Episode 478: Overcoming Financial Trauma: Breaking the Cycle & What Healing Actually Looks Like w/ Rahkim Sabree

Rahkim Sabree 0:02

If you're getting ready to buy your spouse or significant other a present for their birthday or for anniversary, your response might look different than my response, right? I might be excited about buying my spouse or significant other something, whereas somebody else might say, Oh, like this is going to hit the bank account. How many hours am I going to have to have to work to replace this money like they want to do the good thing or the thing that they feel like they should be doing? And also, what are the implications on their mental and physical health look like and financial health look like based off of making this decision?

Intro 0:40

Welcome to the journey to launch podcast with your host Jamila Souffrant as a money expert who walks her talk she helps brave journeyers like you get out of debt, save, invest and build real wealth. Join her on the journey to launch to financial freedom in

Speaker 1 0:57

54321,

Jamila Souffrant 1:01

Jamila one. If you want the episode show notes for this episode, go to journey to launch.com or click the description of wherever you're listening to this episode in the show notes, you'll get the transcribed version of the conversation, the links that we mentioned, and so much more also, whether you are an OG journeyer or brand new to the podcast, I've created a free jumpstart guide to help you on your financial freedom journey. It includes the top episodes to listen to, stages to go through to reach financial freedom resources and so much more. You can go to journey, to launch.com/jumpstart

Jamila Souffrant 1:48

Hey, janiers, welcome to the journey to launch podcast I have today as a guest. Rakim Sabri who is a Connecticut based financial therapist and author of the book overcoming financial trauma. This book covers trauma, wellness and focusing on relationship between money, mental health and race. He's also a accredited financial counselor, keynote speaker and consultant for corporations and organizations. And I'm so happy that we finally get to chat. Hi. I'm super excited to be here. Thank you so Rakim, can you just talk a little bit about what led you to this work? Typically, when I've talked to people who are in this space, at the personal finance space, as their profession, it's not necessarily like what they started out thinking they would do. So is that the case for you? What happened? Like, how did you get into this world? It was definitely a series of happy accidents.

Rahkim Sabree 2:41

So as a kid, I wanted to be a psychologist. I wanted to be in the world of psychology. That's what I focused on when I left high school going to college, and then my schooling was interrupted by a cross country move. So I lived I grew up in New York. I went to school in Jersey City, New Jersey at St Peter's College, and now St Peter's University. And after my first year, I came home and started working to help my mom prepare for this move to Texas. So we moved down to San Antonio, Texas. We were there for eight months, and then we came back up north to Connecticut, where I got a job very quickly. In first the supermarket and then second, the banking industry, and that's where this kind of like whirlwind journey starts. So I'm 21 years old, I'm working as a part time teller. Five months into the role, I get a promotion until full time, and so I'm like, All right, this is cool. Six months after that, I get a promotion into a supervisor level role. And the old time, my mom's like, don't get comfortable. Don't get comfortable. You know, go back to school, or you're gonna, you're gonna start enjoying this money too much. And that's what ended up happening. I started enjoying the money too much. And the next thing you know, it 10 years had gone by, and I was in the banking industry for that time period. This is pivotal, I think, to the story that I tell around first financial services, and that being my background, but also my passion around financial education, because much of what I had learned on the job became my crash course in understanding financial products and services, which at the time, I equated with financial literacy. Now, I look at it a little bit differently, but for the people who were observing, friends, family, peers, colleagues, I became kind of the guy to go to to talk about money, right? If there were questions about, you know what's going on my bank account, or what's going on with my credit card, or what, you know, what should I be doing? People will pick up the phone. They will call me in 2019

Rahkim Sabree 4:51

I started focusing on financial education through social media, so using Instagram and Twitter at the time as front. Facing platforms to discuss money, but I was still kind of flying under the radar on LinkedIn, because I didn't want my job at the time to know that I was doing this. I didn't want it to be viewed as a conflict. And then I had this reckoning one day where I'm like, Hey, if you're going to be about it, like be about it. So I started talking about what I was doing on my own time on LinkedIn as well, which led to a series of, you know, back and forth, and raised flags on the part of my leadership, where they were questioning, like, you know, what is your intentions with the company? Why are you doing this thing? Are you stealing company time? If you have enough time to do this, then you must not have enough to do, which kind of came to a head in May of 2021, where I resigned very publicly from my role and posted it on Twitter, and then the tweet goes viral. So 2.2 million impressions, and people are like, congratulations, congratulations. And so you know now we're sitting in April 2026 I'm looking at five years of entrepreneurship next month, which is really exciting. But in this journey of discovery from 21 to present, I had bumped up against financial psychology, bumped up against financial counseling, and ultimately the financial Therapy Association, and really just felt home in delivering financial education through the lens of my experience, backed by some of the formal education that I'd received. And you know, of course, incorporating this human and people focused approach to understanding how to communicate these lessons in a more effective way. Yet. Now I'm on the board of the financial Therapy Association. I'm an active member of the Association for Financial Counseling and Planning education. I talk about financial trauma almost exclusively these days, because I find that the barrier to success financially for a lot of people, is not necessarily in understanding the technical nuances of how to do the things, but in what drives our behavior. Spending a lot of time in understanding not only the psychology of financial behavior, but what our nervous system responses to danger look like, and how that shows up with money, what some of the systemic influences, cultural influences, familial influences, have on people as it relates to their values and money, and then ultimately, what can we do about it? And so that that's where I kind of shine in this moment.

