97. How to Break Through the 'I Don't Wanna Think About It' Money Block Forever

Are you avoiding your finances? Join me as I uncover the hidden reasons behind this common money block and how it might be affecting your abundance.

In this solo episode of the Plenty podcast, I’m diving into a common money block I see, especially among women: financial avoidance. We often hear ourselves saying, “I just don’t want to think about it,” but this avoidance can really sabotage our financial well-being. I’ll share the root causes of this pattern, including societal conditioning and unconscious beliefs around power and victimization. Plus, I’ll offer some tips on how to shift from avoidance to engagement, build your capacity to handle money with ease, and step into a more abundant and empowered financial reality. If you’re ready to break free from old patterns and create a healthier, more pleasurable relationship with money, this episode is for you. And don’t forget to grab my free “Money Reset” resource to start rewiring your approach to wealth!

“Our ambivalence about our money is because of our ambivalence about and around our power.” -Kate Northrup

🎤 Let’s Dive into the Good Stuff on Plenty 🎤

(00:00) Introduction to Financial Awareness
(00:40) Cultural Conditioning and Financial Disenfranchisement
(01:16) Avoidance and Feminine Energy
(02:41) Financial Avoidance and Its Consequences
(07:13) Maturity and Responsibility in Financial Matters
(08:48) Ambivalence Towards Money and Power
(13:15) Victimization and Lack of Agency
(14:19) Trauma and Financial Patterns
(19:31) Safety, Pleasure, and Financial Consciousness
(21:33) Personal Journey of Financial Transformation
(22:49) Co-Creating Your Financial Destiny
(23:14) Balancing Financial Engagement

Links and Resources:

Barbara Huson, formerly Barbara Stanney
Rewire for Wealth
Secrets of Six Figure Women
Overcoming Under Earning
Sacred Success
Tel Darden
The School of Alchemical Alignment

✨ The Money Reset: Feel Good with Money—No Matter How Much You Make

Making more money doesn’t guarantee financial ease… but this will. The Money Reset is a free audio experience designed to help you rewire your nervous system for wealth—so managing money feels effortless. 🎧💸

Inside, you’ll learn how to:
💡 Break the ‘money in, money out’ cycle and create lasting stability.
🎯 Relax into a new relationship with money—where structure meets flow.
✨ Use the 5-Minute Calm Cashflow Ritual to bring instant clarity to your finances.

More money won’t solve money stress—a resourced, supple nervous system will. Ready to shift? 👉 Get The Money Reset Now! 👈

Related Episode:

The Relationship Between Money and Power (055)

What is Plenty with Kate Northrup?

What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.

You can.

When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.

And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.

As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.

Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.

Kate Northrup: 01:00

If you're saying, I just don't wanna think about money, you are acting like a child. And there is a part of you that simply does not want to be in your maturity and in your power. Like, if you're saying, I just don't wanna think about money, you are really saying, I want to be an immature child in this area of my life. Welcome to Plenty. I'm your host Kate Northrup and together we are going on a journey to help you have an incredible relationship with money, time, and energy, and to have abundance on every possible level.

Kate Northrup: 01:40

Every week, we're gonna dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of plenty. Let's go fill our cups. Hi. Today is episode number two in a seven part series that we're doing on Plenty about expanding into your next level of financial peace, prosperity, and pleasure. So today's episode is for you.

Kate Northrup: 02:10

If you currently or have ever felt like, ugh, I just don't wanna have to think about money. I just don't wanna have to deal with this. Listen, I get it. I have been there some days. I slide right back there myself.

Kate Northrup: 02:24

And it is so common, especially for women, to have been conditioned by our culture to want to outsource dealing with the money. For centuries, women have lived in profound financial disenfranchisement and disempowerment. And so many have been taught explicitly or implicitly, and it's certainly been modeled in the media and our culture at large, that a man should just take care of it for you, or that the government should just take care of it for you, or your employer, or your parents. And there's a real tendency to go into avoidance and a feeling of like, oh, the other thing that comes up a lot in our community, and maybe you resonate with this is, oh, well I just want to be in my feminine energy. I just want to be in my goddess energy, and so therefore, I don't want to have to think about money.

