Money shame can sneak in even when we’re doing “okay” on paper. It shows up as guilt, self-doubt, or that quiet feeling of never being enough.
In this episode, I sit down with Meghan SeeKamp, certified hypnotherapist and founder of Ingram’s Path, to explore the hidden connection between money shame and power. Together, we unpack how childhood lessons shape adult money habits, and understanding what holds us back is the first step toward lasting peace and confidence with money.
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Transcript
Hey, hey, hey, Savvy Squad. Welcome to another episode of the Dr. Sev Talks Money, YouTube and podcast, where we empower women to manage money confidently. Ever caught yourself thinking, I am bad with money, or I always make money mistakes? that could be money. Shame that sneaky, quiet, and insidious voice.
We’ll talk about where it comes from, how it hides in plain sight, and what it really takes to feel free and safe with money again. So grab your tea, take a deep breath, and let’s dive in.
Today’s guest is Meghan SeeKamp, founder of Ingram’s Path and a certified hypnotherapist. She specializes in rapid transformational therapy where she helps people untangle the emotional roots of shame, uncover, and rewire the subconscious patterns that keep them stuck and reclaim their power.
Meghan, welcome to the Dr. Sev Talks Money podcast.
Thank you so much for having me. Welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here.
You are welcome. I’m looking forward to this discussion. Yes. So before we jump in, I like to lighten the atmosphere a little bit with an icebreaker. What’s something small or funny that recently made you feel abundant?
Even if it didn’t involve money?
What an interesting question. Let me think about that. Something small or funny that made me feel abundant.
I would have to say that I’ve been spending a lot of time, catching up with old friends.
And just seeing where they are and connecting on a deep level.
Is something that has made me feel abundant and wealthy because I have some amazing friends.
Yes, friends or community is one of the things that we sometimes undervalue. So can you introduce yourself to the audience?
Share a little bit about who you are and the work that you do.
Absolutely. So my name is Meghan SeeKamp and I am a certified rapid transformational therapy hypnotherapist. And I essentially help people translate the hidden patterns that are holding them back. And I got into this work almost by necessity.
I had a pretty average childhood. Uh, my parents loved me. I went to good schools. I never wanted for anything, and yet I had these belief systems that I wasn’t enough, and I found myself. On this kind of rollercoaster path where I had the same relationship with different faces and I had the same experience in different locations.
And I remember my mother wanted me to be the next Barbara Walters. I didn’t really want to, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was taught to be an obedient child, to be really compliant and. So I went to school, got a degree in journalism. I got my first big break. I moved across the country and disaster hit.
And I don’t know if you’ve ever had to live through three minutes of dead airtime, but I have. It’s not fun. And I lost my job . The meaning that I took from that experience was I should have known better. I should have seen it coming. And I started to catastrophize and look for worst case scenarios.
What I now know about the subconscious mind is that what you focus on, you get more of. And so I just expected things to go haywire, and that was the path. That I followed on my career. So I would have these high highs and then I would sabotage and I would come crashing down. And the shame was overwhelming.
I think if we skip ahead, there came this moment where I hit rock bottom and.
I realized that I was giving my power away to people who were committed to not understanding me, and it seemed like all the doorways were closing and I could only follow one path forward. And I started to follow that path. And I got one more breadcrumb and one more breadcrumb, and it led to another place.
And finally. I ended up meeting this woman and I worked for her, and she was unlike anybody I’d ever met. She did not have an ounce of want or need. She knew that she was brilliant, but she did not make anybody else feel inferior, and I learned so much from her how to conduct myself, and I realized that.
All the steps in my life, everything that I thought was a failure had actually brought me to this woman, to this place. Now, she was at the end of her career and she retired, and we were in the middle of COVID, and then my mother died and I had enough money to go back to school and become a hypnotherapist because I realized at that point that the subconscious mind was where I needed to look.
I needed to start to uncover and translate these hidden belief systems that were holding me back. And I went to school. I did very well. I started working for myself, and I don’t know about you, but there’s not a day that I am not grateful that I work for myself and I do what I love and that I help people.
My life has meaning and purpose, and now I help people uncover those shame patterns in themselves.
Yeah. So many people can identify with that journey that you just took us through. It may not have been through journalism, but that pattern of the shame something happening and we’re holding ourselves.
Accountable for that thing instead of looking at the thing for what it is, we start internalizing and think, I’m bad. I’m the problem. I’m the this. Mm-hmm. And I’m the that. So why do you think money carry so much shame for people even when they’re doing okay on the outside?
