The key to a healthy relationship with money starts with having a healthy relationship with yourself. Otherwise, our unconscious emotional wounds distort our thoughts, feelings, and actions in ways so predictable that you’d think they were following a script written by a sadistic playwright. Regardless of whether your tax bracket puts you in the ramen noodle club or among the caviar connoisseurs, we all need to roll up our sleeves and do some inner work. We need to heal those traumas that lead to a distorted relationship with ourselves so that love can flow through us and into our financial decisions.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson I’ve learned from the Enneagram is this: Every time I’ve seriously hurt someone (including myself), it was because I was acting out an unhealthy aspect of my type. And when someone wounded me deeply, they were acting out an unhealthy trait of theirs. As the saying goes, “hurt people hurt people,” and one of the most effective ways to hurt someone is with misspent money.

For example, my father’s journey up the corporate ladder to CEO, while impressive on paper, came at a high cost to those he loved. Growing up in a poor immigrant family with an alcoholic father shed light on his behaviors. These traumatic experiences left deep scars, leading him to seek solace and validation in wealth and status as an Enneagram Type Three. Understanding this offered me an easier path to forgiveness and compassion.

It’s a poignant reminder that financial success, no matter how grand, cannot heal our deepest emotional wounds or bring true happiness. Had my father been equipped with the tools for emotional healing and self-reflection, his life’s trajectory—and mine—might have been markedly different.

I’d love to say I learned from his mistakes, but I swung to the opposite extreme. Reacting against my dad’s example, I took a vow of poverty as a monk and avoided money like it was radioactive. My approach was just as destructive as his, just on the other end of the spectrum.

The truth is, we all have to wrestle with inner demons. Our personalities form around Childhood Wounds that shape our relationships with money and everything else. These early traumas often drive our self-sabotaging behaviors and create much of our adult suffering, especially in our financial lives. It’s as if we’re all carrying invisible backpacks filled with emotional weights, wondering why life feels so heavy sometimes.

Simply put, if we don’t learn to master our money, we will be mastered by our money.

It’s time to unpack those emotional backpacks and learn how to navigate our financial lives with more wisdom and compassion. And the even better news: You don’t need to be perfect or solve all your issues to be a money master. Making steady progress is enough because healing on any level positively impacts our lives.

First, we must bring those unconscious Childhood Wounds into conscious awareness. Next, we must offer self-compassion and forgiveness for those traumas and learn to have a healthy relationship with ourselves. The scars from those wounds may always linger, but we can stop transmitting the pain of that trauma. It’s like surfing—you can’t control the waves, but you can learn to ride them and not get pulled under. (You might still wipe out occasionally, but you’ll look cooler doing it.)

Since everyone has a unique life situation and childhood traumas, there is no one-size-fits-all formula for emotional and spiritual health. There are, however, nine trauma response patterns around which our egos form and create the lens through which we see the world. Understanding these patterns is the first step to a healthy relationship with yourself and money.

The decoder ring for this inner journey is the Enneagram, a robust and well-researched tool for understanding our personality structure. The Enneagram guides us into the dark corners where our money monsters lurk, feeding on our fears and Childhood Wounds like they’re at an all-you-can-eat buffet of neuroses. Confronting our inner darkness is necessary to tame our money monster and become a money master—a person with a healthy relationship with money who ethically builds wealth and uses their abundance as a tool for connection, love, and service.

At its core, the Enneagram helps explain who we are, why we are the way we are, and what our unique core fear is that drives our unhealthy behavior. Once we know the answers to those questions, right action becomes easier to discern, and better money habits are likely to follow.

Doug Lynam graduated at the top of his class from Marine Corps Officer Candidate School in 1995, then turned down his commission to become a Benedictine monk. During his 20-year monastic journey, he headed the mathematics department at a prestigious private school while helping his community recover from bankruptcy. After leaving the monastery in 2017, he joined LongView Asset Management in Santa Fe, New Mexico—a sustainability-focused B Corp—where he helped manage over a quarter-billion in assets. A sought-after authority on conscious wealth creation, Doug is the author of From Monk to Money Manager and Taming Your Money Monster: Nine Paths to Money Mastery with the Enneagram.