195: When Valuing Yourself Changes Your Circle: Money, Friendship & the Grief of Growth
As we begin to take our financial needs seriously—raising fees, setting boundaries, and valuing our work—those shifts don’t stay contained to our businesses. They often ripple into our personal lives, especially our friendships. In this episode, I talk about what can happen when we move from self-sacrifice to self-advocacy, and how that transition can quietly (or painfully) change the dynamics of the relationships we’ve built.
I explore why some friendships feel strained when old patterns of caretaking and over-giving no longer fit, and I name the very real grief that can come with outgrowing relationships that once felt safe or familiar. This isn’t about blame or “doing friendships wrong.” It’s about understanding that growth—especially financial and personal growth—can be both liberating and tender at the same time.
If you’ve ever felt conflicted between honoring your own needs and preserving friendships you care about, this episode is for you. I offer a compassionate lens for making sense of these changes and reassurance that while some connections may fall away, others—often deeper and more mutual—can emerge in their place.
(00:01:45) Noticing Your Personal Needs as Your Practice (and Life) Evolves
(00:05:18) Boundaries, Self-Worth, and Shifting Toward Mutual Relationships
(00:08:37) How Changing Beliefs About Money and Systems Can Create Distance
(00:12:49) Grieving Friendships That No Longer Fit Who You’re Becoming
(00:13:59) Making Space for New or Deepened Connections
As I’ve grown in my own relationship with money and self-worth—and as I’ve supported hundreds of therapists in growing their practices, earning more, and redefining what success looks like—I’ve seen this pattern again and again. When we stop undercharging, over-giving, or minimizing ourselves, our internal shifts often ripple outward into our friendships and relationships. As our values around money, time, and worth evolve, the relational landscape can change in ways that feel confusing, tender, or even unsettling at first.
Here are a few reflections to hold as you navigate this season:
Financial self-care doesn’t just affect your business—it shapes how you show up in relationships. If you’re feeling sadness, confusion, or even relief as friendships evolve, you’re not doing anything wrong. You’re growing. And on the other side of that growth, there is space for connection that feels more mutual, supportive, and true to you.
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Linzy Bonham [00:00:01]:
There is a lot that sucks about friendships no longer working. And I want to name that because this in some ways is some of the least fun part of changing of growing is the things that we used to really value, the people that we used to really value, who we no longer are in step with.
Welcome to Money Skills for Therapists, the podcast that helps therapists and health practitioners in private practice go from money confusion and shame to calm clarity and confidence with their finances. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by numbers or avoided looking at your business money, you’re in the right place. I’m Linzy Bonham, therapist turned money coach and creator of Money Skills for Therapists. Before we jump in, check out my free on Demand masterclass. You’ll find the link in the show notes or@moneynutsandbolts.com under masterclass. It’s the best first step to finally feeling empowered with money in your private practice. Let’s get started.
Linzy Bonham [00:01:01]:
Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Today’s episode is focusing on money and friendship. This was a solo episode topic that was suggested to me by Emily Maynard, who came on to speak to us about high control religion. And there are so many facets to this topic of money and friendship that I’ve almost gotten in my own way trying to figure out how to record this because there’s just so much about money and friendship. There’s so many dimensions to it. So what I’m going to focus on today is a piece that’s also very personal to me about money and friendship, which is what happens to friendships when we start to take our own financial needs seriously. So what I have found over time through my own growth as a helper, healer, self sacrificing type of human, and also watching the hundreds of therapists that I’ve gotten to support at this point is when you take your financial needs seriously, you also need to start taking yourself more seriously. Right? These things go hand in hand.
Linzy Bonham [00:02:08]:
When we’re taking our financial needs seriously, we’re acknowledging that I am a person with actual needs. My needs matter. You may be moving through a narrative of I deserve to be well, I deserve to be okay. Just because there’s suffering in the world doesn’t mean that I need to be in perpetual suffering. When we take our financial needs seriously, whether that involves you up, leveling your fee, deciding you need to change the way that you get paid for your work, whether that just means looking at your money in a more serious way and identifying these are my needs, you are taking yourself more seriously. By extension, these Things have to go together. And when we do that, that has an impact on our relationships and that has an impact on our friendships, potentially our friendships with other therapists, folks we’ve gone through school with, our colleagues, that can start to impact relationships in multiple ways because you’re valuing your gifts, you’re valuing your time, you are being more in touch with your own needs, you are changing the focus of your time and energy, and you’re also changing your mindset and your outlook. And I’m going to talk about how those four facets show up in friendship as we change our relationship with money.
