Speaker 0 00:00:09 What's up everyone. Welcome to the finance for physicians podcast. I'm your host, Daniel Ren. Join me as we dig into what it looks like for physicians to begin using their finances as a tool to live better lives. You can learn more about our
[email protected] let's. Jump into today's episode today, I'm talking with ed Combs. Ed is a financial therapist and the founder of Charlotte couples counseling. He brings an especially unique perspective to the table as both a counselor with a master's in marriage and family therapy. And as a certified financial planner in his work, he has meshed the two typically separate fields together into one. Today we cover what exactly financial therapy is. And we talk about how to know if you should go see one, we also get into how to understand your relationship with money and why that's so important to make sure you check out the end where we talk about practical tips you can be in using today to improve your financial behaviors. So, ed, thanks for joining us for the podcast today.
Speaker 1 00:01:06 Thanks for having me on I'm excited to talk with you and answer your questions.
Speaker 0 00:01:10 Awesome. Yeah. So let's get started. Uh, if you could just give the listeners just a little bit about you and your background. Sure,
Speaker 1 00:01:16 Sure. Yeah. Well, I'm based in Charlotte, North Carolina and I work with couples around money. That's my primary focus, enjoy working with couples because they always bring a mix of emotion and experiences and ultimately a desire to love more deeply and feel more connected around their finances. And so that's super engaging for me to work with couples in that way.
Speaker 0 00:01:36 Yeah. So you would call yourself a financial therapist, correct? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:01:41 Financial therapist is the way that I like to hold myself out. The reality is I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist in North Carolina that specializes in couples and money. And so, um, but the licensed marriage and family therapist, and also a certified financial therapist. So I know your audience are doctors. And so financial therapy is a specialty. If you will, of the broader therapy services
Speaker 0 00:02:01 For those that aren't familiar with it as much. Can you just give us kind of a breakdown on what exactly financial therapy is and kind of how it compares to say just general therapy and maybe even financial planning? Sure,
Speaker 1 00:02:14 Absolutely. Well, financial therapy is using the best of counseling skills in psychology and applying it to the relationship that people have with money. Right? So most of the people, when I get to talking to them, they've never really thought about it this way, but it makes a lot of sense. Intuitively is we all have a personal relationship with money and because we have a personal relationship with money, we know that money can evoke different thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and relationship dynamics that can in the case of doing therapy typically are problematic. Right? So I feel a lot of financial stress because I'm having trouble talking with my partner about how much money they're spending at the store in that you have thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and relationship dynamics, all baked into that. Right? And I mean, who wants to go around being frustrated with their partner and how much money they're spending at the store?
Speaker 0 00:02:57 I would say that's a common, what are some of the, besides that, what are the most common pain points you see people having or approaching you with? So that's
Speaker 1 00:03:07 One of them, certainly the spending and saving dynamic between couples can be really challenging. And obviously one of the most problematic ones on the little less, you know, socially desirable or acceptable side it's stuff that you want to, you know, I think most people could say, Oh, I'm tired of my wife's spending so much money at the store or my husband spending so much money on hobbies. Like I don't think you could be at a dinner party and talked about that and probably get a lot of agreement to be honest, but where we start getting into the, a little more slippery and more difficult stuff is around more power and control and what money represents within couples. So typically when we'll have one person maybe as a high income producing doctor and the other's a school teacher and the high income doctor is frustrated with the school teacher because the school teacher's making 40, maybe $50,000 a year at best, but working 50 hours a week while the physician's bringing home 300,000 half a million dollars, whatever it is and that we're on the same number of hours. And then thinking, is it even worth it? That's a little more slippery slope because now you're talking to them about your partners value of work and what they're doing. And so even though they can't contribute an equal financial level, there may be still equal psychological value to them being an educator.
Speaker 0 00:04:14 I could see that being a very slippery slope. How do you get into that? I mean, that's probably part of what you do, but I'm just curious, like how do you bring up that subject? How do you navigate that, that sort of a slippery slope type situation
Speaker 1 00:04:25 Typically start to do is a couple of things with couples when that's kinda more of the presenting issue is one just to get clear about their values, do they respect their partner and their partner's decision to have their own? You kind of self-direction are interested in work and meaning behind work. And because I think a lot of times you can have different feelings about the same topic at different levels, right? So our values, all of you might say, well, yeah, of course it's important for me to have a job that's meaningful to my partner. Okay, great. If that's true, then we can start to work into, well, what is this really bringing up for you around your partner, working as a teacher and hours. And typically it starts coming up around issues around availability, other roles within the house, like taking care of kids or other family functions.