Jamila Souffrant 7:44

Yeah, well, I love thank you for that background. Is that tweet still there? We could, I would love to see, like, link it to the episode show notes so people cannot see it.

Speaker 2 7:53

I'll have to find,

Jamila Souffrant 7:55

okay, so you got to send it to me if you can find it. I know it's probably, you know, years ago, but I think, okay, so there's a lot to break down here. I think it's interesting that you started, or you wanted to. You said you were studying psychology,

Rahkim Sabree 8:07

yes,

Jamila Souffrant 8:08

at first, but then, you know, you paused, and for various reasons, got comfortable with this job and getting, like, a, you know, steady income and but then, like, woke up and find yourself, like, a decade later, still doing that thing, but ultimately you did end up working in the field of psychology, just in a different type of way. So I think that's interesting to come back to for people. Because I think a lot of people think like, oh, I want to do this thing, and then they get a detour or something. They might still be in their detour, but it can still come around, maybe in an unexpected way where it can still work out. And, you know, like you don't have to necessarily give it up just because it changes the way it looks when it comes into your life,

Rahkim Sabree 8:48

right, right?

Jamila Souffrant 8:49

And the job thing. So I think that's really interesting as someone who also started journey to launch while I was working full time, and because I worked, you know, for a financial services firm, and I also kept that life private. Also just didn't want people to know what I was doing and talking about. But I think for a lot of people, that comes up, like I'm starting something on the side, and they're not in an environment where it will be one, maybe there's some not overlap, but some overlap, or just the company just doesn't want you doing it. If you could go back, would you have, like, upfront said something or no, you feel like that would have definitely raised the flags earlier. Like, because I know some people feel like, how do I do this on the side and work for this company?

Rahkim Sabree 9:30

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that it happened the way that it was supposed to happen. So if I can go back, I would have done it the same way.

Jamila Souffrant 9:38

Okay,

Rahkim Sabree 9:39

I may not have quit the same way. I may not have quit the same way, but in terms of doing the work, I definitely would have done that the same way,

Jamila Souffrant 9:51

right? And what you learned, like you said, so you had a lot of client facing, I'm assuming, like interaction with the people coming in to open banking. Accounts, or whatever that looked like and like, there's different levels to fight finance. What I feel like we learned in school was more economic, very high level, nothing to do with personal finances. Then there's, like, the banking system, then financial institutions, maybe, like, I know a lot of people who work in corporate finance but have no clue how to manage their personal finances. So I feel like there's all these layers, like ways we deal with money in the world, but ultimately it's our personal finances that allow us to live the life that we want. And until we can understand that, then I feel like a lot of people flounder in the world. But what I really like about your work is that there are so many of us in the space that talk about, okay, the tactical things you need to do. I mean, you could just Google, like, how to create a budget. And I often say it's not, it's not that people don't know what to do, because you can Google it. It's like they don't know why they're not doing it, like there might be just a block. So I love that you focus on that internal work and but there's some, you know, structure behind it and frameworks behind it that help people, I guess, release or understand these traumas that they have from money.

Rahkim Sabree 11:07

Yeah, certainly. And it's funny, I was just having a conversation about this, when we look at a lot of the media or material out there related to financial education, so like, I'll raise my hand and say my crash course in financial literacy was the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, right? And I think this is the case for a lot of people, right? They'll read like a Robert Kiyosaki book, or they'll read like a Dave Ramsey book, and they're like, Okay, like, I've been introduced to this world. What I found is that a lot of that content is shame based or fear based, right? And so it's, it's a lot of pointing the finger at the individual and saying you should have done, or you should be doing, or you could be doing this better. And if you don't, you're not smart, right? And so they're attacks to the person's character, where I see people fall on either one side or the other of this, like I'm going to work super hard, you know, not make excuses like nobody cares, just work harder. Or I am going to view the obstacles that are in my path as immovable obstacles, and I'm just going to have this sense of apathy. I'm going to refer to myself in this moment, when I was a baby financial educator, I had adopted a lot of those narratives which were shame based and often fueled by judgment from the vantage point of my experiences, right? So I experienced a little bit of upward social mobility within the banking industry. And I'm looking at, what does my credit score afford me? What kind of credit cards am I carrying? Where am I investing? Who do I have my accounts with? And I'm assigning value to what it is that I've accomplished, rather than me being the person that I am, and so often do I see that being the case, particularly with people who are high income earners, they learn to associate their value as a human being with their job title or with their sanity. And when you strip those things away, it's like this moment of, I love that you use the word floundering. It's this moment of floundering in what is my identity. And so when we look out into the world today, and we look at the job market today, and we see the layoffs that are occurring, or after the layoff, how long it takes for somebody to find employment either at the same level that they were before, or lower, because sometimes they have to take a pay cut that is a internal reckoning of like, who am I outside of this salary that may not many times does not feel good, because we've placed so much on this identity and so to your point, a lot of the reflection that I encourage in my work is in helping individuals separate their identity from what's in their bank account and really do a deep dive on what is driving not only My behavior around money, but the motivations for those behaviors, my hypothesis that I've been kind of surfacing as I have these conversations, is that the decisions we make around money are often made through a lens of desiring safety, and so how we define safety on an individual level is going to look different from person to person, but ultimately, we're desiring safety through a lens of maybe power, maybe freedom or true safety, right? Because we've experienced some scarcity reality at some point in our life, or we have observed that scarcity reality. In the people that we grew up around.

