<![CDATA[Childhood financial experiences are frequently understood merely as a matter of household economics, although they carry deeper messages concerning safety, sufficiency, and personal worthiness. This study aims to understand how Muslim women perceive their childhood experiences related to money and how such perceptions are intertwined with the formation of self-worth in adulthood. Employing a qualitative approach with Moustakas’s descriptive phenomenological method, four Muslim women aged 30 to 50 were purposively selected from 52 screening respondents. Data were collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews, transcribed verbatim, and analysed through six phenomenological stages. The findings indicate that childhood financial experiences do not operate deterministically upon self-worth, but rather through a four-layered sequence: persisting memory, the emotion accompanying it, the money scripts that settle from that emotion, and its present-day enactment. Islamic values, particularly gratitude (syukur), contentment (qana’ah), and trust in God (tawakal), function as a mediator that provides a space for reinterpretation, so that the anchor of self-worth shifts from material possession toward an awareness of karāmah and ’izzah. The novelty of this study lies in integrating Schutz’s phenomenological sociology with Islamic Psychology to explain the mechanism of meaning-making among Muslim women.]]>
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