Financial Trauma Therapy
Providing Psychotherapy and Counselling services for financial trauma therapy, in person at our office in Burlington and virtually online across Ontario.
Feelings of shame, fear, or avoidance around money aren’t just “mindset issues.” They’re often symptoms of unprocessed trauma.
Do any of these sound familiar?
- You feel on edge, overwhelmed, or avoidant when dealing with money
- You’re unsure how to charge your worth or raise your rates
- You under-earn, overwork, or take on too many sliding scale clients
- You overspend to relieve stress—or hoard money due to fear of loss
- You avoid looking at your finances entirely
- You feel guilt or shame when you think about wealth, success, or retirement
- You have internalized beliefs that “money is bad” or “people like me don’t thrive”
These are common signs of financial trauma. They are not character flaws—they are adaptations rooted in your lived experiences, nervous system patterns, and often, collective and systemic conditions.
Whether you’re a therapist, professional, entrepreneur, or parent, financial trauma can deeply impact your ability to feel safe, resourced, and secure. These experiences may stem from childhood instability, systemic inequity, generational scarcity, or financial abuse—and they often live in the nervous system long after the original events.
At Christina Janiga Psychotherapy, we offer financial trauma therapy to help individuals uncover the emotional roots of their money patterns, regulate their nervous systems, and develop a healthier, more empowered relationship with wealth, work, and worth.
What Is Financial Trauma?
Financial trauma is a type of psychological and physiological distress resulting from harmful or destabilizing financial experiences. This may include:
- Growing up in poverty or financial insecurity
- Experiencing bankruptcy, job loss, or sudden loss of income
- Job and Business insecurity
- Entrepreneurial challenges
- Chronic under-earning or overworking
- Exposure to systemic oppression, wage disparity, or intergenerational wealth gaps
- Financial abuse in relationships
- Living through economic uncertainty or instability
Like other forms of trauma, financial trauma can trigger a nervous system survival response—causing you to:
- Fight by overworking, hustling, overcompensating, and generally doing too much.
- Flight by avoiding bills, analyzing quarterly profit/loss, making difficult decisions
- Freeze by under earning and shuttin down.
- Fawn by over giving and over extending yourself
It’s okay to feel safe. It’s okay to build wealth. It’s okay to rest.
Financial trauma therapy with our team at Christina Janiga Psychotherapy helps you:
- Identify your money survival style: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn and your money blocks
- Learn how dopamine plays a part of your financial blocks and trauma
- Regulate your nervous systems and come out of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses
- Effectively process the experiences from the past that contribute to your money blocks and transform your beliefs and improve your relationship with money and boost your confidence in running your business
- Gain clarity about your money mindset and develop the courage to pursue new business opportunities, expand your horizons and reclaim your sense of empowerment
Who can benefit from financial trauma therapy?
This work may be right for you if you:
- Are a therapist, healthcare provider, or entrepreneur feeling stuck or undercharging
- Avoid money altogether, or obsess over it
- Grew up with financial scarcity or economic trauma
- Struggle to ask for what you’re worth
- Feel it’s morally wrong to have wealth or success
- Want to break generational patterns around money and worth
- Are ready to feel safe, empowered, and resourced
We welcome adults of all genders and backgrounds, and we hold space for the unique experiences of marginalized communities and those impacted by intergenerational or systemic financial trauma.
Our Approach to Financial Trauma Therapy
Our team at Christina Janiga Psychotherapy brings a distinctive combination of clinical trauma expertise and real-world financial experience to this work. Financial distress and financial trauma can look alike, but they respond to different kinds of support. We offer two pathways so you can find the right fit.
I’m dealing with a recent financial crisis
If a scam, fraud, job loss, or sudden financial event has left you anxious, ashamed, or unable to sleep – you need stabilization first. Our Financial Stress & Anxiety Counselling program offers virtual, reduced rate sessions with a supervised Master’s level counsellor who can help you ground, cope, and rebuild trust in yourself. Counselling interns are trained at the onset of their practicum placement in supporting individuals that are in acute distress and can provide short-term support, psychoeducation, resources, and if deeper patterns emerge, they can connect you with our trauma therapy team.
Format: Virtual across Ontario | Sliding scale $60-$150 | Supervised by Christina Janiga, RP (EMDR Consultant).
My relationship with money has always been difficult
If your financial behaviours are rooted in childhood experiences, generational patterns, financial abuse, or deep-seated beliefs about money and your worth – you may benefit from longer-term trauma therapy.