Speaker 1 00:05:08 Then it starts to get into like, Oh, okay, where does this come from? Typically we, I start adding the next layer is really about, well, where do these expectations come from? And most often it comes from people's families that they grew up in where the families worked and had different roles. So the kids, as you're growing up, you learn different expectations about who does what in the family and what money means and represents. And so we can start to unpack that a little bit too, and start to usually get a little more clarity around why this is such a problem.
Speaker 0 00:05:37 So it sounds like typically there's a little bit more to the story than just the surface. And there's often some background typically related to their upbringing and maybe how they were raised. Is that accurate?
Speaker 1 00:05:51 Absolutely. Yeah. I think one of the things that I held a couple of start to realize is that whatever their presenting concern is is that there's always a bigger story to it and there's more layers to it. And it's part of the change process is exploring what those things are, gaining new insight into the meaning behind that, which then creates space for new action. So a new decision around like, okay, well, yeah, I hear, you know, you still want to be a school teacher that this is really important to you, even though it doesn't produce anywhere close to what's equal for me as a physician, but you know, how can we open up to then maybe hiring a nanny to come in, or maybe they've been adamantly opposed to having a nanny because for whatever reason, or they say, well, we can bring in someone to help us clean the house and somebody else to help us do the laundry, they can start collaborating together to figure out what's the solution.
Speaker 1 00:06:42 And so that's one of the nice things about financial therapy is I don't come in with a preset of solutions to people's problems. What I'm working towards is helping the couple understand themselves and their partner better and get them on a place where they're feel like they're back on equal footing with each other. So they can then enter it into a collaborative discussion. Right? The other thing that can be really challenging if we just keep using this example of a couple where one's a teacher and one's a physician is the one that's a teacher may have to deal with feelings of like they're smarter than me. They have more social esteem or recognition because they're a doctor. And it floors me when I have couples like this, where the non-doctor partner puts themself in a less than position to their doctor spouse. And the doctor's spouse is saying, no, no, I think you're equal to me. I think you're just as smart as me and they're, they're having a wrestle through this. Just kind of, even dynamic of who's smarter, who gets to ask for things because of the social positions that they have. And so I think a lot of times physicians need help working through understanding the social meaning of their professional identity and how that gets brought home.
Speaker 0 00:07:48 It seems like people have a pretty big spectrum of what their thoughts are on counseling and therapy. You got the one extreme where it's like, I don't need any fixing. I'm fine. The way I am. I have control of everything. I'm good to go. And then the other extreme is like, everybody needs a therapist or counselor. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think there's times when pretty much all of us have some stuff behind the scenes that we could use the help of a counselor.
Speaker 1 00:08:14 So the short answer is yes. And you know, people listening to this would, may it maybe initially say, well, he's a therapist, so of course he's going to say, yeah, everybody needs therapy. And yeah, I'm going to say everybody could benefit from therapy. But really what I'm talking about is when people are in that position of no, I don't need, there'll be nothing to look here. When I hear that as a therapist, I'm thinking psychological defense mechanisms, I don't feel comfortable being vulnerable and open up to somebody else about things that are significant or challenging for me. I don't want somebody else to have to see who I am and that I struggle. I think that that's very respectable position and it's something that I really well trained. Therapists can work with you through and help understand why it is that you maybe even don't want to come into therapy.
Speaker 1 00:09:00 Like, so if you're getting your partner saying, Hey, you really need to go to therapy. And you're saying no way, not me. I don't need it. There's nothing wrong with me. I don't want them to fix me well, in my mind, as a therapist, I see that as just early stage healing, you've had it. Things happen. You needed to protect yourself from being vulnerable and seen as something might be wrong with you. And I think most good therapists see humans as intrinsically good, intrinsically valuable, and intrinsically able to heal. Right? And so I think your, a physicians, they really appreciate that the body has many marvelous, self healing properties and with good medical intervention, the body can start to heal itself. And the same is true with, with therapy is a good therapeutic relationship allows the self healing properties of your brain and your mind to start activating.
