What is Financial Therapy?
Financial therapy also known as Wealth Psychology deals with financial problems related to subconscious behavior. Financial therapy is a process of evaluating and reprogramming one’s money-related habits so that an individual can move from self-defeating behaviors and attitudes to ones which help him/her thrive. My method of bringing one’s relationship with money from the subconscious to consciousness works to reduce anxiety and depression around money, while creating new thought and behavior patterns. I work with individuals all over the country addressing common issues that sometimes come with money.
Common Counseling Issues:
- Overspending: State of spending more than one can afford and feeling out of control. Debtors Anonymous has a useful tool to see if you fall into this category.
- Underspending: A mental state in which one feels as if he/she doesn’t deserve anything more than having basic needs met.
- Serial Borrowing: Rolling over debt. Often the individual pays small amounts toward an old loan as a new loan is taken out.
- Financial Infidelity: A process of “cheating” on a partner by spending and lying about it or not mentioning significant purchases.
- Workaholic: An addiction to work, not necessarily because one enjoys it but because one feels compelled to continue. This usually leads to neglect of family and friends.
- Financial Incest: Father/son psychologists Ted Klontz and Brad Klontz coined the term “financial incest” to describe situations in which children are used by adults to bear unreasonable, age-inappropriate responsibility for financial situations. An example is a mother relying heavily on her 12-year-old son to help make family financial decisions.
- Financial Enabling: A process by which a person recognizes that a negative financial circumstance is occurring on a regular basis and yet inadvertently assists that individual in such a way that detrimental behavior continues. For example, a father continues to provide large sums of money to his financially strapped adult daughter who is then not motivated to support herself.
- Hoarding: A symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Frost and Hartl (1996) provide the following defining features: the acquisition of and failure to discard a large number of possessions that appear to be useless or of limited value; living spaces sufficiently cluttered so as to preclude activities for which those spaces were designed; significant distress or impairment in functioning caused by the hoarding; reluctance or inability to return borrowed items; as boundaries blur, impulsive acquisitiveness could sometimes lead to kleptomania or stealing.
Wealth and Psychology
Wealth psychology is a specialty within the psychology field. Many people struggle openly discussing money and their overall net worth. Wealth helps us have options but does not guarantee happiness or emotional well-being. Definition of wealth is also relative. We sometimes get into a loop of comparing ourselves to others. There is also a risk of never being satisfied and striving for more and more.
Wealth psychology leads to the exploration of the psychological impact of wealth on the person as a whole and the family system. It brings forth self-awareness and self-acceptance of your true capabilities, including strengths and weaknesses.
The following population can benefit by working with a financial or wealth therapist:
Business Leaders:
- Understanding intentions behind decision
- Learn how to motivate others
- Increase efficiency, mindfulness, and effectiveness.
Families:
- Improve communication skills among couples and families
- Provide financial literacy to your children
- Resolve money related conflict
- Discuss financial planning
Individuals:
- Work life balance
- Create an identity outside of your net-worth
- Improve overall wellbeing
Inheritors:
- Understand the impact of the inheritance and others view of you
- Self-actualization and paying it forward
- Explore the challenges and opportunities of your inheritance
Life Changes and Transitions:
- Overcome and smoothly navigate difficult life transitions like divorce, selling a business, or an unexpected windfall.
- Reduce the emotional impact of stressors that may affect your decision-making capabilities and well-being
New High-Income Earners:
- Identity and reduce unproductive significant income raises may bring, e.g., guilt, isolation, and loneliness.
- Explore your relationship with money and how it influences your life
- Navigate changes that may occur within your family, friendships, or social circles.
- Understand and move through your new status and address imposter syndrome
Answer a few simple questions to see what your relationship with money looks like. Click on Let’s get started to see if you can identify with one or several of these issues. I am available for online therapy all over the country. I can be reached at marina@new.truemecounseling.com or 818.851.1293.