Jamila Souffrant 15:02

Yeah, so as we're thinking about, you know, our financial lives, like as an individual, how do we determine, like, if we have financial trauma? Does everyone have financial trauma? I know you said you've in your work, have identified six sources of financial trauma. Can we go through what those are and how someone can identify like that to them? Or can someone not have financial trauma?

Rahkim Sabree 15:28

I love these questions, and I have never been asked that one, so that's good six sources of financial trauma that I'll get to your questions. One is genetic or generational, so that looks like the attitudes, beliefs, behaviors that we pass down from generation to generation, and how our body responds on a DNA level to the threat of money, right? So I leverage the emerging study of epigenetics through a trauma lens that says trauma or stress can change the way that our genes express, both in our lived experience and in future generations, this may, as a result, have an impact on our sensitivity to things like our response with cortisol, which is a stress hormone, right? If there's a highly stressful situation that we experience related to money, maybe our tolerance for what that stress looks like and what induces the flood of cortisol through our bloodstreams happen not because of an experience that we had in our lifetime, but because of an experience that our parents or our grandparents had. And so I tie those two together. The second is vicarious, or observational. So what are the things that we observe around money, either in the household right growing up? What are the attitudes like If our parents are fighting over money, if we go out into the world and we are the child that does not have as much as the other children. But also, what do we observe about how people who don't have money are treated? I think this is a really important point. When we look at the population of homeless people or the unhoused or we look at people who stand in line for social services, how are they talked to, right? How are they advocated for? And when we look at the reverse, people who have money, how are pathways made to accommodate them? Right? We learn very quickly from a young age that the people who have are treated better than the people who don't have, and so we may develop disdain for people who don't have, or at least for the idea of not having in a desire to establish safety, as I mentioned, we may try to keep ourselves or create as much distance from being perceived in that way as possible. So that changes the whole narrative around this conversation of Keeping Up with the Joneses or why people are wanting to wealth signal through the items that they acquire or the clothes that they wear. Right. Number three is poverty or financial instability. So I think this is your classic take on financial trauma. Most people, when they hear that phrase, will think of somebody who is struggling financially. So I surface an argument that people who are high income earners and who have assets can likely do experience financial trauma as well, but certainly poverty and financial instability is your you know, classic financial trauma marker. There's also workplace and employment trauma. And so we talked about what the job market looks like briefly, but also what is the process to get a job look like. Who do we have to become in those interviews, or when we're on the job? Do we have to put on that voice?

Jamila Souffrant 18:47

Code switch? Yeah.

Rahkim Sabree 18:49

Do we have to wear our hair? Right? Code switch. There's this concept that Chantelle Chapman, who's the founder of trauma of money, coined as financial fawning. So this fawning behavior as a trauma response, where we're people pleasing because we are engaged actively in economic warfare, we need to make money to survive. And so if we have to deal with some things that maybe we wouldn't normally deal with because it's tied to a paycheck, that can be a traumatic experience, right? That can create what has been referred to in the past is a double consciousness in that we may come home wanting to seek a relief, but also like carrying the burden of not only what we had to perform in order to do the job, but in who we had to be in order To even get to a place. And so at that workplace trauma is a big one. Five is institutional or systemic. So we talk about what does. And, you know, I poo poo on the financial services industry, partially because I've existed in financial services industry. But what do the institution. And systems that we navigate do to cause harm actively. What have they done in the past to cause harm, and how does that influence the alienation that people may feel with trusting these institutions? And it's not just necessarily applied to financial services, right? When we look at our government, when we look at our legal system, when we look at our healthcare system, right, especially post covid, there is a lot of mistrust in all of those areas, and that mistrust can create other forms of trauma that I mentioned, right, the financial hardship, or we may choose a path that is more difficult because we don't trust the institutions that we are supposed to trust. And so when you look at history, and we look at, you know, redlining, and we look at the predatory lending, and we look at, I mean, I'll even highlight the institution of slavery and capitalism in this country, right? These are institutional practices that are baked into how we navigate the world today, that persist today and certainly have an impact on financial trauma. And then the last one is a combination of family, society and religious and so a lot of this, I think, speaks the loudest to individuals who are first generation high income earners or first generation college graduates or first generation period, right? They may be the first, first generation child of immigrants who are trying to navigate what is their cultural identity and what is assimilating into American cultural identity look like through a lens of consumerism, and where do they draw the line in embracing individualism and consumerism, and what does it mean to be successful financially? What are the items that I need to have, the car, the clothes, the watch, whatever. What is the obligation that I may feel in supporting my family right and making sure that my mom and my dad is okay, and sending money back home, if you know, if they're the child of immigrants, and being able to help provide my younger brother or whoever, right? I see a lot of this in athletes who, you know, make it right. They come from maybe a hard upbringing, and, you know, they make it and then they're like, Okay, I gotta buy mom and dad and sister and brother a house and a car, and they're spending up all their money before they really even understand how to create a life raft for themselves. And then on the other side of that, have to deal with the resentment of, well, I had all this pressure to provide for everybody else, but you know what's left for me? And so then going into your question, who's not experiencing financial trauma, my argument is that I think all of us are actively experiencing financial trauma, and at any point during our lifetime, we will experience one or more of those six sources of financial trauma, and we may experience one or more of those six sources of financial trauma multiple times. And so some of the work that I'm focused on in this moment, after socializing this what does a measurement or scale of assessing where those six points of financial trauma show up across our lifetime, and how does our response to maybe the same source of financial trauma. I'll just use financial hardship as an example. What does that look like at different points in our life, right? So if we are 10 years old and our family is experiencing financial hardship, of course, we're not making money, but we are impacted by the financial hardship from a passive position where we can't do much, but when we are in our 30s, we have the ability to go out and get a job. What does that look like? How's our response to financial hardship in that moment where, arguably, we're in the highest income earning years of our life, and then fast forward to maybe 70s and 80s, where we might be on a fixed income and we experience financial hardship, what does that look like, where we may have to kind of revert back to the state that we would in childhood, depend on other people so that we can have our basic necessities taken care of. And of course, the hope of, I think, financial educators across the country, maybe around the world, is to prepare individuals to enter that retirement age with enough that they can sustain themselves, but holding up that mirror again to the systems and institutions that we navigate when we look at the difference between community and what these community based collectivism practices look like versus individual. Visualism. That's a conversation that I think we need to have at a larger scale.