Kate Northrup: 03:28

Now I don't know at what point in our evolution it was modeled to us or told to us that being in our feminine energy precludes us from being in a beautiful relationship with money, a beautiful conscious relationship with money, but let me be the first to tell you if you didn't know, it does not. In fact, in fact, being in a loving, conscious relationship with your money can be one of the most important foundational bedrock aspects of being able to surrender into receiving and and feminine energy financially and otherwise. Okay. So there's a few things that I want you to know if you are in the place of, ugh, I just don't wanna think about it, with money. Now I hear this from people who are making tons of money, who have net worths of millions and millions and millions, who come from generations after generations after generations of wealth, and I also hear this from people who are more at the early stages of their earning journey.

Kate Northrup: 04:43

So no matter where you are, know that this applies to you no matter what's going on with your earning level. And I wanna pull it out by the roots today and highlight some things that may be running under the surface that you may not be aware of that that are wrapped up in I just don't wanna deal with it. I just don't wanna have to think about it because that way of being is like a giant hairball in the pipe of your abundance. Financial avoidance, whether it's because you're overwhelmed, whether you it's because you think you're not smart enough, or you think it's too complicated, or you're just like, ah, I'm just not good with money, or because you think that capitalism is stupid, or, you know, or you're just like, I just want somebody to handle this for me. All any manifestation of avoidance behavior is like a giant hairball in the pipe of the abundance that already is trying to flow to you, but you are like putting out your hand and blocking and turning the opposite way.

Kate Northrup: 05:53

And by avoiding your money, you are preventing more from coming into your life. And I don't necessarily mean more earnings, although, yes, for sure, more earnings, But even if you already make good money, not wanting to think about it, not engaging with it, thinking like, ugh, I have better things to do. Ugh, I have more interesting things to do. Ugh, this is so boring. I want somebody else to deal with this.

Kate Northrup: 06:23

This is too hard. Any I just wanna be in my goddess energy. Any of those things is like saying, like, you want your husband to ravish you and have this incredible relationship with him or your partner, and then not making eye contact, having them make a reservation for a date, and you just not freaking showing up. That is the same thing when we're just like, oh, I you know, of course, do you wanna go on fabulous trips? Yes.

Kate Northrup: 06:54

Do you want to fly first class? Yes. Do you want to eat beautiful food? Do you want to be able to afford organic, regeneratively sourced produce? Yes.

Kate Northrup: 07:04

Do we want these things? Yes. So then if we're saying, well, but I don't wanna think about money, that is an exact opposition. It is just like you saying, I want an incredible, romantic, luscious, loving relationship with my partner, and yet I don't wanna think about them. And I don't wanna think about it, and I don't wanna engage with it in any way or with that person in any way.

Kate Northrup: 07:29

And so I wanna pull some of this out by the weeds and just talk about what patterns may be running unconsciously. Now if you're new to me, something you may not know is that my, perspective is that our unconscious patterning and our subconscious patterning is a combination of the neural patterns in our brain and body. Now there's significant evidence that the brain is not just in our head. We actually have neurons in our heart. We have neurons in our gastrointestinal tract.

Kate Northrup: 08:03

We have this ability to have memory and cognition on some level all throughout our body. And so our unconscious is not just in our head. Our unconscious is really wired into our entire nervous system, and so much of it has to do with our ability to feel safe. Now there's so many things going on under the surface, and one of them in terms of this root cause is simply the following, and I'm just gonna call a spade a spade and say this. If you're saying, I just don't wanna think about money, you are acting like a little girl or a little boy or a little person.

