Know it before its Too Late
What is Financial Therapy ?
Financial therapy is counsel that combines financial advice and emotional support to help people manage financial stress. Worry about money and financial matters can have a crippling effect on people, negatively impacting their family life, work, and all other aspects of their lives.
What Does a Financial Therapist Do?
The goal of financial therapy is to help people repair financial problems and establish a sense of financial security. Financial therapists apply evidence-based practices and interventions to improve how people think, feel, and act about their finances. Much of the misunderstanding people have about money stems from the belief that money matters are rational and transactional: work in exchange for a paycheck or other remuneration, and money in exchange for goods and services.
Financial therapists instruct their clients in the emotional and psychological aspects of money management and help them identify the sources of problematic behaviors related to finances, such as compulsive spending, hoarding, overworking, gambling, and withholding financial information from a partner. In many instances, resolving the negative emotions and responses people have toward money requires the assistance of a professional trained in both mental health counseling and financial planning.
Financial Therapists Combine Counseling and Financial Planning
One reason why many people struggle to overcome unhealthy financial practices is that financial planners generally aren’t able to diagnose or treat the emotional and psychological underpinnings of bad money management, and mental health counselors tend to avoid delving too deeply into their clients’ financial situations. By combining the two disciplines, financial therapists can address the causes of a person’s money woes while also helping them devise and implement a sound financial plan.
Financial therapists typically build on their primary background in one of two areas:
They are trained mental health counselors who pick up financial competency skills.
They are trained financial planners who learn counseling skills.
In both instances, the goal is to help people communicate with their partners and others about the state of their finances and to replace negative emotions about money with positive ones. The techniques applied by financial therapists are designed to help their clients evaluate their spending and saving habits to identify unhealthy or problematic attitudes.
Often a person’s poor money habits have their origins in childhood. For example, someone may repeat their parent’s tendency to relieve stress or anxiety by shopping, which can result in compulsive spending. Conversely, someone who develops a compulsion for making and saving money to the point of neglecting relationships or damaging their quality of life could have experienced financial hardship or deprivation as a child that negatively affects their financial practices as an adult.
Why Its Important For You
Financial Struggles May Lead to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
- Overcoming the impact of serious financial losses takes time and effort. Helping people regain their financial and emotional footing after such setbacks requires that programs designed to mitigate the effects of money woes on a person’s health, well-being, and outlook be affordable and easy to access.
- The financial uncertainty created by the pandemic-related economic downturn has brought to light the psychological trauma that many people feel about their finances.
- The hope of financial therapists is that the financial shockwaves of the pandemic will lead people to rethink their relationship with money.
- Financial therapy provides individuals and couples with an opportunity to express their financial anxieties.
- By examining their negative emotions about money, people gain insight that helps them create a workable, realistic financial strategy.
- Discussing their relationship with money helps people cope with the financial aspects of their lives that they
- have no control over, which are the source of financial stress for many people.
- People are able to express the anger they feel about their financial situation and understand the emotions that underlie that anger as part of their recovery from financial trauma.
- The feelings expressed by people who have been negatively affected by economic setbacks are identical to those of people suffering from PTSD. For example, they often note that others are suffering much worse financially than they are so they have no right to complain, mirroring the survivor guilt associated with PTSD. In extreme cases, these emotions may lead people to become overgenerous or place themselves at financial risk to assuage their feelings of guilt.
- Financial therapists work with these clients to replace the guilt they experience with gratitude, so they are reminded of the positive forces in their lives. They coach their clients to help others in constructive ways, such as by offering their family and friends in financial distress a sympathetic ear and by supporting their efforts to regain their financial footing.
- But Choosing a Right Financial Therapist is the Need of the Day