Linzy Bonham [00:03:16]:
So first, let’s talk about valuing your gifts and your time and, and how that can impact your friendships. When you start to really look at your financial needs, you are gonna have to start to acknowledge that what you do professionally has value. Right? This thing that we do, the healing work that we do, whether that’s mental health therapy, whether that is manual practice that you have, the helping and healing that we do has value, right? And the more that we get in touch with that, the more that we realize that this thing that I do, I deserve to be well compensated for it. I should not be struggling and suffering while I’m also bringing immense value into other people’s lives, means that you have to start really valuing your gifts and your time. Right? There’s a shift that starts to happen there where you realize, yeah, this thing that I do is actually valuable. Just because it’s come naturally to me or just because I am good at it doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. Right? I’m actually changing people’s lives with this gift. And, and when you start to value your gifts and your time, you’re going to start to value them in your personal life too, not just in your professional life.
Linzy Bonham [00:04:21]:
Most therapists and caretakers, I find, are prone to self sacrifice, right? So we tend to have often built relationships in our personal lives. We’ve built friendships where we are not necessarily valuing our gifts and our time. Right. Where we have been over giving, where we’ve been overly accommodating and people pleasing. Right? Right. All of these lovely things that come along with having a helping, healing kind of personality. And when we start to value our gifts and our time, that is gonna disrupt that dynamic in friendships that have been based on you giving a lot over giving, sacrificing yourself, being like, oh, it’s the end of a busy day and I’m exhausted, but I will go and have coffee with this friend who is not gonna ask me anything about myself, but I know they’re going through a hard time, so I’m gonna go sacrifice myself. Despite being exhausted, when you’ve started to value your gifts and your time, you’re going to find you’re less able to do that, right? That starts to be really inauthentic to do that.
Linzy Bonham [00:05:18]:
There’s going to be parts of you that are like, no, what I do is valuable and I’m no longer going to be in this dynamic. And that is going to be a disruption to friendships that you’ve built that are based on you sacrificing yourself. Right? Friendships that are not reciprocal or friendships where you’re giving beyond your boundaries, right? Your friendships, if they have been built on you caretaking and over giving, as you start to value your gifts and your time, they’re not going to work the same anymore, right? Like you are changing, you are changing. And the dynamic in your friendships, if it has been built on you over giving and you’re no longer doing that, you’re changing the rules, you’re changing your boundaries, and that is going to impact your friendships. The next piece that goes along, of course, with valuing your gifts and your time is, is being more in touch with your own needs. When we start to be more honest about our financial needs, and that might be realizing that you can’t actually get by on $45,000 a year, you need to be making $70,000 a year to get by in the city that you live in, right? Or that might be acknowledging that you also need to retire. You know, there’s not going to be some magical fairy that sweeps in at the end and takes care of you. You are the one who has to save your retirement.
Linzy Bonham [00:06:30]:
When you start to really acknowledge your own needs and you’re in touch with your own needs, that’s also going to impact your friendships. There’s going to be friends who are on a similar path to you of starting to take their needs more seriously, or maybe they’ve always been in that place who are going to be able to support you and you’re going to be able to cheer each other on and, you know, help each other stay connected with your goals and what matters to you. But there’s going to be other friends who are invested, not consciously, unconsciously invested in you not being in touch with your needs, right. And in being self sacrificing. And when those friendships have been built with that dynamic in it, you are going to be changing that relationship, right? Not everybody is going to want you to change there’s going to be dynamics and friendships that you’ve built that are really based on you not being in touch with your needs, right? And overriding your own needs and being like, this is fine. This is okay. When it’s not fine and it’s not okay. And the more that you are in touch with your financial needs and take those seriously, the more that is also going to be showing up in your friendships.
Linzy Bonham [00:07:31]:
And things that might used to be okay in a friendship for you are not okay, right? The friendship might not work as well anymore because you are changing along with valuing your time and energy and being more in touch with your own needs. When we start to change our relationship with money, it also changes the focus of our time and energy. We might be reading different books, listening to different podcasts, you know, consuming different things than we used to. There’s also going to be a change in mindset and outlooks. Often we have made friendships based on, like, similar political views, similar philosophies of life, right? Like, we. We end up in. In step with people at times in our life because we, you know, think the same, we talk the same, we’ve come from similar experiences. But as we change our relationship with money and maybe you start to think more about financial strategy, right? You want to put your energy towards that to think about, how do I get the most out of my retirement planning? Your friend who has not done this work is probably not going to be able to chat with you about that.