Jamila Souffrant 25:07

Yeah, it's funny. Was you were going down the list, my question of, who doesn't have it, and then you're like, listen, all these things. I'm like, oh, that's everybody. Then it's like, and so this leads me to, it's almost like, you know, life has ups and downs. Like, just, you know, being in an existence, like, not everything, you're going to experience things just like with my kids, I'm like, I hope, you know, I'm not, like, traumatizing them too much. Like, whether I'm yelling or I just, I'm a human I make mistakes, and then it's almost like adopting this mindset of not purposely trying to hurt them emotionally, right or mentally. But that someone said, you know, at the end of the day, just like this, they're going to talk about this when they're older to their therapist, like it's just part of life that you go through and you experience. So that's what I was kind of feeling as you're talking about all these things, because there's no way to really escape any of it, especially as a child, who you don't have much authority and autonomy over your life, and so you kind of have to just exist right within your structure. It's just, you can't help this. So with that, would you say that? Let's just, you know, we all have some experience of financial trauma, but the ultimate thing is that accepting that that happens, but how we deal with it is really what I guess, allows us to, quote, unquote, succeed or not succeed financially. Because if we're all going through it and have it, then it is what it is. It's more now about how do we identify and or help ourselves when I guess we want to revert to systems that are going to hurt us? Can we talk about what that looks like and how people can now identify, maybe that they're going through something or experiencing things, but how to overcome and get through those moments?

Rahkim Sabree 26:44

Yeah, I um, my hope anyway, in socializing this and certainly in writing overcoming financial trauma, was to provide shared language for what it is that people are experiencing, right? Because, as we go through this list, right, if somebody's listening, hey, what I check off that box? I check off that box. Maybe I don't check off that box, but I know somebody who does what we realize through this lens of financial trauma and also introduce a lot of somatic, psycho, physio responses and in terms of our nervous system, what we realized through this lens of financial trauma is that we're more alike than we are different, right as human beings, regardless of our income, our place of employment, what assets we have or don't have, what education we have on a topic or don't have, we are not socialized to view money through a lens of being threatening. But because we're not socialized to view money through a lens of being threatening doesn't mean that our bodies are not responding to the threat. And so when we look at the evolutionary responses of fight, flight, freeze, fawn, a lot of times those are tied into this physical threat that we see standing in front of us, and so how our nervous system kind of coordinates the different bodily systems that we have to either get us out of There or gear us to fight our way out is something that happens automatically, without us having to think about it. And in the instances that we apply this to money, which is an ever present threat, it kind of causes us to exist in this state of heightened threat response and through a sustained period, particularly if you are somebody who's experienced financial hardship, right? Some people experience financial hardship their entire life. They experience poverty their entire lives. So they're in a state. And you know, I'm guilty of using this language, so I'll pick on myself here, when I first again, when I was a baby, financial educator, I used to repeat things that I would hear online, and I would say, Oh, you have a scarcity mindset, right? You should have an abundant mindset. Oh, you know, you can essentially think your way out of this problem and what I've learned and certainly matured into realizing is that while people may have a scarcity mindset, many times people also have a scarcity reality, and sometimes we bypass that in our educational efforts, right? We may say, oh, here are the keys to understanding what financial literacy looks like. You just have to have a better mindset about applying these keys and you can get out of your situation. Well, no, that's not the case for a lot of people right on both end of the conversation, I think, for the financial educator, empathy and understanding that just because it's not your reality doesn't mean that it's not this person. Reality is important and also on the side of the individual, understanding that as much as you may desire it, thinking your way out of a scarcity, reality is not going to move the needle for you.

