09/07/2025
𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙑𝙚𝙡𝙙 𝙒𝙖𝙨 𝙒𝙝𝙞𝙩𝙚
My grandmother’s mother – my great-grandmother – was taken from her home to a concentration camp during the Anglo-Boer War.
On the way there, she and her family saw the veld covered in white.
At first, they thought it was snow.
But it wasn’t.
𝙄𝙩 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙗𝙤𝙙𝙞𝙚𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙙𝙚𝙖𝙙 𝙨𝙝𝙚𝙚𝙥.
As part of the British military strategy, during the Anglo-Boer War, farms and homes had been burned, crops destroyed, and livestock shot. Everything was destroyed – homes, food, security, the future.
My father told me this story. He said his grandmother never spoke about the British. Not once. The pain was held silently, but the impact was passed down visibly.
My grandmother was frugal in ways I didn’t understand as a child.
My father is the same.
And in many ways, so am I.
We didn’t grow up talking about intergenerational trauma. We just knew you didn’t waste. You didn’t throw away a breadcrumb if it still had value. You saved. You kept. You were careful. Because you never knew when everything could be taken from you again.
This is what Malcolm Gladwell calls a 𝙘𝙪𝙡𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙖𝙡 𝙡𝙚𝙜𝙖𝙘𝙮 – a deep pattern that outlives the original event. Even when the war is long over, the response to it lives on.
I see this again and again in my work as a Money Coach.
People feel shame for the way they handle money – whether they overspend, hoard, avoid, or freeze – because they carry emotional legacies that were never truly theirs to begin with.
What we think is a “money problem” is often an inherited survival strategy.
But the beauty is this:
Once we can see the story, we can decide how it ends.
I now work with professionals who feel stuck in financial fog – not because they’re careless, but because they carry layers of inherited patterning, unspoken fears, and old survival rules.
If that sounds like you, know this:
You’re not broken.
You’re not behind.
You’re just carrying more than your share – and it’s okay to set it down.
📷 Pictured are my great-grandparents with my eldest cousin.
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