Family Wealth Mentor™ Diana Chambers has carved out a unique niche in wealth management and for more than two decades has helped HNW clients deal with the consequences of their wealth.
Six years ago, she published ‘True Wealth: Letters on Money, Life and Love’, a book which addressed the rarely discussed subject of Financial EQ. Drawing on her experiences as a trusted adviser, she explored our relationship with money and reflected on what it meant to be truly wealthy.
Now, she has written a new e-book ‘Money Wisdom Unlocked: Understanding Trauma as a Key to Your Financial Behaviour’. It explains the factors that have shaped our belief systems, which in turn form our experiences, including our attitudes to wealth.
Drawing on insights from the fields of science, integrative health, psychology and spirituality, she identifies uncomfortable truths which many of us prefer to overlook. Diana Chambers believes that we all carry the mark of trauma – whether ancestral, collective, or individual.
How we behave in relation to money – for example, extreme frugality or excessive spending – reflects our underlying trauma. Understanding our financial behaviour enables us to recognise deep-seated beliefs that cause us to act as we do, but no longer serve us well. It also gives us an opportunity to heal our trauma.
The e-book is the result of a collaboration with Thomas Hubl, the author of ‘Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds’, with whom she engaged on a series of conversations.
In Money Wisdom, she writes:
“Not only do we equate money with our survival, but we also charge it with our hopes, desires, and intentions. We have given money meaning that it cannot realize and created a delusional bubble around it, wanting it to achieve the impossible for us. Yet if we are discerning, we can use money to enhance our happiness”.
Diana Chambers founded the Chambers Group LLC in 2002 and subsequently established the Chambers Group Sarl in Switzerland, reflecting on the impact of money on her life. She has become a trusted confidant to others as they address the challenges and opportunities resulting from their wealth.
She says:
“Through my work and experience, I have been able to develop an insight into the connections that illustrate how an understanding of trauma sheds light on an individual’s financial behaviour. I wanted to make these insights broadly available because I believe that they apply to all of us, whatever our level of wealth.
“We all have relationships with money, just as we have relationships with people. We express our desires, needs and beliefs within those relationships in patterns that are positive, negative or neutral.”
She warns against a fixation with wealth for its own sake and, in the book, she concludes: “Wealth does not equal freedom and our financial assets cannot replace an inner sense of wealth. If material wealth is being used to replace inner wealth, the emptiness and sense of scarcity, separation, or absence will remain. Our work is to build our inner wealth”.
She accepts that healing trauma is often not straightforward and might require professional support.
But she argues:
“The first of several steps is to recognize your fear and anxiety, appreciate why you carry it and then tease the fear and anxiety from your current reality so you can be present in the situation and then begin to sense what is right for you to do rather than attempting to pursue what you believe will give you security”.
She says:
“I hope the e-book will raise awareness about the role of trauma in our relationship with money, in turn leading to compassion for all of us who are struggling to manage and own our money in more generous and connected ways as well as identifying new ways to express ourselves financially”.
She hopes that both clients and their advisors will find these insights helpful in relation to wealth management strategies. For example, many of us are afraid to lose our wealth, which is why most investors prefer to mitigate loss on the downside than to make gains on the upside.
Drawing on her own experiences – she was disinherited by her father in favour of her two sisters – she recognises that her own financial losses have often been driven by a fear of loss. She lost substantial investment value in 1987 and 2008 and the second experience caused her to withdraw from the stock market during one of its best streaks in recent history.
‘Money Wisdom Unlocked: Understanding Trauma as a Key to Your Financial Behaviour’ can be downloaded free of charge from: https://dianachambers.com/