Jamila Souffrant 30:18

Hey, journeyers, if you are loving this podcast, then you will love my book, Your journey to financial freedom, a step by step guide to achieving wealth and happiness. I wrote this book for you. This book is for you if you want a clear and enjoyable path to having more money options and a rich life. This book is for you if you hate your commute and the fact that you need to seek approval or permission from a boss, I hated that when I worked this book is for you. If you weren't born into wealth, you didn't marry rich or won the lottery, but you still want freedom. This book is for you. If you're at a crossroads, a major decision or event is imminent, maybe a career change, marriage, starting a family, pressures are reaching a tipping point, and the discomfort and the desire for more can no longer be ignored, and this book is for you. If you find yourself zoned out at meetings, looking out the window or daydreaming about the life you truly want. So go pick up your journey to financial freedom.com. So I can show you how to map out how to get from where you are today to where you ultimately want to be and enjoy the journey. While you're on the path, head over to your journey to financial freedom.com. To see where you can pick the book up. It's available on Amazon, bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, your local bookstore everywhere. Go to your journey to financial freedom.com to get the book. Now, when we are thinking about, I guess, the big idea of financial trauma, and you broke it down really well in like, the ways in which we can identify the source of it, or how it comes up, I want to talk a little bit about what it looks like in reality, on a day to day basis for someone. So would that look like? And this might be all yes or multiple things, because it doesn't look the same for everyone. But would that look like someone who overspends? I'm assuming Yes. Would that look like someone who underspends, who actually has money, but is afraid to spend money? And so I kind of want to go through like, what it actually like, the physical or the reality of someone, so they can identify if they're listening like, Oh, I think that that actually is me. I have this behavior. I do this thing

Rahkim Sabree 32:26

before I answer those questions, I would frame it through a lens of, it's not just the resulting behavior, right? So we're looking at overspending or maybe underspending. It's also like the context through which that behavior is employed, right? So somebody who, on paper, saves whatever percentage of their income, they're spending less than they earn, they're investing and maxing out their flow on k's and their IRAs and all the things, right on paper, they look like they're doing the right things, but their behavior may be driven through a lens of vigilance, which could be a trauma response to maybe not having or being told like, Hey, if you don't do XYZ thing, your idea of safety, the foundation that you've established In your mind, will no longer exist. I while I was writing overcoming financial trauma, I pulled on the work of Dr Rasma menekin, who is the author of my grandmother's hands among other books, and he's a somatic practitioner and a trauma therapist. His area of specialization is racialized trauma. And so I wrote a review of his book, and then we got in contact, we started talking, and we had a zoom one day, and he goes, what you think is happening is actually happening, right? And so, first off, his work has influenced my work tremendously, because before that, I viewed financial trauma through a lens of just narrative based therapy, right? Financial therapy through a lens of like, Let's talk it out. Let's reframe how you think about this and his introduction of the somatic impact of trauma, and that a lot of times we hold on to that in areas of our body changed the way that I viewed financial trauma entirely. So diving into his work, and then diving into where he built his work from looking at the Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, I realized that the responses that we have are, yes, psychological, but also very much physiological and because our brain doesn't have the ability to distinguish between the real or the imagined threat, and a lot of times, that threat response happens automatically. What we think is happening is happening until we can reframe what we think is happening. Think so the individual who is vigilant and saving and living under their beings on paper, again, is doing the right thing, but they may be in this constant state of threat that makes that behavior then an unhealthy response for the person who was overspending, again, that would be a judgment on our part as financial educators to say, well, you're spending too much money, but they may be overspending in a desire to either ease their nervous system because it feels good to spend money, or we have to Look at, what are they overspending on? Right? Are you preparing for something? So there's a lot of you know, Doomsday Preppers, right? They may be buying, you know, jugs of water to put away, or cans of tuna to put away, right? Because they believe that the world is going to end at some point and that they need to have these reserves. That is a desire to establish safety like that's not necessarily just a compulsive spender, and so yes to the items that you listed as behaviors and how that may show up, but also, like in qualifying, why do these behaviors exist? What is the motivating factor behind these behaviors? Is there a threat somewhere in that behavior that is motivating, it is super important. I think you know, those questions get asked and answered by financial therapists or financial counselors in terms of our body's response. You talk about physical responses, right? Like, the fascinating thing about trauma in general, is that, to your point, it affects everybody differently. So it's really subjective to the individual whether or not the experience that they have or have had is traumatic. You and I can go through the exact same thing, and you can say, Absolutely not. I never want to experience that again. And your brain is going to find ways to protect you from experiencing that harm. But I say, Oh, wow, that was super fun, right? I think of the roller coaster as an example, right? I love roller coasters, but you might have somebody who gets on it as like, I did not like the way that my body was responding to these loops and ups and downs. I'm never doing it again. And so with stress and trauma a lot of times, particularly as it relates to money. When I have conversations with people, I ask them, Where do you feel money in your body? And then I might give them prompts to, like, really elicit that feeling, right? You're opening an expected or an unexpected bill. How are you feeling as you're opening this bill? You are on a shopping spree, right? You're getting ready to swipe your credit card. You're getting ready to press send on Amazon, right? How are you feeling in that moment? You're getting ready to buy your spouse or significant other a present for their birthday or for anniversary. How are you feeling in that moment and in each of those examples? Because, I mean, I could give examples all day, and each of those examples, your response might look different than my response, right? I might be excited about buying my spouse or significant other something, whereas somebody else might say, oh, like, this is going to hit the bank account. How many hours am I going to have to work to replace this money like they want to do the good thing or the thing that they feel like they should be doing, and also, what are the implications on their mental and physical health look like and financial health look like based off of making this decision?

