Please take a few moments to write down your responses to the following queries. Doing so will assist you in better understanding the arguments and conclusions in this article. When we ask clients, counselors, colleagues, and friends to respond to the following exercises, they often report surprise and fascination with the information that emerges.

• Write down the first 8 to 10 words that come to mind when you think of the word “money.”
• Underline all of the words you have identified which you think have a negative connotation
  regarding money.

$$$

• Write down three things that you are proud of in terms of your relationship to money.
• Write down three things that you feel badly about in terms of your relationship to money.
• Identify which list was easiest for you to complete.

$$$

• Write down your most joyful experience with money.
• Write down your most painful experience with money.
• Identify which memory was easiest for you to recall.

$$$

• Now take a ten or twenty dollar bill and look at it. Write down the answer to the following question: What has this ever done to hurt you?

$$$

The obvious answer to the last question is that the currency you were holding in your hand has never actually done anything to hurt you (unless you suffered a paper cut pulling it out of your wallet or purse). Rather, the hurt you may have identified related to money resulted from your experiences with people and situations, not the actual money itself.

How is money like sex?
Look back on your answers, or the answers of your client. Now imagine substituting the word “sex” for money in the original questions. If the answers reflected predominately negative judgments and painful experiences related to sex, many counselors would be alerted to the possibility that the respondent had been traumatized in their relationship with sex.

A great number of clients have had significantly negative experiences with money, which have injured or compromised their relationship with money. It is very common to observe a great deal of negativity and pain around money. Just having clients begin to answer these kinds of questions brings up a wealth of material counselors can use in working with clients.
The intriguing thing is that when skillful counselors follow the money trail, they often end up with the client at some basic core-wounding place. They will discover as we have in our work with clients, “it’s never about the money.”

And yet, with all the painful feelings associated with money, in and of itself money is innocent. According to leading financial planner and leading financial futurist Dick Wagner, money was originally developed and is “based on generosity and virtue, not greed, fear, and pain” (Wagner 2004). But, when someone has unresolved feelings related to money, they often act in self-defeating ways and find themselves facing significant financial stressors.
It is ironic that money is seldom, if ever, explored in the therapeutic setting. Many counselors feel very comfortable and justified in helping clients examine relationships with their work, partner, family, sexuality, family of origin, nicotine, alcohol and other drugs, food, spirituality, chronic illness, and so on. Why not money? Think about it. When was the last time you asked a client about the details of the state of their financial affairs? How many of us remember how uncomfortable it first felt when we finished our training and someone paid us for our time? How many of us still feel uncomfortable talking about, or receiving payment from clients? How many of us find it difficult to raise our prices just to cover the costs of inflation?

Even though we may be reticent about bringing it up, working with clients around their money issues does not necessarily involve a counselor learning a new skill set. By using the same techniques counselors have developed to assist clients in resolving trauma associated with physical abuse, sexual abuse, painful families, death and loss, and other life circumstances, the counselor can help clients heal the money wounds also.

However, we propose there are two additional prerequisites required to work effectively with clients who struggle with issues around money. The first prerequisite requires the gathering of information and expertise around the nature of money. The second prerequisite involves the counselor understanding and making peace with his or her own history and current relationship with money. This is no different a standard than that of a counselor who wants to begin working with clients around their sexual abuse. Gathering the appropriate information about the clinical issue, and coming to terms with one’s own sexuality is considered basic, necessary ethical, and prudent.

Our relationships with money
First, let’s examine some of the information a counselor might find helpful in working with clients around their money issues. We’re not talking about the “external” knowledge of money: how to invest or what a good financial plan looks like. We are referring to the counselors developing a body of knowledge about the “internal” side of money. This internal side of money represents discovering some of the common ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that are at the very foundation of client’s behaviors around money and many other issues that at first glance wouldn’t seem to be related.

