Inherited money stories

In early 2025 I heard Gail Wong speak during F5 Collective’s female founder programme, and her words mirrored so much of what I’ve been exploring. She talked about psycho-breaking, the process of becoming aware of the beliefs we’ve inherited around money and safety and slowly beginning to loosen their grip.

What stayed with me was the reminder that these stories didn’t come from nowhere but often from survival, and that instead of judging ourselves for carrying them, we can meet them with gentleness and curiosity.

She shared the line “The wound is where the light enters”, a reminder that our pain and our deepest hurts can also be our greatest sources of transformation.

SIX might look like a share trading platform, but to me it’s something more meaningful: a space to rethink how we relate to money, and a way for people, especially women, to make financial choices that reflect who they are and what they care about. It’s about unlearning the stories we’ve inherited about money, success and power, and rewriting them in ways that feel aligned, grounded and just.

Our money stories are rarely just our own, shaped as they are by silence, by survival and by systems we didn’t choose, and healing begins when we start naming them.

Through a systems lens

Here I step back from the story to look at the system it belongs to, how the same pattern shows up elsewhere, and where it sits in the Coherence Framework.

Money stories are some of the earliest we inherit and some of the least examined. They arrive through what was said at the kitchen table and, more often, through what wasn’t: the tension when a bill arrived, the way someone’s shoulders set when money came up, and the unspoken rule that you don’t ask, don’t boast and don’t want too much. A child learns what money means about safety and worth long before they learn what it is.

Every system that follows tends to reinforce it. School teaches almost nothing about money, so the family story goes unchallenged, and relationships replay it in who earns, who spends, who worries and who gets to decide. Workplaces lean on it too, especially in purpose-driven work, where the belief that caring about the mission means not asking to be paid well quietly turns values into a discount. The financial system itself was built by and for a narrow group, and its jargon and gatekeeping tell everyone else it isn’t for them, so women in particular are handed the story that they’re not good with money and then shown a system that seems designed to prove it.

The pattern to notice is how a survival response in one generation becomes a rule in the next, and how every system downstream benefits from nobody questioning it. Shame keeps the story private, and what stays private can’t be organised around.

In the Coherence Framework it lives in all three layers at once: in state, as the body’s reaction when money comes up; in story, as the beliefs about worth and deserving; and in structure, as pay gaps, literacy gaps and a market most people feel locked out of. Working on one layer rarely holds on its own, because a budgeting app doesn’t touch the shame and insight alone doesn’t close the pay gap.

That’s why naming matters so much. Gail’s point was that these stories came from survival and that gentleness does more for them than judgement, and one of the things people say most often at SIX is that they had no idea what their money was funding, followed, usually, by relief. Clarity is where agency starts.