Your relationship with money may seem random, but an expert says there are clues from your childhood — and understanding this could help you overcome harmful spending habits.

Vicky Reynal, financial psychotherapist and author of “Money on Your Mind,” told CNBC Make It that there are psychological reasons for our spending habits, and many of these attitudes stem from childhood experiences.

“Our emotional experiences as an adult will shape who we become,” she said.

For example, someone who felt secure in childhood might feel like they deserve good things and be more willing to negotiate a higher salary or be happy about the money they have later in life, Reynal said. While someone who was neglected in childhood may grow up with low self-esteem and express this through their money behavior.

This could include feeling guilty about spending money because they feel like they don’t deserve good things, or spending money to impress because they feel like they’re not worthy of attention are.

“The little toddler who goes to his parents to show them his doodle – how they are reacted to gives them a message about how the world will react to them,” Reynal added.

Reynal said, “The money lessons we learn as adults largely depend on whether we grew up in an environment of scarcity or abundance.

“To give you an example, people who grow up poor and manage to extricate themselves from that economic reality and perhaps manage to accumulate a whole lot of wealth in their own adult lives often have problems with what they have.” You can call it a scarcity mentality,” Reynal said.

This is a thought pattern that fixates on the idea that you don’t have enough of something, for example money. A scarcity mentality means someone may have a hard time enjoying the money they’ve earned and be afraid to spend it, Reynal added.

Alternatively, there are people who grew up with little but have become wealthy and are now very careless with money.

“They give themselves everything they longed for when they were little, so they might go to the other extreme and start spending it carelessly, because now they want to give their children everything their parents couldn’t give them “Reynal added.

The key to overcoming toxic spending habits, Reynal says, is to stop self-sabotage, a common behavior.

“Often there are deep-rooted emotional reasons behind a pattern of financial self-sabotage, and these can range from feelings of anger, feelings of undeserving, to fear of independence and autonomy,” she said.

“To identify these, you first have to identify what financial habits and inconsistencies you have,” Reynal said, giving an example of someone who may be overspending in the evening.

“Is it boredom? Is it loneliness? What feeling might you be trying to address with overspending?,” she said.

“That already gives you an indication of what you could do differently. So if it’s boredom, what can you replace this terrible financial habit with?”

Reynal said she has a young client who always runs out of money in the first two weeks of the month. She asked them, “What would happen if you were financially responsible?”

The client stated that she was afraid of jeopardizing her relationship with her mother because every time they ran out of money, she called her mother and asked for more.

“Her parents had divorced a long time ago and the only time they ever spoke to her mother was to ask her for money,” Reynal said. “They had a vested interest in being bad with money, because if they were good with money, then they would have the problem: ‘I might run out of excuses to call my mom, and I don’t know how to work it out .’ Relationship again’.”

The financial psychotherapist recommended being “curious and non-judgmental” when it comes to the causes of poor spending behavior.

“So we sometimes ask ourselves, ‘What feelings would be left if I didn’t sabotage myself financially, or if I wasn’t so generous with my friends?’ That can reveal the reason why you do it,” she added.