Negative emotions about money don’t serve my financial goals.

Two people can know each other for fifteen years, share the details of divorces and hospital appointments, and never once say a number out loud.

That silence has a cost. It leaves everybody assuming their own position is uniquely embarrassing, when the room is in fact full of people running similar sums and saying nothing about it either.

None of which makes the feeling a failure. Shame around money is a reasonable response to a subject nobody was ever allowed to discuss. But it is the part that stops the question being asked, and asked questions are where things move. Frightened and informed is a far better position than frightened and alone with it.