the Not-Good-Enough Financial Mother — a clinical lens from my forthcoming book, applied to current news on this hub.
What this lens is
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Most people think of the economy as a mathematical machine. As a couples therapist, I look at the economy and see an emotional environment. Specifically, I see an erratic, unavailable parent. I call this the Not Good Enough Financial Mother.
From the moment you are born, your nervous system is scanning your environment asking one fundamental question. Is the ground beneath my feet solid? A good enough parent provides a secure, predictable base so a child can feel safe enough to explore. But in the modern world, the fiat financial system has stepped in as the primary caregiver for our civilization, and it is a profoundly dysregulated parent.
This system demands your absolute loyalty and participation while constantly rewriting the rules of your survival without your consent. It promises safety but delivers inflation. It tells you everything is fine while quietly extracting the value of your labor. It refuses to take responsibility for its own mistakes and instead externalizes its panic directly into your body.
I see the devastating clinical results of this dynamic in my office every week. A client sits on my couch who has done everything society asked of them. They got the degree, they work the sixty hour weeks, and they earned the promotion. Yet they are living in a state of chronic, low grade hypervigilance. They wake up at three in the morning with a tight chest, terrified they are falling behind. They hustle endlessly to outrun the feeling that they are never going to be safe. They are convinced they have a motivation problem, an anxiety disorder, or a personal defect.
They do not have a personal defect. They are experiencing a massive attachment wound. They are tethered to a system that functions exactly like an abusive caregiver. When you depend on a system that constantly moves the ground beneath your feet, your biology forces you into survival mode. You develop the same anxious and avoidant attachment strategies with money, work, and relationships that children develop with unstable parents. You absorb the system’s deficits using your own nervous system.
You cannot heal this exhaustion until you see the system for what it actually is. Explore the essays below to see exactly how this dysregulated financial mother is showing up in the news, in your relationships, and in your own body.
Get the chapters as they are written
the Not-Good-Enough Financial Mother is one of the lenses in my forthcoming book, Proof of Work: From Fiat Life to Thriving in the AI Age, with Greenleaf in 2027. The waitlist is my Substack, where the chapters are being written in public.
Essays applying this lens to current events
- India Raises Diesel, Gasoline Prices for Fourth Time in: a couples therapist on the not-good-enough (2026-05-25)
- India Raises Diesel, Gasoline Prices for Fourth Time in: a couples therapist on the not-good-enough (2026-05-25)
Read more about the book · About Figs
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