There’s so much that goes into that question because you could be looking at two different things.
We both know that money is simply a means of exchange, it’s a currency. And on the other hand, we can have these beliefs about ourselves. There’s something wrong with me. We could look at people in the news today, people who are very wealthy, and yet there you can see certain shame cycles that are taking place where they have this need to prove to other people that they are worthy.
And so there are three core universal wounds. One is, I am not enough. One is what I want, is not available to me. And the third one is if only I was younger, older, thinner. If I had a better education, if I lived in a better part of town, then all my problems would vanish. If only I had more money, then all my problems would disappear.
So we have this knowledge that money is simply a means of exchange, and then we have this belief there’s something wrong with me. I have to prove myself. I grew up in a family where if I didn’t get straight A’s, I was ignored. Or you learned that if there was something. Fragile and I needed rescue.
That’s when people paid attention to me. That’s when I got the love and the care and the safety that I needed. And so you can have an amazing life and still feel like there is something deeply wrong with you. And I worked with a lot of those people, people who made six figure salaries and.
It was never enough. Whatever they did, it was never ever enough. And so if you have this belief that if I make a hundred thousand dollars, I’m gonna be fine. I’m gonna be safe, I’m gonna be on Easy Street, and everybody’s gonna love me. And then you make a hundred thousand dollars and you haven’t done the inner work, you still have this deeply seated pattern that says.
I’m not allowed to make mistakes. ’cause when I do, everybody takes off. Everybody criticizes me, they pile on. I don’t have any friends. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, you still will behave in a specific way. If you have deep shame about money and you’ve learned, I’m not gonna look under that rock ’cause I don’t know what I’m gonna find.
So I’m just gonna ignore it. I’m gonna doom scroll. I’m gonna I’m not gonna look at my bank statements. I am, I’m gonna spend money that I don’t have because it makes me feel good. None of that will change unless you start to bring awareness to what it is that you’re actually doing on a daily basis.
Because that’s who you authentically are, how you show up every day, that’s who you authentically are.
Yeah. I love how you connected those dots. I know that you’ve seen how money sh shame show up in people. You mentioned some of them. Can you share a little bit more about how you see money shame showing up, in ways that people might not recognize, like in relationships, career decisions, or even health?
Absolutely. Money, she is not always obvious. There can be times when you don’t really see yourself overspending or you hear about an amazing job and you don’t go after it because you think, who’s gonna hire me? If, if it’s between me and Sev, they’re gonna pick her because she has more experience.
Or she just, she communicates better , with people, so I’m not even gonna try. What we know about disease, about health conditions is that a lot of it is brought on by stress, that chronic stress of, am I doing it right? And so when we. Start to spiral into these doomsday catastrophes.
One of my old specialties, we start to connect dots that shouldn’t be connected because what does our subconscious mind need to do? It needs to close loops, it needs to put a nice big bow. On a story, so if I can go back for just a second and talk about the subconscious. Subconscious is formed in the first seven years of our life, and as children our, brains are actually very different from an adult brain.
So as children, we experience the world through sensation and through emotion. Logic hasn’t kicked in yet. That comes later when we are teenagers and young adults. Our brain stops growing when we’re about 25, but our subconscious is formed in the first seven years of life. And our money story is actually pretty well shaped by the time that we’re seven.
So if you learned that mom and dad only fight about money. You now have a belief that money creates conflict, and that could create a lot of different feelings. It could create resentment or anxiety or stress or fear in you. And if you are not aware of that pattern, you will think that it’s something else.
Now, I also wanna state that we live in a grief phobic society. And that means we don’t wanna feel our feelings. We don’t want to really think about an outcome that we wanted that never happened. So we’ll say something like, oh, it wasn’t a big deal. Yeah, I’m okay. Yeah it’s okay. And we will avoid thinking about something that makes us feel bad.
And so we’ll just start suppressing the anger. And the shame in particular. And then someone might come to work with either one of us and say, yeah I don’t know what’s going on. And there’s just this massive confusion because you don’t know what’s going on. You haven’t tuned in to any of your own needs or values.
You just know that you’re not very good with money. Money makes you feel. Stupid. That was one of my big ones. In my family, my dad was a day trader when he retired, and I just remember all of these spreadsheets all over the floor, and my dad would get so angry and I associated investments with extraordinary amounts of stress.
My dad was never happy. It didn’t occur to me that he had a gambler’s mindset. So he invested in penny stocks, which are very volatile, and I just didn’t wanna deal with any of that. I didn’t start investing until I was over 40, and then I had so much shame over the fact that I didn’t do it right.