Speaker 1 00:09:45 What we know is healthy minds are developed in healthy relationships. And so when people grow up in environments where they were exposed to emotional distress or neglect, physical violence, sexual abuse, parental addiction, parental divorce, those types of things have a lasting impact on the psyche and the mind and your sense of self. Certainly if there's no shame in, if that's where you're at right now and it's okay and I'll just share it from my own story. That's where I was at. When I started, I honestly finished my master's in counseling and still didn't really believe it had actually worked. So I, I am, you know, as they say, a converter
Speaker 0 00:10:20 Skeptic, I would say that's kind of a tendency. A lot of us guys start out with thinking, at least that's where I came from.
Speaker 1 00:10:28 Yeah. I mean, especially for men, culturally, we're taught typically to not be vulnerable to man up boys, don't cry, hold your shit together. I don't know if you played football. I certainly didn't. But the guys that played football on the, some of the stories that they tell me, Oh, it's just horrendous. Some of the stuff that they've heard and then told antidote, you know, for anybody that's really interested in understanding the mental psyche and what it goes through growing up, there's a great documentary. I think it's out on Amazon prime called the mask you live behind. And I think that this is actually a really a huge issue for a lot of couples, is that as a male therapist, I watch how much my female clients struggled to understand their husbands lack of vulnerability. And they see it more as a character defect than as like part of the way that their husbands have been socialized.
Speaker 1 00:11:15 And because our women in general are socialized towards being more emotionally expressive and in tune with relational, emotional needs, they experienced significant distress with their, their male partners that don't have that capacity anywhere close to them in, you know, sadly in some extreme cases, males get labeled as narcissistic, which is really kind of an ultimate self-absorption, but typically beneath that is really just an unfamiliarity and a discomfort with our own emotional reality. And for someone to truly be narcissistic, there's a lot of things that have to go really profoundly wrong. So I think that there's plenty of men that are self-centered and not very self-reflective and aware of their impact on others, but that doesn't make them a narcissist. And so we can start to use sometimes these advanced psychological terms on our spouses or partners, because we're just in distress and the lack of better explanation. But one of the ways that I like to work with my clients is more through what's called an attachment perspective, which is the way that people form a working model, a map in their mind of how relationships should work. And that comes from their early caregiving in the families.
Speaker 0 00:12:17 It seems like a lot of people, at least I come into contact with, we're getting people that kind of want to take the logical scientific, rational approach. Like sometimes we get the same, I think sort of issues presenting to us that you might see people coming to you with, like I'm having trouble getting through this issue of communicating money with my spouse and I need to fix it through financial planning. But the problem with that I think is that we're taking a logical, scientific, rational approach and what a lot of times really needs to happen is that peel back the layers, let's look at the behaviors and the motion and the upbringing that, that sort of thing that you do more. But I guess my question for you is, do you think it's better to start with one or the other? Is it totally situational or people tend to gravitate towards one or the other, like the logical versus the behavioral mode.
Speaker 1 00:13:05 It's really a chicken or the egg kind of situation. I mean, I started from kind of the logical side. I didn't want to have money fights in my own marriage. And so I trained to become a financial planner so that I would understand how money works, thinking that would stave off or prevent me from experiencing any money conflicts in my relationship with my now wife, or I can tell you we're 14 years into it. And me being a financial planner has helped us a lot. Don't get me wrong, but it didn't save us from a lot of the financial complex conflicts and find differences of opinion. I had actually made it worse in some ways, because I thought I knew the right answer because I was the financial planner and I was the expert. And so that, that expert trap of, and I see this all the time with couples is, and again, I'm playing gender stereotypes and this is not to say women can't be experts in money.
Speaker 1 00:13:47 There are wonderful many women that are, are wonderfully equipped and do really well managing money and know all the intricacies, but I still in lion's share. And maybe it's just because I'm a male. I get a lot of male clients in that there, the money asked for it in their relationship. And they think because they're the money expert and their wife has kind of deferred to them as the money expert. It really is a trap because what you really need in a collaborative relationship is to help draw out your partners, experience understandings and expectations around money. And it often gets misdiagnosed as irrational. When you take the time to understand your partner's context and the deeper experiences around money, it's typically not irrational. I heard a story recently where the husband and wife were getting ready for a dinner party and the wife is starting to be moaning like, Oh, our house isn't nice enough.