Our Trauma Therapy Team
Christina Janiga, RP is our clinical director and our lead for financial trauma. She is an EMDR Certified Therapist and EMDR Consultant (EMDR Canada & EMDRIA) with advanced training in trauma processing, nervous system regulation, and somatic approaches. Christina has completed training through Money Healing for Therapists program (Heather, Valdez, LCSW), which focuses on the intersection of trauma, shame, scarcity, and money blocks. She primarily works with other health professionals for this type of work. She also trains and supervises our counselling interns that offer Financial Stress & Anxiety Counselling Program.
Jillian Yuzpe, RP brings a unique lens to financial trauma therapy. Before becoming a psychotherapist, Jillian spent nearly a decade in corporate finance – including roles as a Senior Auditor in TD Bank’s Investment Banking division, a Lead Senior Accountant at KPMG, and ultimately as Chief Financial Officer of a publicly traded company. She understands the financial world from the inside – the language, the pressures, the systems, and the toll they can take. She combines this breadth of lived professional experience with clinical training in EMDR therapy, health anxiety symptoms, chronic pain, grief, and menopause symptoms.
Together, we draw from brain-based, evidence-informed approaches including:
- EMDR Therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) to reprocess painful or limiting money memories
- Parts Work / IFS-informed Therapy to explore internal conflicts or moral dilemmas around wealth
- Somatic and Nervous System Regulation Tools to shift freeze, fight, flight, and fawn states
- Psychoeducation on financial trauma and its psychological and neurobiological roots
- Mindful reflection + practical strategies to support clarity, sustainability, and financial alignment
We work collaboratively with you to explore how financial trauma may be affecting your financial life, your sense of safety, and your capacity to thrive – and we help you build a more sustainable future.
How Our Approach Differs from Financial Therapy
You may have come across the term “financial therapy” or the Certified Financial Therapist™ (CFT™) designation through the Financial Therapy Association. We want to be transparent about we offer and how it compares.
The CFT™ designation is designed for professionals who integrate financial planning with therapeutic techniques. A CFT™ may help individuals set financial goals, build healthier money habits, and address emotional barriers to following through on a financial plan. The designation is held by both financial planners and mental health professionals and bridges the worlds of financial literacy and emotional well-being.
Our approach is different -we are Registered Psychotherapists regulated by the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario (CRPO). We treat financial trauma as a clinical trauma presentation. Rather than integrating financial planning into therapy, we use brain-based, evidence-informed modalities – including EMDR therapy and somatic nervous system regulation – to process the underlying traumatic experiences that drive financial patterns.
In practice, this means we help you resolve what is happening in your nervous system and belief system around money, so you can move out of survival responses and make empowered financial decisions. We do not provide financial planning, investment advice, or financial literacy education.
For some individuals, working with a CFT™ who combines financial guidance with emotional support is the right fit. For others – particularly those whose financial behaviours are rooted in unprocessed trauma, deep shame, or nervous system dysregulation – clinical trauma therapy can be an alternate path. In many cases, these approaches can compliment each other well.
YOUR NEXT STEPS
Your nervous system deserves skilled, informed support – at a rate that reflects your reality. We are here, we are currently accepting clients, and we would be glad to help you find the right fit.
You do not have to keep struggling with money in silence.
Whether you are coping with a recent financial crisis or untangling patterns that have shaped your relationship with money for years, we have a path for you.
Dealing with a recent scam, fraud, or financial crisis?
Book a free 15 minute consultation for Financial Stress & Anxiety Counselling. Virtual across Ontario. Sliding scale $60-$150.
Ready to address deeper financial trauma with EMDR therapy?
Book a free 15 minute consultation with Jillian Yuzpe.
Not sure which path is right?
Email us at admin@christinajaniga.com – we will help you find the right fit.
More about Christina Janiga Psychotherapy
At Christina Janiga Psychotherapy, we recognize that financial trauma is more than just numbers—it’s deeply tied to survival, self-worth, and systemic pressures. Many psychotherapists and professionals struggle with navigating financial avoidance, burnout, and internal conflict around wealth, especially during times of economic and political uncertainty.
We support individuals from all backgrounds, including marginalized communities, who may feel stuck in scarcity-driven patterns—whether that shows up as overworking, under-earning, overspending, or emotionally shutting down around money. Our approach helps clients explore the psychology of money, process financial trauma through EMDR and somatic therapies, and build a more regulated, intentional, and sustainable relationship with money.
We believe it’s okay to build wealth, be sustainable, and thrive—without guilt or burnout. Our work helps clients unblock money beliefs, reconnect to their higher self, and make values-based decisions for both life and business.
Secure Services
Christina Janiga and associated employees of Christina Janiga Psychotherapy offer virtual psychotherapy and couselling sessions through secure, Canada-based software called JaneVideo. JaneVideo is a secure and encrypted online video platform that meet all of Canada’s privacy requirements and laws.