You’re supposed to start investing because of compounded interest when you’re in your twenties, and I never took advantage of any of that. So I didn’t like talking about money with anyone because it just brought up, she’s dumb. I don’t understand it, so I’m afraid I’m gonna be taken advantage of.
And so I could feel like a burning sensation on my stomach whenever money came up, and yet we know that you don’t have to be incredibly intelligent or blessed with inherited wealth to make your own fortune. You can simply invest small amounts of money consistently. And then let that money sit and compound over time and you’ll make money.
That’s it. It’s not this great big, complicated issue. And yet for me, I thought, people like me, they can’t do it. I don’t have the means, I don’t have the knowledge. And that’s how shame showed up
for me. Yeah. And that’s how it shows up for a lot of people, because again, you talk about the anger that you saw and you associated that with investing and
and unfortunately for us, we don’t apply logic that’s embedded in our brains. Right. And we can’t say, well, that is isolated. That doesn’t mean that’s what happens with investing for everyone, because that’s our model, that’s our money story that’s formed from seeing. And so a lot of people there are maybe, we mentioned even parents fighting.
The mom or the dad may go shopping when they get angry and, mm-hmm. So the child thinks if I get mad, shopping is going to help that, or that’s what I need to do when I get mad. So those associations, sometimes can be so embedded that it takes a lot of work to get rid of them and for us to not associate ourselves.
With the situation that’s happening. Just because I see that doesn’t mean I’m bad or I’m going to be bad because it’s not a mm-hmm. It’s not a me thing. It’s just a thing that happened and Absolutely. And it, it can take a lot of work to unwind that.
Yeah. So, just to briefly say with the subconscious mind, it filters information through three different layers.
So it deletes anything that does not line up with our values or belief system. It distorts usually through emotion, especially through anger, and it over generalizes. So if you worked with a financial planner once and you found that person to be lacking, you, then take that one experience. And you say, oh, they’re, yeah, I don’t need them.
They’re not gonna help me. But we do that because our subconscious mind is like a CCT TV camera. It records everything. Our conscious mind doesn’t have the capacity to do that, so it has to naturally filter out anything that we do not deem important. So the stories that we tell are ultimately what we think are important in that moment, and when I realized that I started to focus on things that actually were important for me.
Yeah. Yes. This has been a deep conversation so far, and listeners, as you are mulling over the discussion that we’re having, I want to take a quick pause and remind you that if you are enjoying today’s episode, the best way to support the show is to share it and leave us a rating, and don’t forget to subscribe.
If you’re watching us on YouTube, there’s a lot more resources. That you can get access to continue the discussion. And I’m going to be sharing Meghan’s website and other information where you can follow her to dig deeper into this topic. Meghan, you’ve said that money is more about capacity than numbers.
Can you explain what you mean by that and how someone can start expanding their capacity?
So what I mean by. Capacity is what do we have the ability to hold in any given moment? So when I was younger, I did not have the capacity to deal with difficult situations related to finances and
when we’re able to stop and pause and really contemplate what it is that we need in that moment, what is the story that we’re telling ourselves about our finances? We start to get clear on what is important and then we can start to untangle how we show up. When these topics come up for us. So I think I shared earlier one of my go-tos was to avoid what I didn’t like.
I wanted to bypass anything that made me feel uncomfortable. I wanted to leap into a fantasy world because that’s how I learned to self-soothe. That’s how my parents. Self soothed. And it’s a very common, way that we learn to make ourselves feel better in the moment. So when we are feeling overwhelmed, our nervous systems will start to.
Take us to a very specific place. It might be flight, the part of us that wants to escape. We might get very defensive about our finances. We may people please, we may compare ourselves to other people. Or we may just bury our heads in the sand. We build. Capacity one day at a time. The first step is to become aware of how you show up, how money makes you feel, and then I would suggest you start to really unpack that story either through Word association
or. Trying to uncover what emotions start coming up for you. Have you blamed anyone you know, are you still holding onto the fact that Uncle Joe was really stingy with money and he didn’t give you a loan when you asked him to invest in your business? Are you still blaming your mom for not teaching you
how to budget? It’s much easier for us to blame other people and to
to judge them and almost make them into 2D villains because it’s easier on our ego. If you look at at money as an energy.
As a friend, like you gave it a personality, would money want to spend time with me if I thought that it was gross or
filthy in some way?
Or would it wanna spend time with me if I actually valued it And I wanted to have a conversation. I treated it with respect. I thought of it as being able to do good in the world.
