We may unconsciously project our internal qualities (security, love, worth) onto money.

A three-step reclamation process is: projection, reclamation, integration.

Reclaiming projections changes not just income but identity and life.

The most popular course I’ve taught in 20 years of coaching is about money. Except it’s not about money at all. It's about understanding ourselves. When we examine our relationship with money, we discover we’ve unconsciously given away parts of ourselves to it.

The Projection We Don’t See

When someone tells me “money equals security,” they’re revealing something deeper: I am insecure without money. This is projection. We take something internal—our sense of security, worthiness, or love—and outsource it to money.

The work I do, influenced by Peter Koenig’s projection-reclamation approach, helps people take back what they’ve given away through three stages:

Projection — noticing what money means to you

Reclamation — owning that projection fully

Integration — holding the opposite truth simultaneously

This isn’t positive thinking. It’s reclaiming the part of yourself you didn’t realize you had outsourced.

What Happens When We Reclaim

One client said, “Money for me is love.”

As we explored this, she realized that growing up, financial stability meant her family was okay—that she was cared for. When money was tight, love felt absent. Her unconscious equation: No money = no love. This shaped everything. She chronically underpriced her services, afraid that charging her worth would make her “too much”—or unlovable.

Through the reclamation work, she named the truth: “I’ve believed I’m only loved when I have money.” Then she held the opposite: “I am loved regardless of money, and I can charge what I’m worth.” Within three months, she’d raised her fees by 40 percent. But the real shift was internal—she stopped performing for love and started working from alignment.

When the Teacher Becomes the Student

I didn’t come to this work as a detached observer. I came because I had to.

My father wielded money as control. Depending on the state of our relationship, I was written in or out of his will—sometimes within the same year. When I told him I was leaving on a trip he didn’t approve of, he delivered the ultimatum: “Go, and you’re out of the will.”

I went. And in that moment, I thought I’d freed myself: His money would have no power over me. But I hadn’t freed myself from the projection. I’d just flipped it.

My father had said money equals love—conditional, controlling love. Since I couldn’t receive that kind of love, I began rejecting money altogether. For years, I sought relationships and opportunities where money wasn’t a factor. I told myself this was integrity.

What I was actually building was an unhealthy relationship with money itself. The moment I saw this clearly came years later. A wealthy aunt wanted to buy me an expensive watch. I refused it. “I came to see you, not to receive a gift,” I told her. “I don’t want that confusion.”

She looked puzzled. There was no confusion—except mine.

I’d been so determined not to let money mean what my father made it mean that I’d made it mean something else equally limiting: money is contamination. I’d projected onto it the very control I was trying to escape. The reclamation work began when I could hold both truths: “Money was used to control me.” And, “I can receive money as a simple exchange, or generosity, or appreciation—without it meaning control.”

That shift didn’t just change how I earned. It changed what I allowed myself to receive.

The Science Behind Money Meaning

Research in emotional finance shows that unconscious fantasy plays a powerful role in financial decision-making. A 2024 paper on emotional finance describes how phantasy—unconscious internal images and narratives, according to psychoanalysis—shapes how investors perceive opportunities and risk. These hidden emotional meanings can influence investment choices far more than the purely rational models of finance assume.

What psychologists call phantasy, coaches call money story. Different language, same phenomenon: The meanings we’ve assigned to money operate below conscious awareness, driving decisions we believe are rational. When we bring these meanings into consciousness, we move from reaction to choice. From scarcity to possibility. From being defined by money to defining our relationship with it.

Why This Isn’t “Money Skills”

This is not budgeting or investing, this is work with the inner terrain—the meaning, the projection, the identity, the freedom. Once that internal terrain shifts, the external financial terrain follows. People don’t necessarily earn more. They earn differently—with more integrity, less anxiety, greater alignment. The work opens questions beyond money: What am I worth? What do I allow myself? What have I given away?

In 20 years of practice, when people reclaim what they’ve projected onto money, they don’t just change their bank accounts. They change their lives.

Money is never simply money. It’s a mirror reflecting what you believe is possible, what you’ve unconsciously given away, what you’re ready to reclaim. If you feel stuck around money—undervaluing your work, avoiding financial conversations, or feeling that money defines your freedom rather than you defining your relationship to it—start here:

Ask yourself: What does money mean to me?

Write down the first answer that comes. Don’t edit it. Then ask: What if I held the opposite?

If money means security, what would it feel like to say: “I am secure with or without money?”

If money means freedom, what opens when you consider: “I am free regardless of my bank balance?”

Hold both truths. Notice what shifts.

This simple exercise is where the work begins—where you stop letting money define you and start consciously choosing your relationship with it. That shift opens more than income. It opens identity, alignment, and purpose.

It opens the part of yourself you didn’t know you’d given away.

© Psychology Today