Jamila Souffrant 38:35

Right? How does one determine if like they are exhibiting behaviors that are just a part of just life, right? Like, for example, like, I find myself, like, I don't want to, like, buy things when it's like, not a lot of money, like, it's like, it's something small, or like, I'll be like, All right, you know, I don't know. Let's say I could save 199 or it's just something crazy. And I'm just like, Absolutely not. And then sometimes I go home, like, you shouldn't, like, why? That wasn't that big a deal, right to me, that's small. I'm sure it shows up in other areas, you know, like, that's just like a microcosm of something bigger. But at what point does you say to yourself, Okay, this is like a small thing I do with money, and I can live with it, versus actually, this is bigger thing that's impacting me and holding me back or making things harder. How do you identify like that? It's like a little T, or like big T, like something where you need to, like, work with someone or dig deeper to figure out what's going on.

Rahkim Sabree 39:30

This is hard for people, because it's kind of like, like, why a doctor wouldn't diagnose themselves, or why, you know, why they wouldn't perjuring themselves, right, even as somebody who's very like knowledgeable on this topic, right, I will still exhibit behaviors in my everyday life that if I was talking to somebody who was telling me that they were doing the same thing, I might say, Oh, maybe you want to look at this a little bit differently, but my answer in this instance would be to do in order. It on your values when it comes to spending money, right? And I think it's become cliche now when we when we hear money as a tool, but I mean it truly is, what is that money doing for you? In fact, the first question that I ask people when I sit with them, is, what does money represent to you? And I usually get one of three answers. Actually, I want to ask you the question. I want you to answer it. What does money represent

Speaker 2 40:30

to you?

Jamila Souffrant 40:31

Choices,

Rahkim Sabree 40:33

okay, I like that. I usually get one of three answers when I ask that question, money represents power, money represents freedom, or money represents safety, and some variety of those three answers, right? And when somebody answers that question for me, it then kind of like creates the container by which I am viewing their behavior around money I'll just use, I'll use freedom as an example, because you said choices, and I think a lot of times like the choice to do what, or the freedom to do

Jamila Souffrant 41:09

right, the freedom to choose, the freedom to choose what I want to do

Rahkim Sabree 41:13

with that. When you so given, given the example that you gave, you might want to spend less on something. Let's just say it's like lip balm or something, you might want to spend less on that lip balm so that you can have money to spend on something else later, right? I see this. I've seen this in myself, and I went through a financially traumatic experience recently. So I think this is a great example. As an entrepreneur, we know income can be fluctuating, right? There have been months and days over the last five years of my entrepreneurial journey where I'm like, I don't know where my next check is coming from, but the bills are still there, right? I have to pay my mortgage, I have to pay my car no to have to do, you know, whatever, I will have the money in my bank account to pay this bill, and I will not spend it. I will not pay the bill until they start threatening me to, like, cut it off. And from a rational perspective, when I look at, well, why am I not just parting with this money and spending it? It doesn't make sense for me to wait to, you know, maybe get a late fee and then certainly to get the nasty grams through email and the phone calls and the letters, right? But I realized that if I spend the money on the thing that I need to spend the money on, I no longer have this money to spend on something else, and if my focus in that moment is on safety and I'm worried about the possibility of, let's just say, not being able to put food on the table, or experiencing some emergency with my dog where I need to do XYZ thing or whatever I want to have the option to decide in that moment What is the greater net positive or benefit to me using the same money for one or two of those items? Now that's a big example, compared to like the example of lip gloss as an example, or a lip balm, right? But it speaks to the role that money plays in our lives when making those decisions, particularly through a lens of the values that we have. Because if money represents choices, and I'm spending my choice now, I have less choices or less things to choose from. I mean, I think that's that's a real example blowing up through the lens of entrepreneurship, but I realize that there are people who have, you know, full time jobs or part time jobs, and are having to make these decisions every single day just because they're under earning. From a rational like, we remove ourselves from the emotional and behavioral aspects of this that we could give the advice we'll go out and get more money. But then what does that look like from a time perspective, what does that look like from a skill acquisition perspective? What does that look like from a like fatigue perspective,

Jamila Souffrant 44:25

right? Energy, I was gonna say like level perspective.

Rahkim Sabree 44:28

We have responsibilities to children or spouse that may not be feasible, right? And so we have to kind of work with what we have to work with, or at least we feel that way in that moment. And again, what you think is happening is actually happening, right? And so the framing is difficult to remove yourself from when you're in it, which is why I think there is so much value in being able to lean on a professional like a financial therapist or a financial counselor, and some cases, financial coaches who. Who are trauma informed, who are not going to beat you over the head with that shame and guilt you should, you should have just paid the bill right? Who can understand, like, where is this apprehension coming from? And how do you kind of coax them out of this feeling of a lack of safety, into recognizing, like, hey, there's something else, if there's something

Jamila Souffrant 45:21

right, like going deeper. Well, can you share? You just said you went through something also traumatic recently, of yourself and a bit about that and how you dealt with it from, like, the just human aspect and the financial aspect,

