Financial Therapy helps couples achieve financial health, individually and together, adding tremendous value to their partnership. Our actual client is the couple’s relationship, or the “coupleship”, seen as an entity separate from each partner with the focus on each person working toward what is in the best interest of this “coupleship” entity. This perspective enables the couple to have a greater ability to make arguments, negotiate, balance individual needs, and act as responsible adults for the ultimate well-being of the relationship.
Couples Financial Therapy Goals
Financial therapy supports the couple in developing a balanced comfortable relationship with money, where both are:
- Communicating openly and honestly within the family around financial issues
- Having clear financial goals and plans for meeting those goals
- Making financial choices and taking financial actions that are consistent with each other’s values
- Experiencing low levels of financial stress
- Experiencing high levels of financial satisfaction
- Maintaining reasonable debt that is aligned with mutual goals
- Having an active savings and retirement plan and periodically reevaluating it together
- Using money, not as an end in itself, but as a tool to help achieve what is most important in life
Balanced Financial Life
Creating a balanced financial life is not just about the money. Managing money touches on personal and emotional issues that come up in many significant events and decisions in couples’ lives – pregnancies, starting or ending jobs, buying or selling homes, starting or selling businesses, dealing with illnesses, raising children through adulthood, caregiving for seniors, retirement. Although all of these life events include significant financial components, they encompass much more than just financial decisions.
Behaviors Around Money
Couples’ behaviors around money, such as:
- Compulsive spending,
- Unmanageable debt,
- Financial dependency,
- Financial caretaking,
- Secrecy about money, and
- Chronic conflict between partners about money
may be entangled with and serve as important windows into both partners’ deepest life difficulties.
Equal Participants in Financial Counseling
We take the position of treating partners as equal participants in the financial counseling process, even if one is the primary or sole breadwinner, or there is a great difference in net worth. That means that each partner is 100% responsible for their fifty percent of making their relationship work, financially and otherwise. Each partner comes to an understanding that the two are equally responsible for creating the context in which the conflict occurs or success is achieved. Each partner also accepts equal responsibility for creating solutions to the conflict or an impasse. Neither partner will make or carry out unilateral decisions in the planning process.
Couples Financial Therapy with Elaine Korngold
In my Financial Therapy sessions I offer couples activities, questions, and exercises that help clarify their money-related issues – how they relate to money emotionally vs. how they understand and manage the mechanics of money, or what we can see and touch.
I introduce elements from the Gottman Method Couples Therapy, such as the initial detailed assessment in the Gottman Relationship Checkup, and lessons learned from how Gottman’s Four Horsemen of the apocalypse impact relationships and how to stop them with their antidotes.
I also bring in concepts from IFIO (Intimacy From the Inside Out) therapy based on IFS, where we identify what parts of us get triggered in money conversations and what beliefs and stories they carry from our past.
For couples impacted by ADHD or Autism, I include exercises from Neurodiverse Couples Counseling.
For emotional issues that are not resolved by conversations, partners engage in Brainspotting therapy sessions to process past traumatic incidents stored in the deep subcortical brain region with no access to speech or language.
Elaine Korngold’s Blog Posts on Financial Therapy
Here is the link to interesting articles for my Financial Therapy clients – https://askcounseling.com/category/financial-therapy/
Elaine Korngold’s Financial Therapy Resources
Here is the link to various resources that I mention to my Financial Therapy clients – https://askcounseling.com/financial-therapy-resources/
If you are interested in learning more, please text or email me requesting a free consultation.