Speaker 1 00:14:33 It doesn't, we don't have the right furnishings, et cetera, et cetera. And you know, the husband's like, what are you talking about? Our house is fine. He's really nice. And then he clicked onto it and he remembered, Oh yeah, she felt socially excluded when she was a little girl. Like she didn't have the nice clothing at school, her parents' house. Wasn't quite nice as her friend's house. And that like now all of a sudden they're having their party. They're in their late thirties, early forties, having friends over and she's freaking out, even though objectively, they have very nice furnishings for the house. You know, it's going to be a great party. Their friends are good friends. They're not going to judge them for the standard of their housing, but that old money story was triggering up. Well, once he recognized that he said, you know, Hey babe, I'm with you.
Speaker 1 00:15:13 I love you. I'm wondering if some of this is connected to your past of feeling excluded or being judged for not having nice enough things. And because they had been working on this topic for awhile, she could receive them and hear that it reset the tone for their dinner party. They were able to have a nice dinner party and, and move on with it. But you know what we know from lots of research with people and money is the author. Brad clients is a great psychologist on stone, a lot of money work, and he labels them financial flashpoints, right? There are these defining moments we have in our childhood where there's high, emotional arousal around some situation that has also a money element to it. And so for kids, right, it's typically buying clothes, getting toys, family trips, parental divorce can also be like a bigger issue, but it was like little kids.
Speaker 1 00:15:59 They're going up. What do they want? They want bikes. They want toys. They want doll houses. They want all these things. At some point, they're not going to get what they want, how their parent responds to that. Disappointment is going to set some of the stage for how they deal with material goods later in the future. Because sometimes you do grow up objectively in a family where they literally cannot afford to buy you the toy. But sometimes you have kids that grew up in environments where mom and dad are more than capable of buying the toy or, or the event or the experience sending them to summer camp. But they act as if they don't have the money. And that creates some deep incongruency between, wait, I know that you're a doctor. Wait, I know that you're an attorney. I know that you're, you know, whatever, that's where a lot of the mixed messages around money can start coming into, play through childhood and can be playing out. Then again in our adulthood,
Speaker 0 00:16:42 That's very deep I'm sure. And what person has not had some experience like that, that's affecting them. And, and that's, I think the trick is, is acknowledging that and, and getting to a point where you're ready or at least open to having a discussion about it. I think that's a hurdle for a lot of people. I felt it is. How do you open somebody up? What's the benefit to going back to that kind of painful place in my childhood that I don't really want to talk about. And I've gotten really good at like compartmentalizing it. And just, how do you get to that point where you're ready to talk about it?
Speaker 1 00:17:15 One of the biggest things is having a safe relationship with another person that can hear it in a nonjudgmental way. And that's where financial therapy really comes into plays because most of us are untrained to listen to people's stories about money and pathic. <inaudible> most of us weren't going to bring our own money, judgments and values to any financial conversations. And we'll say, we'll end up instantly minimizing or saying, well, that's really not that big of a deal that you didn't get to go have this type of birthday party or go to that summer camper. What's the big deal about it. And at a logical sense, you're right. It is in the past, but the reality is our memories live in our mind and brain and get stored there. And so the value of going back to it is like, I think about it a lot, like going to a good massage therapist is like, you don't really want to go to that massage therapist to get that knot in your shoulder, worked out because it's going to hurt when they push on it.
Speaker 1 00:18:03 But man, once they push on it and just the right way and it releases and you get your shoulder moving around again and you're like, Ooh man, that's good stuff. And so I think that that's the way that therapy honestly works is therapists are trained to work on our mental nuts. They can feel a little more nebulous or hard to pinpoint. It's like, well, what am I, what am I rubbing on metaphorically in my brain? Or mind a good therapist knows how to put the right pressure points in the mind at the right time to help start relaxing. The mind. Uh, Dan Siegel is really a prolific author in the mental health world and his image of, of a well-working mind and brain is what he calls neural integration or mental integration. And what he means by that really is the brain is made up of these different compartments, that store information.
Speaker 1 00:18:50 And when we go through a series of traumatic or challenging relationship experiences, we compartmentalize different parts of our brain become more disconnected from each other. So we've become left hemisphere domicile, right? Your left brain or your all analytical or your right brain, or you're all emotional. That's the way we hear the complaint a lot of times. And it really is supported by the brain research. And so part of good therapy is helping all the sections of the brain reintegrated and reconnect across the left and right hemisphere. And from, you know, the top, top down the neocortex, down into the limbic region and down into the brainstem and then back up from the brainstem into the limbic region and the neocortex. And I'm using these technical words because I know you have physicians and they've had brain anatomy in their education and I'm sorry, you know, all the physicians that are listening and they're saying, God, this therapist only knows the surface of it. I get it. I work more with the mind than the specific brain locations, but that's a story for a different time.