Rahkim Sabree 45:33

yeah. So 30 days before my book was due to publish, I left the house to go to Barnes and Noble actually, and create content promoting the book Morgan households, the art of spending money just came out. And so I was gonna, like do a comparison between the two, because the psychology of money was like such a cult like classic in the making, I guess. And I get to Barnes and Noble parking lot and I hear this voice in my head that's telling me to go back home. And I'm like, Oh no, I'm good. And I'm sitting fighting with myself in the parking lot for like, a good 15 minutes before I decide to listen to this voice that's really insistent in this moment of me going back home. And so I drive back home and I'm angry that I'm like wasting the trip to go back home because I swear that there's nothing that could possibly be wrong. Get into the property. I own a duplex that is top and bottom, and so I get to the top unit, which is where I lived, and I'm hearing smoke alarms, and I run inside and everything's black and there's smoke everywhere, and the lights are out, and I'm like, Oh, shoot. And I run to the front of the house, because I come in through the back and realize that there was a fire. And so in this moment, I'm like, Okay, there's a fire. Let me go get my fire extinguisher, put it out, even though, you know, it was very clear the fire had been burning for a while. I grabbed the fire extinguisher, go to deploy, and it doesn't deploy like nothing's coming out. And so in this moment, I am realizing that I've been standing here breathing in the smoke and the fumes, and I'm suffocating. Essentially, I run to the nearest window, and just before I get like, super lightheaded and pass out, I open the window so I get this fresh air. What I didn't realize in that moment is that by opening the window, I was feeding the fire, because in comes the oxygen. And so I make it out of the house. I'm calling for my dog because I can't find him, and I call 911 of course, because at this point I realized it was out of my control. I see it spreading massively, and by the end of it, the entire unit was gone, total loss. And then I have to be hospitalized for several hours because they're worried about smoke inhalation, very weird in terms of timing, because I just finished writing a book through a lens of like evidence based research and practice and early experiences on this topic of financial trauma, where I'm giving people A tool to navigate financial trauma and financially traumatic experiences. And just before it comes out, I experience, arguably, you know, one of the bigger forms of financial trauma through financial hardship and a variety of others, humbling to say the least, but also where I've arrived to in this journey myself is that it's an opportunity for me to live out the frameworks that I offer in the text. And so, as you mentioned, you know, how have I navigated? What has that looked like? Literally, like following the play by play that I wrote out in the book? So like taking my own medicine, I'm not so far removed from the experience, right? So this happened October 18. We're now in April, so coming up on six months in short order, have had the headache of navigating insurance and the insurance claims process. Have had to learn very intimately what that looks like. You know, thank God I had homeowners insurance to navigate the headache that is involved, but lost pretty much everything that I owned at the time and have been slowly in this state of rebuilding. So very similar to, you know, what I shared about this highly publicized exit from corporate America was also a highly publicized experience of having this fire occur. You know, some of my personal finance friends really advocated for me through the lens of creating a GoFundMe and sharing on their pages and the time that it took for me to get my first pay. Out I was covered with money that was raised through this lens of community, which I talk about as one of the healing practices involved in overcoming financial trauma. As you know, we talked about briefly earlier, individualism versus collectivism, right? And how much value is placed on what can I do to get ahead, and not so much on what can we do to build together? There was a testament to the value of community and the value of showing up and, you know, just being a good person. I think the response that I received in response to that call was directly related to the person that I strive to be every day. But it is actively unfolding. It is trauma that you know it's true trauma, right, trauma that you have to face head on in the immediate weeks and months following the event. I experienced physical trauma, and, you know, brain fog and short term memory was shot. Couldn't really focus on tasks that required a lot of concentration. I had a hard time with sleeping, because if I closed my eyes for too long, and I started to see myself in the house, in the fire like that was a traumatic thing that kept coming up, super paranoid about any heat source. I could not be around candles. I could not be around incense, even, you know, using the stove, like if I was placed in an apartment, you know, happily in an apartment now, throughout the time period that will take for me to rebuild my home, if I was cooking and I turned off the oven or turned off the stove and, you know, walked away or left the house, I would come back because I was like, Did I leave it on? So like, there's a lot of vigilance still in my brain trying to protect me from experiencing this again. And of course, because my dog was a part of the experience, you know, fortunately, he was able to be saved and make it out. There's been some co regulating taking place between the two of us in that, you know, he's hypersensitive to smoke and things like that as well. So it is a process that is still unfolding. I think over the last several months, I've done a really good job of just kind of like showing the wins and the way that I've been demonstrating resilience, but in the immediate weeks and months to follow, I was also very transparent about how terrible of an experience it was, and letting people know like, this is really bothering me. This is, this is what I experienced, like, really being raw about it, and I had to, you know, come to a moment of reckoning with myself and say, Hey, you don't have to share all of this to prove to people that you are deserving of, you know, whatever money was donated, or whatever you don't have to prove anything like you experienced something very traumatic. Take your time, you know, as needed. And so December and January, I kind of went a little quiet on social media, stopped posting with as much regularity as I was used to. And then since I've been back to posting, it's really just been like, Oh, I'm at this event. Oh, I'm at this event. I'm doing this I'm selling these books, because, you know stuff, you still got to do stuff, right? Like, my publisher is like, hey, take your time. But also, like, what's going on with the books? Right?

