Growing up in the suburbs of Vancouver, business owner, financial consultant and now author Chantel Chapman didn’t have the kind of childhood that set her up for financial stability.
She developed the Trauma of Money curriculum, a certification program to empower psychologists, financial advisors and even non-professionals with a trauma-informed understanding of the impact of debt and money on the human psyche. After nearly six years and more than a dozen cohorts, Chapman just released her book, the Trauma of Money. We caught up with Chapman to talk about how financial shame can rewire the brain.
Your background is in finance, but what was your story before all of this came up for you?
I grew up in poverty with a single mother. I lived in social housing. I am a survivor of multiple types of trauma in my childhood, and as I was experiencing trauma in my childhood, I could feel a lot of the stress of being in poverty. I had developed this very strong narrative that if my mom would have had money, I would have been safe. So, I deeply connected money with security, and that kind of laid the groundwork for my career path.
I became a mortgage broker at 21 years old, which was very challenging, because people don’t trust a 21-year-old with getting their mortgage. As I was doing this in my early 20s, I started to feel this rage: why do so many people, including myself, not have this basic financial literacy education? I realized this is so much deeper than learning how to budget. This is about all the experiences that we go through in our lives, our identity and the intersection at which we meet our relationship with money.
Some folks won’t have the money to pay for a certification course, but a $25 book makes it much more accessible. In your journey, which came first: the certification or the idea for the book?
We’ve seen how powerful this method is, so I knew at some point the book was going to make sense [in order to] get it into the hands of more people. When Wiley approached me, it just seemed like a really good fit.
Obviously, this is a trauma- informed course, which has a big emphasis on equity-seeking and social justice. Can you tell me about why that’s important to you?
How can you talk about capitalism and money without acknowledging the racial and gender wealth gap? They exist because of each other. Racial capitalism is capitalism. And because of that—and this is something that’s a big part of our programming—we ask, how can we deconflate having money and financially flourishing, running a successful business, being an entrepreneur, with being extractive and exploiting?
How has this changed your life? Do you feel by the time you started teaching this, you were like, “Okay, I’ve dealt with my financial stuff”?
When I started it, I had not dealt with it. I was on the journey myself. One of the things that we teach is fault tolerance and it’s one of the antidotes to scarcity. Fault tolerance is the opposite of perfectionism. Perfectionism is a setup for shame.
Remember, your relationship with money is going to mirror a lot of other relationships in your life—your relationship with romantic partners, your relationship with time—there are going to be patterns everywhere. And this is one thing we teach in Trauma of Money: how to go into pattern recognition mode to help increase your levels of awareness.
Pet peeve
Inconsistency.
Hobby
Meditation.
Most recent TV binge
Yellowstone.
Most memorable concert
Bryan Adams, in grade 4.
If I had a superpower, it would be…
That I could touch a book and download the whole thing without reading it and retain all the information.
Favourite place in B.C.
Great Bear Rainforest.
Last book I read
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.