I had to uncover all of those different entanglements. And once I did. I started to show up differently. I wasn’t looking for money to save me. I didn’t see money as something that was keeping me from my dreams. And that is a huge lesson that I’m sure you have to deal with a lot of your clients as well.
That drama triangle where something has happened to me. And now I need someone to either rescue me or I see them as the person who’s keeping me from my dreams. Yeah. And the subconscious mind, it can’t hold conflicting thoughts. So if I put both my hands out here, my right hand is my dreams and my left hand are all the obstacles in my way.
You can’t have both. You either aren’t focused on. Your dreams ’cause you’re focused on the obstacles or you’re focused on your dreams and you’re aware that there are obstacles, but it’s not your primary focus.
And so for me, that was how I started to build capacity around money because it was about my actions, not. These thoughts that I thought were true which weren’t. They were someone else’s truth.
Yeah. If we, if we learn how to befriend money it makes such a difference. Because for the most part, we attract what we think and if we think it’s dirty.
It’s bad. There’s this popular saying, money is the root of all evil. The Bible. Did not say that. It said the love of money because. We love money so much that we hurt people to get it. That’s a different thought pattern. And so we think money is evil, money is dirty, rich people are awful, and so I don’t want to be rich people, so I’m going to sabotage myself.
Well, you probably don’t say that, but you do that to. Not get the riches because you don’t want to be considered rich and part of the those evil people. Mm-hmm. So, yes. Um, I know we’ve unpacked a lot here today. And again, I’m gonna be sharing Meghan’s information so you can connect with her and have more discussions.
You can hire her to talk through anything that you are going through that you think. Will help you to unpack those things so you can befriend money and have money work for you rather than against you. So what is one practical step someone can take today to begin shifting their relationship with money without trying to fix everything at once?
Yeah. If you try to fix everything at once your subconscious will implode. So I would say, what are you most afraid of? And I know that’s probably not the answer that people wanna hear, but the thing that you are most afraid of that is what is truly keeping you stuck. So if it’s, you’re afraid to look at your bank balance
making time in your calendar every week to look at that balance. And then to note what are the emotions that are coming up for me? And just make note of it and then start to see the pattern. What do I wanna do once I have this anxiety? Do I wanna go on Instagram and doom scroll and see if I can buy something that makes me feel better?
Is it that I’m afraid of? Of emptiness. That was a big one for me. People would say, why do you want money? And I would say, freedom. And they’re like, great. Now that you have freedom, what does that give you? And eventually what most people want is security and choice. They wanna have more than two choices so that it feels like it’s a fulfilling choice.
But if you associate freedom with a kind of clean slate or emptiness like I did, then that can be terrifying. So just exploring where these stories take you in a very gentle way. Can do more for you than anything else.
Yeah. And be kind to yourself as Meghan used that word, gentle. Be kind to yourself.
Yeah. We tend to be so hard on ourselves and we need to. Treat ourselves the way you treat somebody else. The thoughts we think and the words we say to ourselves, those are words. Sometimes we would not say to somebody else, I’m stupid, I’m dumb, no, no, no, you’re not stupid.
You may have made a misstep with your finances and who hasn’t. Be gentle with yourself as you continue to unpack. And learn how to make money your friend. So what are some final words that you’d like to share with our listeners before we talk about how they can connect with you?
The subconscious mind I found holds the key to your worldview. How you think of the world comes down to your subconscious. Beliefs. And yet we learned this worldview from our caretakers, our teachers if we went to church, religious leaders, our friends, a and we were given a role to play in a script to follow.
The thing is, is that we didn’t choose that it was given to us. And so. Whatever story you feel that you’ve created around money, you can uncreate that story by thinking different thoughts and change happens the moment that you decide that you’re ready for something different.
Yes, I love that and I love that connection . so, Meghan, tell us, , how listeners can connect with you and how they can learn more about the work that you’re doing.
So you can find me on my website www.ingramspath.com. Or you can find me on LinkedIn. I am the only Meghan SeeKamp there. So, easy to find. And I work one-on-one with people doing either deep dives through hypnotherapy or through compassionate inquiry coaching.
Uh, Meghan, thank you so much for coming on our show and sharing such powerful and compassionate stories and conversation. Your insights on money, shame and emotional. Healing are a reminder that real financial freedom starts within.
Friends, thank you so much for having me. Please share this episode with someone who could use a little encouragement on their own journey. It really only takes a spark to get the flame going. So until next time, this is Dr. Sev saying, see you.