Kate Northrup: 08:48

You are acting like a child. And there is a part of you that simply does not want to be in your maturity and in your power. And it's okay to admit it, but it's important to just say, like, if you're saying, I just don't want to think about money, you are really saying, I want to be an immature child in this area of my life. You know, my kids, right, they're six and nine, they don't really have to think about money, although we do give them an allowance, and we have like a whole system for teaching them healthy money behavior, but they don't have to think about paying the mortgage. They're not thinking about paying their tuition.

Kate Northrup: 09:25

Like, they're not thinking about that because they're children, right? That's not what they do. But if you're listening to this podcast, you are a grownup, and it is time to put on your big girl pants. Because when you put on your big girl pants, the blessings of prosperity and power are so beyond anything you could possibly imagine. Now what's interesting, my mentor and friend, Barbara Hewson, formerly Barbara Stanney, she wrote Rewire for Wealth, The Secrets of Six Figure Women, Overcoming Under Earning, Sacred Success.

Kate Northrup: 09:59

She's amazing. And she says that our ambivalent relationship with money, especially as women, is related to our ambivalent relationship with our power. So our ambivalence about our money is because of our ambivalence about about and around our power. Why? Because in our culture, we have not had the healthiest, most conscious models of power, and so there's a part of us that thinks either power means power over and not being a good person, or we also may think we can't handle it.

Kate Northrup: 10:43

Right? Have you ever thought about going for your dreams? Like, maybe you have this this dream for some kind of huge impactful business or some kind of big creative project or impact or visibility or some big thing. Right? And then have you ever felt like, I don't know if I can handle it, so I'm just not going to I'm not even going to take steps.

Kate Northrup: 11:08

That's because of our ambivalent relationship with our power. Now I did an episode, about six months ago that we'll link in the show notes about money and power. And so that's an episode to listen to if this is resonating with you. But the thing is, in order to steward your money beautifully, to be in beautiful relationship with your money, you need to come to grips with and begin to be in a sweeter relationship with your power because I promise you, you can handle it and more. There is so much energy.

Kate Northrup: 11:45

There's so much life force. There's so much that wants to come through you, and our job as humans is to build our somatic bodies, to build our energetic capacity to be conduits for everything that wants to come through us. And we do that through nervous system practices of building deeper and deeper layers of safety because it builds the circuitry literally in our bodies to be able to handle the amount of electricity that wants to come through us. Now that is true on an energetic level, but that is also true on a financial level. There's more with your name on it and you stepping fully into your power and stewardship and and becoming a channel, a conduit, and building your circuitry so that you can handle higher and higher voltage is actually the name of the game.

Kate Northrup: 12:45

And I promise you when you do small doable parts over time, which is language from, Tel Darden from the school of alchemical alchemical alignment, and I think actually originated with Bridget Vixman's, when we do small, doable parts over time, you build that capacity, you build that circuitry, and then you won't even believe how much you can handle a year from now that you couldn't handle prior. So underneath the surface of I don't want to deal with my money, I don't want to have to think about that, is actually an ambivalence with your power. And it is a part of you, and in the world of internal family systems therapy, parts work, there is a part of you that is running the show that is a small child who is scared. Okay? That's all it is.

Kate Northrup: 13:33

There is a part of you that is running your financial life that is a small child who is scared, and you can signal to that small part. You can communicate with that part that it is actually safe. It is safe to be an adult. It is safe to engage with your money. And that's the work that we do here on Plenty and in my whole company, so welcome.

Kate Northrup: 13:56

That that is literally what we do. And coming up, we have an amazing workshop called, actually, I think when this episode airs, I'm not allowed to say what the name is. But, anyway, we have a free workshop coming up, and then we're going to open up the doors to our once a year program, Relaxed Money, coming up as well. So many, many good things coming, so make sure you're staying tuned. Okay.