Everyone has a relationship with money. We deal with money everyday. However, for most of us, our relationship with money, for the most part, remains unexplored and unconscious. To the degree that our relationship with money is unconscious, we will be controlled by it, and be susceptible to “out of control” behaviors around money. Out-of-control money behaviors include overspending, excessive or chronic indebtedness, hoarding, enabling children, sabotaging financial plans, avoidance/obsession with money issues, misrepresenting financial status, money behaviors and values, ideals, and goals not matching, and work compulsion to name but a few.

It has been said that “money is the most powerful and pervasive secular force on the planet” (Wagner, 2004). While it may be a powerful and pervasive force, most people carry significant shame around the topic of money. Primarily the shame manifests itself through people having a sense of having too much or not having enough. At the end of many interviews we are doing with clients for an upcoming book on money relationships, clients report that they had great difficulty being honest when we asked them questions about their annual income and net worth. This sense of shame creates a condition that supports most people carrying secrets in terms of their relationship with money. In the addictions field, it is often quoted “we are sick as the secrets we keep.”

Talking about one’s personal relationship with money is a social and psychological taboo in our culture. (Wagner, 2004). In his book Real Wealth, Robinson (1998) notes that if he asks a client to tell him about their sex life they will do it, but if he asks them questions about their finances they will begin lying (p. 100).

Money is the number one area of contention in primary relationships and the number one cause of divorce within the first seven years of marriage (Ramsey, 2002). According to a press release dated March 31, 2004, a survey commissioned by the American Psychological Association showed that 73 percent of Americans report that money is their number-one stressor, ahead of issues such as work, physical health, and children.

Money Scripts™ drive behavior
It is important to understand that everyone’s money behaviors make sense if we understand the beliefs, or Money Scripts™ that drive their behavior. A Money Script is an unconsciously held belief, which is often only partially true, or a message about money that is so deeply internalized in early life that it is rarely, if ever, questioned. We seldom examine these beliefs, even when acting on them causes repeated painful financial consequences.

An example of a common Money Script is “Rich people got that way by taking advantage of poor people.” This Money Script represents a partial truth. One client’s story represents a typical consequence of following this script. At the tender age of 20, he found himself “worth” $20,000,000. He was a well-known celebrity who hit it big. He was born into and had lived most of his life in abject poverty. His financial advisors referred him to us for assistance because for the last 7 years he was spending at the rate of three times his income. Every strategy they had tried to get him to understand what was happening had failed. He had gone through $13,000,000 of his nest egg within 10 years as well as spending an additional $8,000,000 per year in annual earnings. We were amazed to find upon examination that he did not spend any of the money on himself. He was living in a rented home. He supported 13 families, representing more than 60 people who were members of his entourage. He paid $25,000 a month to take care of stray dogs and cats that he ran across. He reported that he grew up “not wanting to be like those rich people who looked down on him and his family.”

Fred’s Money Script was that being rich made you a “bad” person. His current course of behaviors, if unchecked, would ensure that he and his family would be penniless within the next 10 years. Until our work with this client and his wife, they had no knowledge of the dire state of their financial affairs. Our work with him helped identify his primary Money Script, and helped open his mind to some other potential truths about wealth. We explained that while it is true that some people take advantage of poor people to get rich, it is also true that others were just in the right place at the right time. Still others became wealthy because they were willing to take the risk of following a personal dream or vision and as a result became successful financially. When Fred heard this later possibility, he began gently weeping. That was his truth. He had a dream at the age of 5 and had worked endlessly to make his dream come true. Through the therapeutic process, Fred was able to identify the limitations of his original Money Script, and was able to incorporate new understandings that served to modify his original script to make it more functional and accurate. We call this process “re-scripting,” which is an important part of the healing process.

The changes the client has made in terms of his finances in the months following our work with him have astounded his advisors. He is now doing many of the things that he had been advised to do to provide for his family and future and has reduced his spending by 35 percent.
His experience has been a common occurrence with other clients. Though the dollar amounts differ, they have reported the same kinds of life-changing experiences.