Linzy Bonham [00:08:37]:
They’re not going to be interested in that, right? You’re going to start to maybe be interested and talking about different things, or you might start to talk about something that is very interesting to you and realize, oh, this. This friend is not there. They are not in this place. And so we do put ourselves kind of out of step with our friendships in terms of where our focus is, what we’re thinking about, but also how we’re thinking about the world, how we understand how the world works. I have found for myself as I have changed my relationship with money over time, as I’ve taken myself more seriously, as I’ve earned more money than I ever thought I would be able to earn and earn more money individually, but also just generated more money from folks wanting to get my support and the support of my team with their money, that has changed how I think about the world. For better or for worse, right? We end up with different philosophical outlooks, right? Different ideas of what is possible when you’ve experienced something that’s possible, and your analyses might start to Change, especially if you have come from a narrative of very strongly systems oriented narrative where like everything is systems, everything happens kind of to us. More of that, kind of like strong, strong systemic analysis. When you start to make choices that have impact and you start to take things more seriously in a way that has direct impact, that’s going to change that philosophy, right? Your philosophy is going to shift.
Linzy Bonham [00:10:08]:
And if you have a friendship that started with a similar worldview, your worldview might start to change. And that is going to put you out of step sometimes philosophically and politically. And just in terms of what’s interesting from the people that you built friendships with before you started doing this work. So sometimes you just want to talk about different stuff, or you start to talk about something that’s really interesting to you and realize, oh, this person’s not at all interested in talking about investments or how to batch time. They’ve got other focuses. And so this is also something that can happen in terms of friendship as we change our relationship with money, as we start to take ourselves more seriously again, not everybody’s gonna go with you, right? We’re all on different paths now. Something that I haven’t mentioned yet, but that is, I think, really relevant to all of this, is that it sucks. This is the part of growing and changing that also involves a lot of grief.
Linzy Bonham [00:11:03]:
And I know that a couple years ago on the podcast, and just like in my communities, I talked about this more. Cause it was very active and present in my life at that time of having to make space or let go of relationships that used to be really important, but did have these dynamics baked into them or that we just didn’t have that much in common anymore. And those might still be friendships that I maintain in a casual way, but the people who are your people start to change when you change your focus and your way of thinking and ask for more from life and ask for more from the people around you. There’s a lot to grieve here. And this can be a really hard part of changing your relationship with money. Taking yourself more seriously is, you know, for every door that opens, there’s other doors that close. There’s loss here. And I want to acknowledge that because it’s difficult and it’s not fun.
Linzy Bonham [00:11:57]:
And I think that friendship is an area generally in society that we don’t talk about enough. You know, of how it feels when you have somebody that you’ve loved deeply and been in touch with and been in step with for a long time. What that’s like when you start to Fall out of step or things that you used to be okay with or that you at least expressed to that person you’re okay with, you’re no longer able to tolerate. There’s a lot of loss there, and there can be conflict and tension and hurt. There is a lot that sucks about friendships no longer working. And I want to name that because this in some ways is some of the least fun part of changing, of growing is the things that we used to really value, the people that we used to really value, who we no longer are in step with. So I will say, with growth always comes grief. They go hand in hand.
Linzy Bonham [00:12:49]:
This is one of the areas where I’ve certainly felt the most grief in my own growth. But it’s also one of the areas, friendship is one of the areas that’s been the richest for me too, in terms of growth. The folks that I’ve ended up in step with and the ways that they see me and show up for me and challenge me are a type of friendship that I could not have had before I did this work. So there’s, you know, also all of the great relationships that you build on the other side as you value yourself, take yourself more seriously, ask for more from life, and maybe ask for more from the people around you if you haven’t been doing so. There’s beautiful new relationships or changed relationships on the other side, but it certainly can be a painful process to go through. So money and friendship, to sum it up, you know, as we change our relationship with money, our relationships change because, you know, we value our gifts and our time more, we’re more in touch with our own needs, and we often change the focus of our time and energy, and we change our mindset and our outlooks. Right? Our philosophies change, maybe our politics change and shift. This all has an impact on friendships.
Linzy Bonham [00:13:59]:
So just noticing that, noticing for yourself, are these things showing up in your own life in some way? Where are the areas where maybe your growth is starting to create some tension or conflict? Where relationships that used to fit are not fitting so much anymore? And naming that and thinking about how you want to address that, are these things that you can talk about with this person? You know, is there enough love and openness and trust in this relationship that you can start to. To name where there’s discord? Or are these areas where this is life showing us that seasons change and this is a natural change that’s going to be coming as you continue to take better and better care of yourself financially and emotionally? And thank you so much for joining me today. I’m Linzy Bonham, therapist turned money Coach and the creator of Money Skills for Therapists. If you are ready to go from money confusion and fear, maybe not owning your needs to feeling clear and empowered, then my Free On Demand Masterclass is the best place for you to start. You’re going to learn my four step framework to get your private practice finances working for you. Register today using the link in the show notes or go to moneynutsandbolts.com under masterclass. I look forward to supporting you.
I’m a therapist in private practice turned money coach, and the creator of Money Skills for Therapists. I help therapists and health practitioners in private practice feel calm and in control of their finances.
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