Abundancia Is Not Selfish.
A note before we go further: This post is written from my experience as a Fundraiser and Philanthropy Advisor — from years of listening closely to the Latino community (and being part of it), and from the research of the scholars and clinicians whose work I cite throughout. I am not a licensed financial advisor or therapist, and nothing here should be taken as financial or mental health guidance. What I offer is reflection, pattern recognition, and the honest naming of what I have witnessed. If what you read raises questions specific to your situation, I encourage you to work with a qualified professional who can walk alongside you.
A Latino professional who built what their family could not have imagined a generation ago leans forward and asks what seems to be a financial question.
But it is not a financial question; rather, it traces back to something older and more complicated.
“I know I should be giving more. I have the resources. But I don’t know where to start. I look at organizations, and I don’t know which ones make a difference. I’m afraid of giving to the wrong place. And honestly — I’m not even sure I’ve allowed myself to fully accept what I’ve built. It still feels like it could disappear at any moment.”
This experience is common among first-generation professionals, second-generation entrepreneurs, and those raised in Latino households where abundance seemed out of reach. They describe not a financial challenge, but a psychological one: being unable to fully accept their prosperity or direct it outward.
This is where both layers of that paralysis—the struggle to accept prosperity and the uncertainty about how to give—surface with recognizable names. Naming them es liberador.
The Soul Wound: Dr. Eduardo Duran’s Framework
To understand what is happening inside these conversations, we need to go deeper than money psychology. ¡Tenemos que ir a la raíz!
Dr. Eduardo Duran, clinical psychologist, researcher, and author of Healing the Soul Wound, developed one of the most precise frameworks for understanding what happens to communities — and the individuals within them — when generations of scarcity, migration, and cultural dislocation are absorbed into el cuerpo y la mente. His concept of the soul wound describes the internalized injury that occurs when a person or community is systematically separated from the conditions that allow them to fully inhabit their own life — their identity, their resources, their right to flourish without apology.
While Dr. Duran’s framework was developed primarily in the context of indigenous communities, his insights resonate profoundly with Latino immigrant families and their descendants. The mechanics are strikingly parallel: when a community is defined for generations by precarity — by borders crossed in difficulty, by wages that never quite reached far enough, by the constant message that want, and need are the natural conditions of your people — the wound does not stay in the past. It is transmitted. Absorbed into the nervous system of the next generation as surely as any other inheritance.
What Duran calls the soul wound manifests in first- and second-generation Latino professionals as something that, from the outside, appears to be financial caution or cultural humility. From the inside, it feels like an inability to fully arrive. A persistent sense that the prosperity you have built is temporal. That wanting more — or even fully receiving what you already have — is a transgression against something unnamed but deeply felt.
It is not greed. It is not ingratitude. It is a wound. And wounds, Duran reminds us, require healing — not just discipline, willpower, or simply working harder or giving more.
The First Paralysis: Not Knowing How to Be Abundant
The first layer of the double bind is the one we rarely speak about directly: the inability to fully inhabit monetary abundance.
This is not about spending recklessly or losing values. It is about something much quieter and more eroding: the chronic inability to receive what has been earned. To sit with prosperity without bracing for its disappearance. To make a financial decision from a place of sufficiency rather than scarcity — even when the numbers on the page say, clearly, that there is enough.
Dr. Brad Klontz, financial psychologist and co-author of Mind over Money: Overcoming the Money Disorders That Threaten Our Financial Health, identifies what he calls money scripts — the deeply held, often unconscious beliefs about money that are absorbed in childhood and carried intact into adulthood, regardless of how much the financial reality has changed. I think the most common money scripts in immigrant and working-class families are money vigilance — the belief that security is always fragile and that enjoying wealth can be dangerous — and money avoidance — the sense that wanting or having wealth is suspicious, sometimes leading to self-sabotage. Both scripts are perfectly adaptive in conditions of genuine scarcity. In conditions of abundance, they become a psychological ceiling.
The professional earning a surgeon’s or tech’s salary who still can’t relax on vacation. The entrepreneur with a seven-figure business who feels anxiety at any large purchase. The executive who insists on qualifying every financial comfort—”but things could change anytime,” “No nos deberiamos de acostumbrar a esta vida”—is not being responsible. They are living in a past that’s already over, unable to cross into the present their work created.
The scarcity mindset does not know it has been outgrown. It only knows to protect. And protection, held too long, becomes a limitation.
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s landmark research, Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function, published in Science (2013), showed that scarcity thinking — even when the original material scarcity no longer exists — continues to capture mental bandwidth. It reduces the cognitive space available for long-term thinking, creative planning, and crucially, the kind of generous imagining that makes meaningful philanthropic decision-making possible. You cannot design a giving strategy from a mind still running on survival mode.