If you haven’t already, check out my latest feature on The Wall Street Journal’s podcast, Your Money Briefing where I provide some insight on how couples can successfully navigate significant financial changes in their marriage and avoid divorce. Listen here.
FAQ
What is the difference between financial counseling and therapy?
Financial counseling and financial therapy address different — though often overlapping — dimensions of the same problem, and understanding the distinction matters for getting the right support. Financial counseling focuses on the practical: budgeting, debt management, financial planning, and the concrete mechanics of improving your financial situation. It is skilled, valuable work — but it operates primarily at the level of behavior and strategy. Financial therapy goes deeper. It addresses the emotional, psychological, and relational roots of financial behavior — the beliefs about money absorbed in childhood, the shame that drives secrecy, the anxiety that makes decisions feel impossible, and the relational dynamics that turn money into a battleground. In my practice, I work at that deeper level — because in my clinical experience, the reason most people struggle is not that they lack information. It is that something emotional is driving the behavior that no spreadsheet can reach.
How can financial stress impact emotional and relationship well-being?
Profoundly — and in ways that most people significantly underestimate. Financial stress keeps the nervous system in a chronic state of low-level alert — the same physiological state produced by any perceived threat — which over time produces anxiety, depression, sleep disruption, irritability, and a progressive erosion of the capacity for connection and presence. In relationships, this type of stress is one of the most reliable predictors of conflict, emotional distance, and the kind of sustained tension that quietly erodes intimacy over time. What makes it particularly insidious is that couples often fight about money without recognizing that they are actually fighting about safety, control, trust, and the fundamental question of whether they are genuinely in this together. The money is rarely the real issue. The emotional experience underneath it almost always is.
When should someone seek financial therapy instead of traditional financial advice?
When the obstacle is not information but emotion. If you have received advice, created budgets, made plans — and still find yourself making the same financially self-destructive decisions, avoiding your finances entirely, or feeling a level of anxiety about money that is disproportionate to your actual situation — the problem is not strategic. It is psychological. Similarly, if financial stress is significantly affecting your mood, your relationships, or your sense of self-worth, that is a clinical concern that deserves clinical support. In my practice, I often see clients who have spent years trying to solve an emotional problem with a practical solution — and experiencing the shame and confusion of it not working. Financial therapy addresses what the practical approach cannot reach: the beliefs, fears, and relational patterns that are driving the behavior in the first place.
Can therapy help couples who argue about money?
Yes — and in my clinical experience, money arguments are among the most important conflicts for couples to address in therapy, precisely because they are almost never really about money. Couples who argue about money are almost always arguing about deeper things — safety, trust, control, fairness, and the fundamental question of whether their values and visions for life are actually compatible. One partner’s finance anxiety may read to the other as controlling or suffocating. One partner’s finance casualness may read to the other as irresponsible or indifferent. Neither perception is necessarily accurate — but both are real, and both deserve to be understood. Using the Gottman Method as a framework, I help couples get beneath the surface of the financial conflict to the emotional reality driving it — and build a shared financial life that actually reflects both of their needs, rather than one organized around avoidance of the next argument.
What can I expect during a financial counseling or therapy session?
The first thing you can expect is to be heard without judgment — about whatever your financial reality is, however much shame you may be carrying about it. In my practice, financial therapy sessions begin with understanding your full story — not just the numbers, but the history, the family patterns, the beliefs, and the emotional experience that have shaped your relationship with money over your lifetime. From there, sessions are collaborative and active. We identify the specific beliefs and patterns that are driving your current behavior, examine where they came from, and build a genuinely different relationship with money — one grounded in clarity and self-awareness rather than anxiety and avoidance. You will leave each session with something concrete to work with. And over time, the goal is not just better financial behavior — it is a fundamentally different sense of safety, agency, and freedom around money than you may have ever experienced before.
Take the first step toward healing and connection, schedule your consultation today.
Not sure where to start? Let’s talk.