Dopamine, Pain, Pleasure x Your Bank Account with Chantel Chapman

In the third episode of our series on money as medicine, we're chatting with Chantel Chapman of Trauma of Money, to understand how our collective and individual traumas affect our financial health.

Learn more about the Trauma of Money here and follow Chantel here to follow along with her myriad of fascinating projects!

What actually impacts our relationship with money? Generational and intergenerational trauma, relational trauma, societal trauma, systemic trauma, social contexts, laws of nature, and financial literacy.
— Chantel Chapman
The main narrative of consumerism is, if I ever feel defective in any way, inadequate, bored, lonely, any sort of pain, something’s wrong with me and I need to fix it right away. There’s a lot of convenient solutions that consumerism offers to fix pain. This narrative leads to this hedonic treadmill of chasing pleasure.
A lot of the stuff we see around manifesting is misleading, and it’s just actually serving the narrative of consumerism in many ways.
I absolutely believe in a scarcity mindset because consumerism tells us oftentimes that we don’t have enough and we have to be seeking more.
Actually, there are similarities to what happens to the brain when we’re in trauma and when we’re in scarcity so let’s map those similarities and talk about them.
— Chantel Chapman
Even after I broke up with that relationship, I still did not have the awareness of the connection between desiring that and trauma.
— Chantel Chapman
Through some experiences of trauma rising to the surface, I started noticing that a lot of the decisions I made in my life were really connected to safety and money.
— Chantel Chapman
I felt so connected to this person that I was helping in their recovery, my family member, and to the men in this house. I just didn’t choose heroin, but what did I choose? I chose to be a workaholic, I chose to overspend, or I chose to be incredibly codependent. Even me being at this house, helping these people is me being in my addiction.
— Chantel Chapman
Our approach in Trauma of Money is (1) decrease shame and (2) increase discernment. Everything we’re doing is either working at the level of decreasing shame or increasing discernment.
— Chantel Chapman
When you review and recycle information and it builds upon itself, you can build this lush world, perspective, and view and you start to make connections that you never would have before.
— Michelle Pellizzon
Mental accounting is something that we can use to our advantage when it comes to money, but it also can be a major disservice.
— Chantel Chapman
Pay attention to the states of your nervous system. We don’t just have a brain, we also have a body and they communicate with each other.
— Chantel Chapman

COVERED IN THIS EPISODE

  • Where does money trauma come from?

  • Do poverty and traumatic experiences have anything to do with crime tolerance?

  • Dr. Anna Lembke’s DOPAMINE Framework: D-Data, O-Objective, P-Problems, A-Abstinence, M-Mindfulness, I-Insight, N-Next Steps, E-Exploration

  • The approach in Trauma of Money: (1) decrease shame; (2) increase discernment

  • How to approach our relationship with money through the lens of healing our individual trauma

  • How can we use mental accounting to our advantage?

  • Paying attention to the states of your nervous system, and understanding the connection between the brain and the body and how we interact with money

Resources and People Mentioned

  • Follow Chantel Chapman on Instagram @chantelchapman

  • Follow The Trauma of Money on Instagram @traumaofmoney

  • Visit The Trauma of Money’s website here

  • Visit Dr. Anna Lembke’s website here

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