Speaker 0 00:19:44 I wish it was as easy as just go into the massage therapist, but maybe, maybe it is. But if you get to that point with upper to a point of being ready to address it and then getting that good kind of hidden that pain point and then releasing the pressure, that's definitely, I think a place most people would want to get to, but what happens if you don't what happens when you have this deep pain or prior experience that's causing these effects and it just kind of, you just don't do anything about it.
Speaker 1 00:20:15 Well, a lot of the symptoms that we ended up seeing right are, so this is the more extreme end of it is really the financial infidelity is the financial secrecy is the using the money, the family funds inappropriately, or maybe even the business funds inappropriately. That's a sure symptom that there are unresolved psychological issues for the individual that can be also emotional or physical sexual infidelity that comes out. We can see a lot of emotional control and manipulation, resentment, and jealousy showing up a general sense of listlessness or dissatisfaction with it's the extreme end of keeping up with the Joneses and never being satisfied. I'm soft on keeping up with the Joneses in general. I think most people at some level will always have a little bit of a comparative bias and longing. There can be a healthy place for that, right? When we're more secure in herself, when we to recognize wow, that person's really accomplishing something that inspires or motivates me to become a better person out of a sense of security. Great. But when you have that, those deeper layers of insecurity and you're continuing to buy bigger and nicer houses or fancier and fancier vacations, and you're still not feeling satisfied, those are massive clues that there's something else going on for you.
Speaker 0 00:21:22 So I'm curious on your thoughts of, for couples managing their finances as like one unit versus keeping their money separate, like your money is here. And my money's there. What are your thoughts on that? In general?
Speaker 1 00:21:36 The further I go down the road, I think it's always our money. Now. I understand that there can be sometimes practical reasons for having separate accounts for just ease of facilitation. You know, it's like, okay, I'm going to have 500 or a thousand dollars a month of discretionary money and you are too. And you're kind of welcome to do whatever you want. And I don't, I'm not going to ask you questions about that and you can do the same, right? And then while the joint account where we pay everything out of it, but where I see that the separation of money management becomes a much bigger issue is when there's underlying trust issues in the relationship. And that usually is the basis for having separate money management practices. When I work with couples is they've had bad experiences in their past relationships. Maybe they're on a second marriage.
Speaker 1 00:22:17 This is where I see it come up a lot or they're, they're joining their finances together for the first time. And they saw catastrophic financial issues in their parents' marriages around money. And so they think that separate having separate accounts is somehow going to make it easier. But the reality is when you're married to somebody, what you do with your quote unquote, your money still has an impact on the other person. Right? I worked with a couple where it's felt unequal. They got the same dollar amount of money for discretionary purposes, but he used his money for more of his own individual interests. And she used her discretionary money more for the benefit of the family. And that created a huge conflict because like this doesn't feel fair that you're getting to go on these trips with your money while I'm spending money to buy furnishings for the house. I think that money needs to come out of the joint family money.
Speaker 0 00:23:07 Doesn't feel like a very tightly closed, not there when, when you have, I think of marriages or at least ideal marriages, one unit,
Speaker 1 00:23:18 I think so. I think that's not all your, your listeners may be Christians and that's fine one way or another, but it from a Christian lens or in the Christian world that I've worked in for so long, they have this concept of two becoming one, right? And so that's like, you know, everything gets merged together. Now that may not fit for people that are in a more cycler mindset or whatever. And that's, there's no judgment on that. But I think really, if you look at the psychology of attachment, when you're married, you're no longer w a one what's called a one person system. You're a two person system. You are psychologically interrelated with this other person. So everything that you do has direct and indirect effects. And the reality is, I think, as a family therapist, you're always still embedded in an even bigger relationship with your children, your parents, older brothers, brothers, and sisters, half brothers and sisters, biological parents, step parents, right. We have all these different relationships that we're always interconnected with. And so the point is money is always flowing between at least the two people that are partnered or married, but what they're doing and how they're earning it and spending it and thinking about it impacts the other. And sometimes it can remain in consequential, but you know, that's where like the $5 a cup of coffee can feel like a mountain.