The Second Paralysis: Not Knowing Where or How to Give
The second layer is the one that surprises people when I name it — because it sounds like a good problem to have.
Many Latino professionals who have accumulated real wealth genuinely want to give. The impulse is there, strong and culturally rooted. But when they sit down to act on it, something freezes.
Which cause? There are hundreds. Education, environment, health, housing, immigration, economic development — needs that exist in the neighborhood down the street, in the national conversation, and in our homelands that we carry in our hearts. And today, many of those same causes are actively under threat, which makes the desire to act more urgent and the paralysis more painful. The enormity of need can itself become paralyzing — not a motivator but a wall. Where does one person’s resources make any difference?
And then, if they manage to narrow it down to a cause that resonates, the second wall arrives.
Which organization? How do I know they are effective? How do I know my money won’t be wasted? How do I know this is not just a well-branded nonprofit that looks good on paper and accomplishes little? The fear of being deceived, of being naive, of giving in the wrong direction, becomes the reason for not giving at all. Y lo perfecto se vuelve enemigo de lo bueno. And the good, quietly, never happens.
This pattern has a name in behavioral psychology: Analysis Paralysis. The condition in which the abundance of choices — combined with the fear of making the wrong one — produces complete inaction. Research by psychologist Barry Schwartz, in The Paradox of Choice, demonstrates that when people face too many options, even in domains they care deeply about, they experience increased anxiety and are significantly more likely to make no decision at all than when facing a constrained set of options.
But for Latino professionals, the analysis paralysis around giving carries an additional weight that Schwartz’s general framework does not fully capture. It is not just the fear of choosing the wrong thing. It is the fear that wanting to give — while still not fully believing they deserve to keep what they have — is itself a contradiction they cannot resolve. How do you give from abundance when you are not sure you are allowed to feel/be abundant?
This paralysis is not from indifference. It comes from the need to protect against further hurt.
This is where Dr. Duran’s soul wound framework becomes indispensable again. The inability to commit to a cause, to trust an organization, to act generously and decisively from a position of wealth — these are not character flaws or failures of motivation. They are the downstream effects of a wound that has not yet been named, let alone healed. The soul wound does not only make it hard to receive abundance. It makes it hard to give from it.
The Shame Beneath the Paralysis
Dr. Brené Brown’s two decades of research at the University of Houston add a third dimension to this picture. Her work on shame and vulnerability shows that shame — the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that one is flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, or success— is the specific emotion that drives the paralysis we are describing. No culpa, which is about behavior and can motivate correction, but shame, which is about identity and tends to motivate hiding.
I think for Latino professionals navigating abundance, the shame operates on multiple levels simultaneously. There is the shame of having more than the people they came from — the fear that prosperity creates an unbridgeable distance from their roots and community. There is the shame of not giving enough — even when they do not know where to give. And there is the shame of not knowing — of feeling that a person with their resources should somehow already know how to be a philanthropist, should have clarity about causes and organizations that they have never been equipped to develop.
Brown’s research shows that shame thrives in silence, secrecy, and judgment. And dissolves in empathy, connection, and language (naming). The person sitting across from me in that planning meeting, saying they don’t know where to start, is not just experiencing a knowledge gap. They are also experiencing shame in real time — the shame of uncertainty dressed as incompetence. And they have almost never been told that this uncertainty is not only normal but almost universal among first-generation wealth builders who were never given a map for this territory.
No one handed us a roadmap for abundance. No one in their/our family had been here before. The giving practices they grew up watching — informal, communal, immediate, relational — do not translate directly into writing checks to organizations with annual reports and overhead ratios. The gap between the giving they know and the giving with intention and determination is real. And navigating that gap alone, in silence, with shame as the background noise, is exhausting.
Three Questions Worth Sitting With
You do not need a therapist, financial or philanthropy advisor to begin this work — though they can help. What you need is honesty and a quiet moment. These three questions have consistently opened something in the people I have worked with:
When you picture yourself giving generously — freely, without doubt, without fear of getting it wrong — what does that feel like in your body? What would have to be true for that feeling to be real?
Is the reason you haven’t committed to a cause a lack of information, or a deeper discomfort with claiming the identity of someone who has enough to give at that level?
What would it mean to give imperfectly — to choose an organization that is good but not perfect, to give an amount that is meaningful but not maximum, and to let that be enough?
There are no correct answers. But there are honest ones. And the honest ones tend to be the ones that begin to move something that has been still for a long time.
If this is something you have been carrying in silence —
Share it with a Latino professional in your life who has built something real and still cannot fully receive it — or cannot figure out what to do with it. They deserve to know this wound has a name. And that the paralysis they feel is not a lack of character. It is a lack of healing that was never offered to them.