Money can be hard to talk about, but in a time of rising prices for everything from food to housing, it's unavoidable.

And having a tough relationship with money can lead to mental health challenges: A 2016 study by the financial wellness company Payoff found that nearly 1 in 4 Americans suffer from PTSD-like symptoms caused by financially induced stress.

Financial trauma can show up in many ways, said Jenae Murphy, a licensed financial therapist and the founder of Financial Therapy LLC in Brockton. And it can be hard to start those conversations.

“When we're talking about money, it's equivalent to undressing yourself at the doctors'. You're revealing yourself. And a lot of people like to put a cover-up on. And when you're looking at numbers like what I have to do, I can find where it's not going to be aligned,” Murphy said.

Murphy's job is looking at people’s emotional relationship to money: Where does it come from? How does it affect how people spend, save and deal with things like bills, loans and planning for their futures?

“A financial therapist is somebody who's going to correlate your finances with your emotional state and put it together, and figure out ways to help you understand your relationship to money,” Murphy told GBH’s Morning Edition.

Anxiety, stress and trauma around money can occur regardless of income bracket, she said. And people’s discomfort around talking about money sometimes compounds that stress.

“It looks different for everybody,” she said. “That's why it's important for you to understand your relationship to money, because some people are content with just making what they're making, and they don't think past that ceiling. And there's others who are like, I need more.”

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Some people can turn to risky financial behavior. Last year Massachusetts legalized sports betting, and nearly 950,000 unique users in Massachusetts signed up to bet on sports online, according to the state's gaming commission. A big factor in the discussion around legalizing sports betting was gambling addiction.

Murphy said she would generally advise clients against sports betting.

“If you don't know how money works, but you're playing around with money without a guaranteed income, if you do not have anything backing that move you're about to make, then consider yourself about to lose everything,” Murphy said. “If you are better, you know, I can't tell you what to do. I would just tell you to do it the efficient way. There's a way to secure that money, make the move that you want to make and still not lose that money.”

Murphy encourages people to have these conversations in safe spaces. She is hosting an upcoming six-week-long workshop around people’s relationships with their emotions, food and how money ties into it all.

She left listeners with an affirmation to use: “Money flows to me easily, but I have to get out of the way of me.”