Speaker 0 00:24:31 I have seen people say it, uh, quite a few times in my experiences is though it usually comes up. Like we want to have separate accounts so that we can buy each other gifts and them not know that's the classic reasoning. They typically say to me, at least that's when I have them together. When I have them separately. A lot of times they'll say, he's just going to spend it, or she's just going to spend it. And, or some sort of protective, not exactly the same answer. And then I think what you see, cause I don't go deeper. I don't know how to go deeper in my, my side of what I do, but it seems like you're probably seeing the much deeper story there is. There's probably something behind the scenes from maybe even their childhood. That's causing them to think like this and they're not even maybe totally understanding it.
Speaker 1 00:25:17 Yeah. I mean, I would say with very high certainty, almost a hundred percent that there's at least some family of origin childhood piece that's connected to that separate money management process that's desired. And so, you know, that's, again, it's not to make that, that it's to set it in the right context. And once we can see it in the right context, then we can usually start to get some more wiggle room around things. Now, certainly if we're talking about parents where there's a highly contentious divorce and money was a significant issue. Yeah. Just getting the right context around it is not going to fully alleviate it, but it's going to be a step in the right direction. Or if parents were using drugs, drugs and money would go hand in hand. And you know, we'd love to think that, you know, certain populations of people who are exempt from that.
Speaker 1 00:25:59 But, um, the reality is that doctors could have easily have grown up in a family where drugs and alcohol were a problem as any other person. And so when you see those things walk in hand, usually it's going to take a lot more money healing work to get to the place of forgiveness towards your parents for the way that they handle it and manage money, the way that you interpret it, your responsibility and re relationship with money. Um, this kind of might be too far field here. But the other thing that I am aware of at least for, for many doctors, is they can grow up in a very perfectionistic environment where they internalize the sense that they're never enough and they've never accomplished enough. And that has huge implications for money management.
Speaker 0 00:26:39 Yeah. I could see the perfectionist mindset in general as causes lot of different issues, but with finances, that's a sticky,
Speaker 1 00:26:47 It's a very sticky point. It is. But it's one that's very important for doctors to be aware of about themselves and to if that's part of their case, where they grew up in an environment where they never felt like they were enough, never achieved enough, never performed enough to start looking into it. Or how does that affect the way that I'm saving for my future, thinking about earning an income and then really into the way that I managed my practice and my business.
Speaker 0 00:27:11 I don't know that the training might even make this harder to address this. The training is very rigorous and academic and strenuous and, and then the financial challenges with student loans and all that sort of stuff. I could see compound all this.
Speaker 1 00:27:26 Yeah. You know, it's interesting because I think about I've had the good fortune of working with many veterans as well. When I look at their family of origin experiences and what drew them into the military, there's a pretty close link, but it's in the military just exacerbate. What was already there for them typically. But I think that medical school also draws a certain type of person and can exacerbate underlying perfectionistic tendencies with the very long work hours, the high demand, exceptional levels of responsibility, right? You're typically learning how to be the most responsible person in the room. You're the most highly educated person. You're the specialist. You're the one that knows it. And so that can create a real vulnerability trap. You can take that. And then some doctors will try to transfer that into being your great money managers and thinking they should be able to do that really well as well. And it's the knowledge is not fungible that you can't just transfer your knowledge of medicine into being a great money manager.
Speaker 0 00:28:22 That's definitely a common thing we see. I've heard, you mentioned about relationship with money and I'm just curious, how do you start to know what is your relationship with money or what are examples of your relationship with money?
Speaker 1 00:28:34 One of the exercises I'd love to use in my practice and I'll share this here, just because it's something that everyone can do to get started is just get out of big eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper. And this is called the money, egg exercise. And what you do is you just get this, you draw a big old hole on a piece of paper and you start at the bottom of the paper and you, um, as you're going to allow yourself to just relax and just let whatever memories come up or you're going to want to remember back to as young as possible, your first memory around money. And you're just going to want to draw a little image there at the bottom of the egg of whatever that was. And so maybe it was getting your allowance or maybe it was tooth fairy money, or maybe it was getting a bicycle or a Christmas present or whatever.
