I am surprised that Vicky Reynal, a financial psychotherapist, is soft and reaffirming when I meet her. Perhaps I shouldn’t be – she is a therapist, after all. But something about her line of work, helping people untangle their issues with money, had primed me to expect someone more brisk, more clinical.

I think of how many business executives she meets with, how prohibitively expensive her time must be, and how strong her boundaries probably are. I even panic at the thought of logging into our Zoom meeting one minute late, because time, after all, is money.

Reynal, I’m sure, would find this compelling. She believes that we often have thoughts and feelings about money that actually have nothing to do with cold, hard cash, and everything to do with our earliest emotional experiences, deepest yearnings or misgivings.

It can be frustrating, then, that Reynal won’t talk much about herself. I’m genuinely curious – especially when I ask about her fascination with Warren Buffett, whom she has read extensively about and once met in person. She admits she was drawn to him growing up, but offers only vague hints as to why: references to formative financial experiences and the symbolic weight he held within her family, though she declines to elaborate.

As a psychotherapist, she tries to obscure her own life from her clients, to prevent it obstructing their process. Anonymity, it turns out, is a very good therapeutic tool.

“People try to guess where I’m from, and their guesses tell me so much about their internal world. Some people who have very strict and ungiving parents guess that maybe I’m eastern European, because of how cold they perceive me to be. Others guess I am Mediterranean or South American – from a warm country – because of how loving and giving [they think] I am.”

It’s not about stripping emotions out of financial decisions. It’s about becoming aware of them Vicky Reynal

When Reynal was younger and went through therapy herself, she had a transformative experience working through some of the feelings about money. This, she thought, must be an area ripe for psychotherapeutic practice. But after nearly a decade studying psychology and psychotherapy, she was surprised to find that only a handful of research papers and textbooks directly focus on it.

“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, we are talking about our relationship with food, with sex, with people, why aren’t we talking about people’s relationship with money?’ It comes in the therapy room anyway, because it’s part of leading a life and people get into all sorts of messes because of it – and as therapists we have the lens to understand that.”

When Reynal began to explicitly market herself as a financial psychotherapist, she was suddenly overwhelmed by patients queueing up to talk to her. Her inbox was full of emails from would-be clients, telling her how relieved they were to find her. “They were saying: ‘I didn’t know a money psychotherapist existed, and I need your help,’” she says.

She sees some clients on a concession fee or a reduced rate, as they may be unemployed or struggling with debt. But others don’t need it. These are patients who know what they need to do when it comes to money on a rational level, but they just can’t bring themselves to do it: the client who obsessively buys shoes, or the one that can’t bring himself to buy basic things like a coat in the winter, because he feels a deep and bewildering desire to deny himself nice things – despite having more than ample means to buy them. Others have more than enough cash, but can’t find contentment. They come to her thinking: “Maybe you won’t judge me, for being wealthy and yet unhappy.”

Finances are central to how we relate to the world. The way we deal with our income affects our families, shapes our conversations with partners, and can cast long shadows over our relationship to our parents.

But as with so much in therapy, when people think they are coming to talk about money, it is actually not about the money at all. And beneath all that, it often reflects the lessons we absorbed growing up.

“It’s just a language that we use, because I think it’s easier to say: ‘You are being stingy,’ than to say: ‘I wish you were more affectionate with me,’ or ‘I don’t feel you love me enough,’ or ‘I love you more than you love me,’” says Reynal.

View image in fullscreen Our thoughts and feelings about money often reflect the lessons we absorbed growing up. Photograph: Andrew Aitchison/Alamy

She also meets clients who are struggling to make ends meet, who have the sense that they are being childish and impulsive with money – they feel belittled by the way that they spend. When Reynal raises this, I can’t help but wonder whether her clients attach those negative descriptions to themselves because in the US and the UK, poverty is often described as being about bad choices rather than broader economic conditions.

Most of us can point to relationships in our lives – certainly with ourselves – where the way in which we spend serves as a proxy for something deeper. The colleague who is a constant under-tipper, who feels hard done by despite always contributing least to the bill; the sibling who works like a dog but can never, ever ask for a raise; the friend who constantly feels on the edge of financial ruin, despite having more than enough.

So what are the subconscious motivators beneath these interactions? Reynal will often see clients who come in to talk to her about one thing: for example, a recurring frustration that they are always too generous and give far beyond their means, even to the point that it leaves them feeling resentful and angry; which in turn leads to a conversation about people pleasing and where the urge to put others’ needs first came from in their life.

Those behaviours, it turns out – just like infidelity or drug use, or any of the more obvious topics that we associate with therapy – may originate from a time in our lives when we felt unsatisfied. An incredibly generous person might have struggled to fit in during their teenage years, while another’s hunger for wealth might be due to an unmet need to be loved by their caregiver as a baby or feeling constantly rejected or dismissed as a child.

“They are non-obvious links on the surface … but they help us get to the real longing underneath, the real unmet desire.”

Her practice has helped her understand broader shifts, too. She remains shocked at how social media use has led to an unprecedented level of lifestyle inflation. People are no longer comparing their lives with their neighbours, but to totally unattainable lifestyles displayed by people paid to look rich.

“There’s this manic level of social comparison,” she says. “People begin to believe that everyone has more money than they do. A lot of clients of mine are men who come under an enormous amount of pressure because they have taken on mortgages bigger than they could afford or cars that they couldn’t afford. They have to accept that they have failed against their own standards, or the shame of not being able to provide what their family wanted or was hoping for.”

In some ways, it’s no surprise that many of her clients feel a sense of relief after finding her. These kinds of struggles aren’t often met with much sympathy – especially in an economy where so many are simply trying to make ends meet.

“There’s this idea that is quite common that money will fix everything. And of course, if you are struggling to pay your bills, money would make that better. But to make the leap that if people have money they must be happy, or they have no right to be unhappy – that’s a big leap,” she says.

She lists many of the ways that people struggle with wealth. Some clients have more than their families did, and self-sabotage as a result, perhaps believing they don’t deserve it. They don’t invoice clients properly for work, or feel guilty when there’s a lot of money in their account. Others spend money extravagantly, almost to rid themselves of it. And in the therapy room she often learns about how the stories clients have heard growing up affect them: if their families thought of wealth as immoral or greedy, for example, what does that say about them if they become wealthy?

But Reynal also stresses the many stabilizing and positive relationships people have with money – like feeling empowered after years of struggle, or wanting to be financially independent because it is freeing.

“It’s not about stripping emotions out of financial decisions,” she says. “It’s about becoming aware of them.”

In that sense, she invites readers to be inquisitive about their own attitudes towards money, how they spend it, and where their own beliefs about financial security come from.

“We can’t all afford therapy. But opening up that curiosity can be enough: why am I buying this thing? Or why am I feeling guilty about spending money on that thing, if I have enough for it? What’s the longing behind that?” she says.

Some may think there are just a number of different ways to split the bill. But for those who look deeper, they may just find out something new about themselves.