Overcoming Financial Trauma: How to Break Free from Guilt, Build Wealth, and Redefine Success - Hardcover

Sabree, Rahkim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1394341245 ISBN 13: 9781394341245

Publisher: Wiley, 2025

Synopsis

An invaluable, hands-on guide to understanding your financial past while building a secure financial future

In Overcoming Financial Trauma: How to Break Free from Guilt, Build Wealth, and Redefine Success, award-winning financial therapist Rahkim Sabree delivers a deeply honest and supportive discussion of how to get to the root of your financial trauma. The author helps you identify triggers for nervous system dysregulation that result in financial anxiety and financial stress, demonstrating the importance of financial psychology and behavioral finance, as well as financial therapy as an effective solution.

This book introduces Rahkim's 3 E framework for overcoming financial trauma as a healing reframe for everyone who has been primed to view their financial failures through a lens of personal shortcomings. You'll learn how to navigate the guilt, shame, and fear that naturally arise from this old mindset. You'll also find:

• Introductions to effective financial education, along with an acknowledgement of systemic barriers to financial success and social commentary
• Exercises utilizing mindfulness and personal audits
• Culturally relevant personal anecdotes and real-life stories of overcoming formidable obstacles

A powerful new resource for human resource professionals, first-generation high-income earners, and anyone else doing their best to make their financial way in a market that's increasingly challenging to navigate, Overcoming Financial Trauma is filled with actionable strategies and a liberating new way of understanding your financial choices and situation.

About this title

About the Author

RAHKIM SABREE is an award-winning financial therapist and an Accredited Financial Counselor®. He’s a Forbes columnist, key­note speaker, and author who specializes in financial trauma, broaching such topics as wealth, mental health, and race. His work has been seen or featured in TED talks, The New York Times, Investopedia, Black Enterprise, The Grio, CNBC Make It, Busi­ness Insider, and more.

From the Back Cover

Praise for OVERCOMING FINANCIAL TRAUMA

“With clarity and compassion, Rahkim Sabree has written a groundbreaking work on embodied financial trauma. This book is both a mirror and a map; inviting us to face hard truths while offering tenderness towards our humanity. Rahkim with great care offers practical tools for the cultivation of room, reclamation of our embodied selves and the possibility of communal renewal. It is a fabulous overture of love and will add to the nurturing of our peoples.”
―DR. RESMAA MENAKEM, New York Times bestselling author of My Grandmother’s Hands

“Rahkim Sabree takes what most of us treat as private failures and situates them inside history, policy, and the systems that raised us. The effect is sobering, and for many readers, it will be a relief. If you work in finance, HR, or community leadership, this book belongs on your desk as much as in the hands of the people you serve. Sabree makes it impossible to keep pretending money is separate from who we are, and Overcoming Financial Trauma reveals that the first balance sheet we have to face is the one written in our bodies.”
―KIERSTEN & JULIEN SAUNDERS, authors of Cashing Out

“As a clinical psychologist who specializes in neuroscience and the brain, I greatly appreciate Rahkim going beyond mere strategies and exercises to get finances in order to include why we think the way we think about finances, function the way we function around finances and what financial trauma looks like in the brain.”
―DR. CATHERINE JACKSON, BCN, CIMHP

“Rahkim Sabree gives people the language they need to feel seen in their experiences. More than that, he offers a pathway to help readers recognize where they are, while reminding them that they are not defined or bound by their trauma. After all, you cannot begin to address what you have not yet recognized. The power of trauma, in its many forms, is that it often hides in plain sight―woven so deeply into daily life that people come to normalize it. Rahkim’s work shines a light on those hidden strongholds, raising awareness and guiding readers toward a course of freedom and healing.”
―DR. MICHAEL THOMAS, AFC®, author of Black Financial Culture

“Culturally relevant stories and strategies for navigating a challenging economic landscape.”
―ESSENCE MAGAZINE

From the Inside Flap

In Overcoming Financial Trauma: How to Break Free from Guilt, Build Wealth, and Redefine Success, award-winning financial therapist Rahkim Sabree delivers an insightful and honest discussion of how to identify and get to the root of your financial trauma. Sabree takes an embodied approach to explaining how nervous system dysregulation results in financial anxiety and financial stress, high­lighting the importance of financial psychology and behavioral finance. He adds cultural commentary, interdisciplinary references, and introduces ways you can craft effective strategies for improving finan­cial security and well-being.

The book introduces the author’s “3 E” framework―Exposure, Education, and Execution―designed to guide readers through the process of identifying and overcoming financial trauma. Across its three sections, the book reframes what may have felt like personal shortcomings as natural responses to financial trauma, and shows how applying this framework can help eliminate guilt, shame, and fear, ultimately leading to healthier financial behaviors and emotional well-being.

Overcoming Financial Trauma offers both a critique and a sound foundation for practical financial education that acknowl­edges the very real barriers to wealth and health that many of us face. It demonstrates how to use trauma responsive approaches, mindfulness, and personal audits while providing culturally relevant personal anecdotes and real-life examples of people experiencing familiar obstacles to realizing their goals.

Perfect for human resource professionals, financial services professionals, mental health professionals, and first-generation high-income earners, Overcoming Financial Trauma is a must-read roadmap for anyone doing their best to build their financial future in an economy that’s increasingly tricky to navigate. The book is packed with actionable strategies designed to hold up a mirror to yourself, the systems you navigate, and society, to help you reeducate yourself on how you acknowledge, create, and grow your relationship with money.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1394341245
• ISBN 13: 9781394341245
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224