Your Nervous System, Not Your Mindset, Determines How You Receive Money
Why Money Comes In… and Then Disappears
Have you ever noticed how money or abundance finally shows up, only to vanish almost immediately?
You get ahead for a moment, and then something happens. An unexpected bill. Your car breaks down. A pipe bursts. A toothache turns into a root canal. Your dog suddenly needs surgery. It can feel relentless.
This isn’t because you’re irresponsible. And it’s not because you’re “out of alignment” or didn’t think positively enough.
There’s something far more fundamental happening.
Money Is an Attachment Experience, Not a Mindset Problem
Our relationship with money is not just psychological or energetic. It’s developmental and somatic.
In somatic psychology, our earliest physical and relational experiences shape how we interact with the world. Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen described this through what she called the Developmental Actions of Attachment. These are the foundational movements that teach us how to reach, receive, hold, and let go.
Those early actions become the blueprint for how we relate to support, safety, resources, and yes, money.
Today, I want to focus on one action in particular.
Reach.
How Far Is Your Reach, Really?
Reaching is not just extending your arm.
It is a full-body action involving your spine, breath, eyes, head, and nervous system. A healthy reach requires safety, orientation, and trust. When early attachment or later trauma interrupts development, the reach often becomes truncated or distorted.
That distortion doesn’t disappear. It shows up later as difficulty receiving support, opportunity, and abundance.
Trauma doesn’t stop us from wanting.
It stops us from safely reaching and receiving.
When Trauma Truncates the Reach
If your nervous system learned that reaching led to disappointment, overwhelm, rejection, or loss, it adapted. Not consciously. Somatically.
Those adaptations often show up as familiar money patterns.
Some people reach and then hold on too tightly, afraid it will all disappear. Money comes in, and immediately there is tension, hypervigilance, and fear of loss.
Some reach and pull so hard that their whole body leans backward. They want abundance, but their system is actually moving away from it. The opportunity never quite lands.
Others reach and then question whether they are allowed to have what is coming. Doubt, guilt, or self-surveillance kicks in before the money even arrives.
Now notice your head and eyes.
When you reach, does your head subtly turn away, bracing for disappointment? Or does it stay forward, with curiosity and anticipation?
These details matter more than we’ve been taught to believe.
Your Body Decides Whether You Can Receive
Your somatic actions constantly communicate with your brain and nervous system. They tell your body whether receiving is safe or dangerous.
This is why so many people do money mindset work and still struggle. The issue is not belief alone.
Receiving requires nervous system capacity.
If your system learned early on that needs were not met consistently, or that reaching led to collapse or overwhelm, your body learned to protect you. That protection may now look like financial instability, self-sabotage, or constant emergencies that drain resources.
This is not a flaw.
It is an intelligent survival response.
Why Abundance Requires Regulation, Not Manifestation
When survival is running the show, money becomes a trigger.
This is why abundance can feel fleeting. Not because you can’t have it, but because your nervous system doesn’t yet trust it.
As long as receiving feels unsafe, the body will unconsciously create conditions that restore familiarity, even if that familiarity is stress, lack, or urgency.
This is not about trying harder.
It’s about restoring safety.
Somatic Ways to Rebuild Your Capacity to Receive
Start slowly. Sit or stand with your feet grounded. Before reaching with your arms, feel your spine lengthen. Let your breath drop into your belly. Allow your eyes to soften and face forward.
Practice reaching halfway and pausing. Notice what arises. Tension. Fear. Impatience. Stay with the sensation without forcing anything.
As you extend your arms, allow your body to move slightly toward what you’re reaching for instead of away. Keep your head aligned with your spine. Let your eyes stay present.
When you “receive,” bring the object or imagined resource toward your center slowly. Notice if your body wants to clamp down, rush, or pull back. See if you can stay with the sensation of having without immediately bracing for loss.
This is not about affirmations.
This is about retraining safety.
When the Body Feels Safe, Money Can Stay
Over time, these small, honest practices expand your capacity to reach and receive without collapse, contraction, or over-gripping. As your nervous system learns that receiving does not equal danger, money and abundance stop triggering survival responses.
And when survival is no longer running the show, resources tend to stay.
Not because you manifested harder.
But because your body finally believes it is safe to have.
If this stirred something in you, let that matter. Your patterns are not random. They are intelligent. And they can be gently unwound.
Does this resonate?
If you recognized your own patterns around reaching, holding, or losing money, this isn’t something you fix with mindset alone.
CLEARITY Entegration™: Nervous System Integration Process works directly with the body and nervous system to rebuild your capacity to safely reach and receive, without collapse, over-gripping, or constant loss cycles.
This is for people who are done analyzing and ready for real, embodied change.