Jamila Souffrant 53:35

Right? No, I you know, thank you for sharing. You know that story. I'm so glad that you're okay, and your dog brings everything back to reality. Of as much as you want to build security for yourself and have physical security and like a home and bank account and investments and all these things, is that anything can happen at the moment's notice, that change is just changes everything. And so it's, it's great that you have the tools and the background knowledge and ability to apply a lot of what you teach, and, you know, give yourself the grace that you're you're giving yourself. Because, like, I find that, yes, like, having the physical things are nice, but like you said, it's that internal work. Like, I always say cliche, but like, we are our biggest assets, and that involves everything, meaning, you know, our body, our temple, but the inner, the innards and the workings of ourselves. And working on that however you can, whether that's spiritually, mentally, you know, working with a therapist and just taking the time to know self or just to be aware of what's going on is so key, because anything can be taken. I mean, you also your faculties can also, you know, go at a moment's notice too. But just going back to hopefully, giving hope to anyone who's experiencing something or going through it, is that the awareness and having the tools can help you get through. Things, because it can happen to anybody,

Rahkim Sabree 55:03

anybody at any time. And I feel that's such an important thing to underscore in that right, like a big part of my story of success, if we call it that, right financially, was the milestone of purchasing a home, right? I bought my house when I was 26 years old. I wanted to buy a house at 25 but I'm like, Okay, I hit the under 30 mark. And so this year makes 10 years that I've owned the property. Very proud of it. Have seen several other people, people and families go on to purchase homes of their own, through seeing me do it right, through realizing that it's possible. And so the purchase was not just an accomplishment, but it was symbolic of what was possible for others, to myself and of course, you develop this sense of safety in a structure that you own, right? So seeing that was like the second untangling, if you will, of my identity from this asset, right? As we talked about earlier, sometimes people develop their identities around their jobs and how much money they have that first kind of layer was removed when I left corporate. And then now another layer is removed, and that, okay, well, this was, and, you know, the structure is still there, obviously in ruins. It's going to be rebuilt. And so I have my house back again, but in the time period that it will take almost an entire year from the day of the fire for me to be able to move back into that structure. But over the last several months, I mean, I've navigated technical homelessness, right, 30 days in a hotel, you know, now being placed in an apartment not too far from from where I lived. But you know, I'm having to navigate the insurance claims process and, oh, and by the way, my insurance company sent me an email last week telling me that they have intent of not renewing. So now I got to go find a new carrier, right? So like all of these little headaches that you experience, but they are headaches that I have challenged myself to view as blessings, because I could not have the headache, right? I could have the structure in ruins without any means for repair. Like I said, the entire experience is extremely humbling, but in the midst of experiencing that, you also you have to continue to live and so, like I said, the book in the way that I wrote, it has been kind of me taking my own medicine, and I don't think I'm grateful for being able to have that experience. It's rare air to be able to speak to the topic with the certainty that I do through a lens of research practice and now very recent and very real experience.

Jamila Souffrant 58:09

Yes, well, or can please tell people where they can get the book, where they can find out more about you and your work, or work with you and all those things, and we'll link it in the show notes.

Rahkim Sabree 58:20

Sure, so the book is available anywhere books are sold. It's called overcoming financial trauma, published by Wiley Barnes and Noble bookshop, Amazon. Think it's in Walmart target, some airports. And so if you don't see it on the shelves, you can ask for it, and they can certainly get it. My website is rock Kim sabri.com that is the best way to get in contact with me. I also have a column with Forbes, and I also have a substack rock. Chem, saber.substack.com where I talk about overcoming financial trauma on a pretty regular basis. Working with me looks like bringing me to organizations to speak. I'm not focused so much on working with people one on one, as I am with bringing the message to organizations where I can speak to many people at the same time. So if you are somebody who books speakers for keynotes, workshops, fireside chats, definitely feel free to connect with me via my website,

Jamila Souffrant 59:17

and I will make sure to link all that in the show notes. Thank you so much, Rakim for coming on, sharing your story. I learned a lot, and I think this will be very helpful to a lot of people.

Rahkim Sabree 59:25

Thank you for inviting me.

Jamila Souffrant 59:27

Don't forget, you can get the episode show notes for this episode by going to journey to launch.com or click the description of wherever you're listening to this and you can still grab your jumpstart guide for free to help you on your journey to financial freedom by going to journey to launch.com/jumpstart if you want to support me and the podcast and love the free content and information that you get here, here are four ways that you can support me in the show. One, make sure you're subscribed to the podcast wherever you listen with. That's Apple podcast, that purple app on your phone, your Android device, YouTube, Spotify, wherever it is that you happen to listen, just subscribe so you are not missing an episode. And if you're happening to listen to this in Apple podcast, rate review and subscribe there. I appreciate and read every single review. Number two, follow me on my social media accounts. I'm at journey to launch on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and I love, love, love interacting with journeyers. There three, support and check out the sponsors of this show. If you hear something that interests you, sponsors are the main ways we keep the podcast lights on here. So show them some love for supporting your girl. Four. And last but not least, share this episode, this podcast, with a friend or family member or co worker, so that we can spread the message of Journey to launch. All right, that's it until next week. Keep on journeying. Journeyers. You.

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