How pervasive are Money Scripts? Everyone carries dozens, if not hundreds, of them. Many of them are contradictory. Since they are mostly unconscious beliefs, the half-truths and conflicting messages can cause incredible havoc. If you did the exercises at the beginning of this article, go back to the “most painful experience” exercise and see if you can discover a Money Script of yours that may have contributed to the painful situation. Most pain around money comes from acting on one or more of these Money Scripts.

The treatment process
The first step in our treatment process involves the identification of the specific Money Scripts underlying a client’s financial dysfunction. Sometimes, the re-scripting process (adding the rest of the truths to a script as described above) is in itself curative. When this is enough, clients report moments of enlightenment when they finally “see” and are able to put these new insights into action. However, we have found that often the Money Scripts are tied to distressing memories and painful emotions related to unfinished business. When these strong emotional bonds are present, they must be dissolved before the client can begin to make changes. We have found that the therapeutic techniques typically employed to assist a client in working through unfinished business related to past relationships and other traumatic events work well in resolving the etiology of money dysfunction. In our work, we have found experiential therapy tools such as psychodrama, role-play, re-enactment, art, guided imagery, and meditation extremely efficient and effective. We also have found it essential to the process of healing that we have a financial professional in the therapy setting at all times.

The treatment model that we employ involves a five-day program that combines didactic lectures by a financial professional with experiential group therapy, situated in a retreat setting. In addition to the program, we also work with individuals, couples, and families who present with challenging financial issues that their financial advisors and counselors have not been able to help them resolve. The success of our program lies in teaming a counselor and financial planner, who are both present during all didactic presentations and group therapy sessions. Our model requires a counselor who has special training in money issues and a financial planner who has special training in the therapeutic process. During the 5-day workshop, the client is exposed to a series of exercises and discovery processes. The therapeutic goal is financial integration, which we define as a client’s sense of being whole around money, where their behaviors and values around money are in alignment. A financially integrated client has the necessary interior (emotional) and exterior (knowledge) money skills that result in sound financial decisions.

Counselors not able to utilize the intensive workshop model described above can use the exercises described at the beginning of this article, and others like them to begin exploring the connection between the client’s relationship with money and unresolved trauma. Tools such as the trauma egg (Carnes, 2001) and psychodrama’s social atom (Dayton, 1994) can be easily adapted to helping a client explore their money issues.

The second prerequisite for a counselor to work effectively with clients around their relationship with money may very well be the most challenging. As you might recall, this prerequisite involves the counselor working to gain an understanding and making peace with their own personal and professional relationship with money.

Olivia Mellon (1994) coined the term “money monk” to refer to an individual who looks to what they perceive as the higher meaning of life, feeling that it is to some degree degrading and debasing to be concerned about something as mundane as money. The counseling profession is over-represented by money monks. Skeptical? Try talking to the average counselor about raising their fees, even to just match the cost of inflation and increased costs of doing business.

We believe that there is also an unspoken professional bias against counselors who might seem interested in the money side of things. It is not uncommon in graduate school for people to get a very clear message that if one is going into the counseling profession looking at a business model, he or she is going into the profession with the wrong idea. According to a colleague who recently graduated from a prominent school of social work, the unspoken message was, “If you came into the counseling profession to make money, you are in the wrong profession!” There is no course work for counselors in any university that we are aware of that teaches prospective counselor how to implement a business plan. There is an expectation that those in the counseling profession take a personal “vow of poverty” and many feel somewhat guilty taking payment for services. Counselors are often willing to negotiate service fees, and often accept clients on a sliding-fee schedule without even working to confirm what a client is able to afford.