Kate Northrup: 14:16

So we talked about, the immaturity and the small child running the show. We talked about ambivalence with your power, and then I also want to talk about victimization. Now when we say like, ugh, I just want somebody else to deal with this, there is a part of us that is actually choosing unconsciously to stay in a lack of agency and a lack of choice and victimization, which is still that kind of adjacent to that child behavior, because there's a part of us that is getting off on not being in our power. Because always, always, always, always, when we are behaving in a particular way that we know is maybe not in alignment with our highest possible expression, it is because there's something we get to not do or something that we get to keep doing that we are getting a benefit from. That's called secondary gain.

Kate Northrup: 15:19

So when we choose to stay in the backseat of our financial lives and let other people make the decisions and just like, I don't wanna open that mail. I don't wanna handle it. I'm not engaging. We are actually choosing to stay in victimization and in a lack of choice. Now why would we do that?

Kate Northrup: 15:37

Because at the root of our nervous system imprinting, and we certainly, some people call that trauma and there, you know, there are certainly trauma patterns related to money. But in this context, let's just say that trauma is when emotional or physical stress has occurred that you didn't have the resources, support, or strategies to fully process at the time. So we get stuck in that particular moment in time in some level in our psyche and nervous system. And the thing is our nervous system imprints are based on what we've experienced before, and the nervous system wants to keep us experiencing what we have experienced before because at least from the survival wiring we have, we know that if we keep experiencing the same thing as what we experienced before, at least we know what to So it doesn't require deploying as many resources from a brain and body perspective as if we are experiencing something new and novel that is often filtered into our consciousness and awareness as a threat. So all of that to say, most of our nervous system imprints that have occurred through traumatic experiences occurred because at the time of the experience in the past, we didn't have agency.

Kate Northrup: 17:14

We didn't feel that we had choice. So practical example, right? You're a kid. Your mom travels all the time for work. You don't feel like you have any agency.

Kate Northrup: 17:28

You don't you're not at choice. She just leaves. She comes back. You don't know when she's going. You don't have any choice about that.

Kate Northrup: 17:36

You beg her not to go, but she keeps leaving because that's her job. Right? Like, that's the work that she does. That's what how it's set up. And as a child, that is interpreted as something is being done to me that I have no choice about.

Kate Northrup: 17:52

And if you were really emotionally distraught about that and didn't have the support, guidance, structure, strategies, resources to fully process that emotional stress, that can leave a traumatic imprint. Now the way we heal that is as adults expanding into our agency, expanding into greater and greater levels of choice. And what's so interesting about that is that even though anybody, if I asked you, like, do you want to feel more agency around your life? Do you want to feel more at choice around in your life? I think you would probably answer yes.

Kate Northrup: 18:30

And yet, and yet, simultaneously, right, we say one thing out of one side of our mouths and then another thing out of the other side. Simultaneously, folks will say, I don't want to think about money. I don't want have to think about money. Because the feeling of victimization, the feeling of not having choice, it doesn't necessarily feel good, but it feels familiar. It is what we are patterned to experience because most of our traumas were because we didn't have choice in that moment.

Kate Northrup: 19:06

So the opportunity to have choice, the opportunity to stand in our power, the opportunity to have agency actually registers as a threat. And then we go back into financial avoidance and like, oh, my husband's just gonna handle that for oh, my wealth adviser does that for me. Oh, it's up to my financial, you know, planner. I don't know. I don't wanna do it.

Kate Northrup: 19:28

I'm five. You know, like, that's literally how it shows up, and I'm only saying this so candidly because I have been there, my friend. I have really been there. Okay. The other thing that comes up is simply that we haven't had as many models of conscious money behavior and conscious money patterning and, like, prosperity consciousness.