Speaker 1 00:29:14 The little thing is, and I've seen people draw houses, but that's your first experience with money that you can remember consciously. And then what you do is you just slowly work up the egg along the chronology of your life. And the goal is to fill in the whole egg over, over your life. And so by the time that you've done this, and you can do this in 10 minutes, 15 minutes, you go back and you look at all those images and you, you would want to try to assign some emotion word to that each of those experiences, right? So this one made me sad. This one made me happy. This one made me fearful, anxious, you know, so on and so forth. As you look over that totality, then you can use a sentence fill in like, so the money and me and my life is, and this is what we're looking to get at.
Speaker 1 00:29:56 And financial therapy turns is the overall emotional valence of money. Is it generally positive, mixed, or generally negative? If you have a generally positive memories of money, assuming that you're not just completely projecting or denying adversity, then you're probably going to be relatively flexible and reflective about the role and purpose of money in life. But if this valence or the balance of emotion starts to shift to more negative experiences around money and relationships, the more intentional work you're going to have to bring to getting into a healthy relationship with money. You know, so if it's disappointment that you didn't get the toy that your, your brother or his older sister was always getting the nicer things than you, that you remember, you're having a sibling steal, some money out of your piggy bank, that you remember, dad losing his job and becoming depressed. Then you know, you go to college and there's no money to pay for college. And then, you know, kind of this lots of different painful experiences, this is not to judge that, but to just recognize like that shaping your understanding of yourself and money, and it's going to take some real intentional effort to create a new narrative and to look for exceptions in your present day life, to where things are actually going. Right.
Speaker 0 00:31:04 So getting to that point, it sounds like that's, that's a really good kind of summary of what you do in your profession. Let's say though, somebody's working through that. And, or even they just aren't ready to do that themselves. They just, they know that they need help and they want to find somebody, I think, I don't know very many financial therapists besides you. How do you find somebody like you? Are there a lot of you guys around? I don't, I don't know that there's any, any, even in my city.
Speaker 1 00:31:29 Yeah. So I think it's an exciting time. The there's the financial therapy association, just the professional organization that also helps to certified financial therapists. And so the best way to identify a financial therapist is to go to the financial therapy association website. And there's a directory of different financial therapist available. What's very exciting is we actually were, we had the first wave of certified financial therapists available. And so that you can identify those people that have gone through the certification. That's not to say, if someone's not certified, they may not be a really fantastic financial therapist because the field of financial therapy is still readily evolving. But what people want to be mindful of is if someone is saying that they practice financial therapy, what you want to really understand is they likely come from one or two major backgrounds. They're either a mental health professional who has gone to do some of their own personal study and reading around personal finance and they're integrating those things.
Speaker 1 00:32:21 And so they're going to have naturally a much stronger skill set around working with psychological issues. The other type of financial therapist is typically interview someone that's trained much more like you, who has a really robust understanding of personal finances and all the nuances of setting up a good comprehensive financial plan and how to help people keep on track with, and then they've gone on to do some additional reading and studying about therapeutic skills and processes. And so they're going to be a little lighter on understanding the complexity of the mind stages of change in life, family dynamics, how to heal trauma. Those types of issues are going to be outside of their typical knowledge and skillset. That doesn't mean that they may not really be able to help you sit down and work through your net worth statement and help you to not, you know, help you with a little bit of guilt or shame or fear and anxiety that might be coming up around actually looking at what's my net worth. I imagine you've seen clients who feel pretty uncomfortable and you start to look at their net worth or their cashflow.
Speaker 0 00:33:16 Oh yeah. Money is definitely tends to evoke lots of, uh, emotions and sometimes good and sometimes bad.
Speaker 1 00:33:22 Surprisingly, this has been a big learning for me, is that for some people even recognizing like, Oh my gosh, I have, you know, $3 million. And that's really a great net worth for my family can feel overwhelming. Like, so you would think that's positive experience of recognizing, Oh, we're financially independent or financially secure, but it can evoke a lot of guilt. And typically what's harder for people to talk about is shame, but it's like, who am I to have this much money? It doesn't feel fair that I have this much money. Right. And those types of internal dot narratives and thought patterns are things that financial therapists love to help clients work on so that they can get to a place of greater congruency around because okay, to have this money, here's what it means to me. Here's what I can do to use it productively for my family and for society, because you've worked so hard to accumulate this money, living with guilt and shame about it is really sad.