Perhaps the counselor’s struggle around money can be traced directly back to Sigmund Freud who, while equating the process of money with the anal stage of development, at the same time said that he felt best about himself when he was making a living. Dr. Richard Trachtman (1999) asserts that money is “perhaps the most ignored subject in the practice, literature, and training of psychotherapy” (p. 276). Money issues may represent one of the last frontiers of psychotherapy. Trachtman also points out that Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis, admitted that in regard to his father’s financial difficulties, he “preferred to suppress rather than explore their impact on him” (p. 284). He notes that when you consider one of the fundamental objectives of psychoanalysis is to explore childhood traumatic memories and one’s suppressed issues, that is an ironic admission by Freud.

The following feedback from clients we have worked with illustrates the richness of using the money portal for healing: “I realized that my money issues are not about money”; “I discovered that my Money Scripts that drive so much of my thinking and emotions are tied to my family of origin”; “I discovered that my inability to maturely handle financial issues has nothing to do with money”; and “I have been able to see how my past affects the way I spend and save.”

Talking with clients about money
So, where does a counselor start, if they want to begin helping clients look at their relationship with money? Perhaps the first step is to give oneself permission to talk about money with clients, another one of our culture’s taboos. To help you move in this direction we would like to share with you what we have learned working with clients around money issues. We would remind you that:

1. Asking about a client’s relationship to money is an acceptable practice.

2. A client’s money experiences can serve as an exceptional treatment portal, touching in a profound way their basic core woundedness issues, and most of those issues are often totally unrelated to money.

3. Client information representing traumatic experiences with money can be treated with the same clinical practices, methods, and skills that are used for other unresolved trauma.

4. A counselor would be advised to learn specific information and the experiences needed to feel comfortable talking with clients about their money relationships.

5. A counselor needs to examine his or her own relationship with money, so that he or she can truly be present for the client attempting to deal with this subject.

Many people believe that money is magic. If there was just enough, everything would come together. We have interviewed a number of people, both professional counselors and clients, around the question of how they feel about having more money than they need. The universal response, whether they had an annual income of $20,000 or $400,000 has been, “I can’t answer that question, because I really don’t have enough.”

Perhaps these answers reflect the seemingly nearly universal belief or as we call it, Money Script, that an unknown and as of yet unachieved amount of money can somehow offer what people are looking for. Jacob Needleman (1991), author of Money and the Meaning of Life says, “We cannot get ultimate meaning out of that which cannot provide ultimate meaning” (p. 42). In other words, there will never be enough, because it can’t provide what we and our clients are really longing for. It’s not about the money.

Ted Klontz, MA, CSATIII, MAC, CETII ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is co-owner of Onsite Workshops, Inc., which offers intensive 4- to 6-day financial therapy workshops that he designed and facilitates. He is co-author of Family Reconstruction and Financial Awakenings, as well as numerous publications and articles.

Rick Kahler, MA, CFP ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is rated as one of the top Financial Planners in the United States. A member of two prestigious financial-planning think tanks,
he has been featured or quoted in numerous publications and is the co-author of Conscious Finance and Financial Awakenings.

Brad Klontz, PsyD, CSAC ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is a licensed clinical psychologist and certified substance abuse counselor, therapist, consultant and coach. The president of Coastal Clinics, Inc. in Kauai, Hawai’i, he has been published in numerous publications and is the co-author of Financial Awakenings.

References
Carnes, P. (2001). Workshop Training Exercise, Scottsdale, AZ.
Dayton, T. (1994). The drama within. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc.
Ramsey, D. (2002). Financial peace revisited. New York, NY: Viking Press.
Robinson, J. (1998). Real wealth. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House Inc.
Mellon, O. (1994). Your money style. New York, NY: MJF Books.
Neddleman, J. (1991). Money and the meaning of life. New York, NY: Doubleday.
Trachtman, R. (1999). The money taboo: its effects in everyday life and in the practice of psychotherapy. Clinical Social Work Journal, 27(3), 275-288.
Wagner, D. (2004). Personal conversation, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

This article is published in Counselor,The Magazine for Addiction Professionals, August 2004, v.5, n.4, pp. 23-29.

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