wealth, women who married into it, women who created it, and women whose financial lives look very different from mine but who recognize some of the same shame, confusion, gratitude, ambivalence, responsibility, and fear.
There has been something unexpectedly liberating about discovering that there are words for experiences I had never thought to name. Naming this part of my life hasn’t made money loom larger. If anything, it has allowed money to become more proportional.
Which brings me back to that art class.
When something is taboo, we lose our ability to see it accurately. We press too hard or barely touch the page. We exaggerate or erase. We glorify or villainize. We obsess or look away.
But neither extreme lets us see what is actually there.
Money doesn’t need to become the center of the drawing, and it doesn’t need to disappear from it. It is one real part of a much larger human life.
The goal is to give it its proper pencil weight: to look at it clearly enough to know what is true, to notice the stories we’ve attached to it, and to decide for ourselves what role we want it to play.
Because once we can see what is actually on the page, we have a much better chance of choosing what we want the whole picture to become.