Kate Northrup: 19:53

We haven't had a lot of them in the media. Most of our parents weren't having like some healthy, lovely, pleasurable relationship with money, and so it may just not even occur to us that it's possible. And what I find inside our programs when we start getting in there with people, because there's a monthly coaching and I'm talking to people and what comes up is this feeling of like, okay, but if I create more financial consciousness, then I go into constriction because financial consciousness for so many of us, financial sobriety and getting super clear, then causes us to go into this constricted feeling of I don't get to have what I want. And now we're the petulant child. Now we're the kid having the tantrum in the grocery store because we can't have the candy in the checkout aisle, right?

Kate Northrup: 20:44

Because we weren't at choice. And so we look at our spending plan, and suddenly we're right back there having a tantrum in the checkout aisle. And our mom is saying, no, I'm not gonna buy you, you know, I'm not gonna buy you the the candy. So what do we do about that? Right?

Kate Northrup: 21:01

Like, what do we do about that? Well, we have to begin to add in the missing piece, which is safety. And then from safety, we move to pleasure. Right? And when we start to layer in safety and pleasure, and in this series, we're gonna get more deeply into those things.

Kate Northrup: 21:22

But when we start to layer that in, what we realize is that financial consciousness actually feels better than avoidance. You actually will begin to feel more free to be met financially, more free to make abundant choices, and you will be more magnetic to money when you engage with your money head on in your full power, in your full capacity because you've got this, and you absolutely have what it takes. So that's what I'm gonna leave you with today. There's so much here. But if you have been someone who says, I don't wanna deal with this, I hope that this helped you to look in some of the nooks and crannies, and I hope that you will stay with me in this series so that you can be we can begin to explore together all of the ways that we can gently and beautifully turn towards our money life and be able to access the power and the agency that's available.

Kate Northrup: 22:34

And I just wanna say a quick story, which is that that this. I was a financial avoider for many years. I got myself in a ton of credit card debt. In front of the scenes, it looked like I had it all together. I was a really strong earner.

Kate Northrup: 22:49

I was in my early twenties. I had this great business. I was, like, going around New York City and, you know, hanging with a very influential crowd. But behind the scenes, my financial life was a mess because I was not yet ready to be a financial adult for all of the reasons I just highlighted in this episode and a few more. I thought it was boring.

Kate Northrup: 23:12

I thought I had better things to do. It felt more exciting to earn money than to actually handle the money I already had. But I will tell you what. When I took the steps that I'm walking you through in this series and that I walk people through in our programs on a deeper level, I was able to go from making $34,000 1 year to $120,000 the next year, and that income just went up and up and up. We just came in last year at just under 3,000,000 in our business with a 31% profit margin, which was up for the from the years past.

Kate Northrup: 23:49

And I can tell you that when you step in and start consciously engaging with your money, the feeling of power, the feeling of possibility, the deep knowing in your body that you actually are the cocreator of your destiny, that at any time, you can create exactly what you want. You don't have to wait for it to be given to you. You don't have to wait for someone else to decide that you're worthy. You don't have to wait for someone else to crunch the numbers to figure out what you get to have. You just get to have what you want that is aligned with your desires and values, and I want that for you because that kind of feeling is something that nothing else can recreate.

Kate Northrup: 24:31

So thank you for listening in. I can't wait to have you on the next installment, episode number three in this series, which is about the toggling from hyper fixation on the money and almost hypervigilance to hypo and going into disassociation and avoidance, and how we can stop flip flopping between two opposite ends of the extreme and just come into the sweet resonant balance somewhere in the middle of the spectrum where we're in a loving dance with our money. So I can't wait to see you on that one. Until next time. What if managing money felt effortless?

Kate Northrup: 25:16

You've worked so hard to earn money, so why does it feel stressful? Well, I wanna introduce you to something brand new that I've created called the money reset because abundance starts in your body, not in your bank account. This free audio experience will help you rewire your nervous system for wealth, stop the money in, money out cycle and create a foundation for true wealth, and relax into a new relationship with money. Plus, it comes with the five minute calm cash flow ritual, so you can have financial clarity and magnetism anytime you want. All you need to do to get the free money reset is go to katenorthrop.com/reset.