I think women bloom differently when they feel financially safe.

hey algorithm,
connect me with people who believe in mental health and who are on their own financial healing journey, because i think i just found mine.

I had my intro session with a therapist through my sponsor BetterHelp this week. The “matching” kind, where you fill out a few questions about what you’re mentally carrying… And afterwards, they pair you with someone who’s supposed to actually get it. I won’t lie, I sat there for the first few minutes bracing for it to feel clinical, long, boring, like I was being assessed instead of heard.

So yeah, it did feel like that… but for just about two minutes. And then the moment I got matched to my personalised therapist, we actually started talking. That awkward and braced feeling slowly turned into something closer to excitement. It was the first time someone asked me about my money trauma without also asking me to explain or defend it. It actually felt good.

Has anyone else used BetterHelp? Because I signed up not really knowing what to expect, and I am ACTUALLY excited about it. It feels good to want to figure my shit out instead of just being an ass about it and ignoring the problem that I have had for years.

I’ve built this whole platform on being honest about numbers. My debt, my income, the months I had nothing. What I haven’t said out loud as much is that the anxiety around those numbers didn’t go away just because I started talking about them publicly. Transparency healed the shame, but it didn’t heal the nervous system and the wounds underneath it.

There’s actual research on this, not just a vibe. A scoping review of 58 longitudinal studies on financial stress and depression found that 83% of them showed a significant link between the two. That’s not a coincidence, that’s a PATTERN. Financial stress doesn’t sit next to your mental health as a separate issue. It lives inside it.

I think that’s the part nobody prepares you for when you start “healing your relationship with money.” You can build the spreadsheet, track the debt, say the number out loud on the internet, and still flinch every time your banking app loads. The flinch isn’t a discipline problem. It’s a body that learned, a long time ago, that money meant danger, and nobody ever told it otherwise. My self-worth has always been tied to how much money I have, had, or will get… and it was time to heal that.

So as mentioned earlier, this week I started therapy through BetterHelp. Not because I hit some rock bottom moment (ok, maybe I did oops), but because I realised I was exhausted from trying to fix my life with Excel templates while completely ignoring the mental health of the person filling them in.

My therapist said something in that first session that’s been sitting with me since:

“But Isabella, if being hard on yourself worked, it would’ve worked by now.”

That sentence genuinely broke me.

I’ve spent years believing that if I just became more disciplined, earned more money, worked harder, optimised more... the anxiety would finally disappear.

But maybe I’ve been treating the symptom instead of the cause.

Maybe you can’t build wealth while constantly feeling unsafe.

Maybe financial freedom starts with emotional safety.

That’s what I’m trying to find out.

So yeah. I contacted BetterHelp, partnered with them, and got an affiliate link. Because I figured if I’m doing this, we might as well see if it’s actually something, together, instead of me just quietly trying it alone and reporting back later.

If you’ve been wanting to start therapy too, here you go, they gave my audience 10% off the first month:

https://betterhelp.com/wealthywomenguide

We can figure out together if this is actually something or not:

With love, ambition, and a little rebellion,
Isabella,
Founder of Wealthy Women Guide 💋