Speaker 1 00:34:12 That's not the way you want to go about it, but it's conversely, you know, when I look at work around eating disorders, and I'd mentioned this when we were getting ready for this, but one of these that's super interesting to me is the ACEs study, the adverse childhood experiences study. That's one of these major studies that helps link trauma to, um, a lot of physical health issues. But one of the major research there's found is while I help people lose weight, the doctor helps them lose weight. Vincent Felitti, they come back and they've put the weight back on after three to six months. And he asked them, well, why, why did you do that? They would say, well, I started to get all this attention. I didn't really want, so why is that? And he said, well, sometimes it was because they had been raped.
Speaker 1 00:34:52 They had had a bad sexual experience. And now they're getting this positive attention. They don't know what to do with. And so I think that when you come from a place where you have shame about having money and then people start to find out or recognize, or you're just internally fearful that people will know how to find out how much money you have. That's a really important thing to work through because people can't see your net worth. They can only make presumptions. People can see your physical body size and make some judgment about it. And it's going to be, you know, like a little more accurate, right? We can judge someone who's larger or smaller in physical size, but we really can't effectively judge someone's net worth just because they're driving a nice car or have a nice watch or a nice clothes doesn't mean that they have a nice network. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:35:34 We'd like to try to, but we'd love to try to, but I'm just, you know,
Speaker 1 00:35:38 As a financial planner, when you, you get people on the financial scale, right. That's what I love equate this to is like, we're stepping on the financial scale. We want to see where we're at. Are you at a healthy financial weight for your age and stage and income? And there's no shame wherever you're at in that spectrum. But my job is to help you get to a place of congruency, right? Is, you know, a lot of people have this mythical idea that if I just hit a million dollars, everything's going to be okay, well, a million dollars is irrelevant number because if you're making $500,000 a year, a million dollars of net worth is nothing. But if you're making $40,000 a year and that's in your two years away from retirement and you have a million dollar portfolio, man, you're going to have a pretty good retirement. Or
Speaker 0 00:36:20 What if you just can't even enjoy the money you have. It's like, what's the point.
Speaker 1 00:36:25 Yeah. Million dollar question. And there's a lot of miserable, wealthy people. And so financial therapy, you know, would certainly help to try to help people realign their relationship so that they can enjoy their wealth and move into a more meaningful place. But that opens up. Maybe we can do another podcast just on estate planning and wealth and the misery that can be all mixed in that. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:36:44 It gets at state planning and legacy planning can get quite interesting in terms of dynamics.
Speaker 1 00:36:51 That definitely brings out the family and a couple of dynamics, I think even better than, you know, looking at saving and spending it's how do we transition this wealth that just opens up huge cans of worms for people with unresolved issues, typically with the next generation or the generation preceding them.
Speaker 0 00:37:07 Right. It can get nasty quick as we wrap up. I'm curious. What would you say is like, if we're just trying to get started, like I'm open to the idea of exploring some of this, my relationship with money or understanding more about what makes me tick, or maybe even talking to a financial therapist, but in your words, what would be a good kind of first step for somebody to take like kind of a small baby step to start moving the direction of having, you know, a healthier relationship?
Speaker 1 00:37:37 Well, certainly I'd love to have people come visit
[email protected]. That's my personal website where I have blog posts up talking about these very topics. I have a course called the family money tree that people can plug into. It's a very low barrier to entry. It's about an hour long. Um, but I'll walk you through a little bit of your family history in relationship with money. So those are some really simple ways. I also, you know, have Instagram I'm on LinkedIn and Facebook. And so people can find me there. I'm putting out stuff regularly. So I think those are great ways to get connected with me personally, and with financial therapy. And then I mentioned the financial therapy association. And so if you're looking for other people beyond what I have to say, I would go to the financial therapy association, just start looking at names and start doing some searching. I mean, Google is our best friend. Financial therapy is at your fingertips. And financial therapy is mentioned in the media and increasing amounts. And so you've got great, great articles like in the wall street journal and the times and NPR down to hyper hyper focused blogs. So it's, it's out there if you start searching. Awesome.
Speaker 0 00:38:40 Well, and I really appreciate you sitting with me and spending the time. I really love what you're doing and have enjoyed having the conversation and definitely appreciate it. Abroad
Speaker 1 00:38:50 Has been an awesome time talking with you, Daniel as well and appreciate the work you're doing to help physicians get on the right financial track
Speaker 0 00:38:57 As always. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you found this valuable, please give us a review on iTunes and share with a friend. Also check out our
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