I have felt the “stuckness” deeply in my bones for years. Mine has been two-fold. Mostly my marriage and my personal finances. From a Marriage and Family Therapist and a Business Owner- We are human too. I have sought out counsel too. Lots of counsel. You heard that right. A THERAPIST telling you about how some of their life has been tough and how they plan to fix it. My personal finances have sucked. My relationship has suffered. They go hand-in-hand. And I’m talking about it. Because it’s REAL and important and my job is to help people. Including those with financial trauma.
My business finances have NOT SUCKED because the day I opened the doors, I knew that this was hard for me and hired someone to handle it. And the business finances WORKING BEAUTIFULLY have helped motivate me to do three things:
- Trust that a healthy financial relationship can work. A really strong relationship with the person who I hired to help me do this has been super important to me. In Psychology, we call this modeling. It has been modeling behavior. I have to have a completely transparent relationship with my business finances. I have no choice. I have to communicate about them, even though it’s hard and conflictual at time. This has caused FINANCIAL relationship repair.
- Have an incredibly strong desire to fix what is wrong with my PERSONAL finances. Like I can’t live with it anymore AT ALL. I know how to do this now from the business! It’s time. This is my journey. (I’ll update you as we go along)
- Share this very vulnerable thing with you, maybe it will help someone else. Which is why I do what I do anyway. I LOVE TO help people. And maybe it will humanize therapists. I am not perfect. I am not alone. You are not alone. 23-36% of us are in this boat. Let’s do this, tribe
So let’s back it up and let me get super intimate for a moment and tell you some stuff about my life.
Long story short, one of my childhood “things” (we all have them) that creeps up is that my parents fought about money constantly. My mom often held two jobs while my dad was in and out of work. It was always a fight, always a strain. I witnessed ALL of the things that shouldn’t happen in a relationship regarding money. Secret spending, saying “fuck it” and my dad spending money that they didn’t have, my mom stuffing money away to make ends meet. Falsehoods, Lies. HUGE, LOUD VERBAL ARGUMENTS. And then the finality of my mother getting a divorce and finally (though struggling), balancing it all out and getting it right.
FEAR. It instilled fear around money. This gave me the impression that finances were basically a war between two people. An Epic battle. And that they were impossible between a couple. I’ve also always had a very strong desire to protect myself. What if my finances went sideways? I needed to separate myself financially from my husband. Shared finances were NOT safe. Unfortunately, sometimes even the professionals can’t get away from their stuff. It’s real. It’s life.
It takes two to tango BUT Unconsciously in my marriage we went down a similar road to my childhood experience. We both spent money we didn’t have, there was no budget, we both entered into the “fuck it” mode. And I had been planning for the inevitable. “it won’t work”. And then we were there. In that bad spot. Our finances do not work well together. Like we couldn’t do it. We couldn’t trust each other. There is no accountability. Financial instability has caused so much damage.
The only way I think I could have had a desire to get out of this cycle was the modeling of a healthy financial relationship that my business has brought me. I knew that I couldn’t do it on my own. And I got help. ASAP. If I was going to do anything right, the practice was NOT going to fail. I had too much love to give. Too many people to help. Too much work to do. My Saving Grace from myself was this: The day the doors opened I went to someone and said, “this is my life’s work, I know that financial management is not my skillset, I have a gut feeling that I need to learn how to do this. And that if I don’t do this my passion will fail, help me”.
It’s still a work in progress. But I’m sharing my story in hopes it helps others. I hope you think about the root causes of your financial stress. Everyone has a financial story to tell. Everyone’s is different. Everyone’s relationship with money has room for improvement. And JUST MAYBE you will take a step into the light and decide it’s time for a change, like I have.
What I also have learned is that there’s this thing that’s called Financial PTSD…Today I’m going to share this Q and A with you.
This is from Dr. Buckwalter has been a research psychologist for over 25 years. He served as the Chief Science Officer at Payoff, a financial services company focused on using science to improve people’s relationship with money. He was formerly the CSO of eHarmony, where he designed the site’s famed matchmaking service to assess and match couples into long-term relationships. His company, psyML, uses psychology and machine learning to provide insights into the personality and emotions behind data. See more of his writing here, https://medium.com/@jgbuckwalter
A research psychologist of twenty-five years, Dr. Galen Buckwalter uses data analytics to study people’s relationship with money. He began his research of financial personalities with the widely accepted HEXACO model (honesty/humility, emotionality, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness), but his data sets soon returned an unidentifiable seventh dimension, or, as his team labeled it, “factor fear”: People were plagued by feelings of stress, failure, and isolation surrounding their finances. They wanted control of their financial situation but had slipped into a permanent state of anxiety due to overwhelming fear.
Buckwalter had questions: Was this a temporary state of stress? Had money reprogrammed their brains in a way scientists had missed? That is, until his boss told him the story of someone who’d lost her house to foreclosure. Listening to her symptoms, Buckwalter concluded the “factor fear” is essentially financial PTSD.
The neighbor’s trauma—hypervigilance around money, avoidance of financial tasks, emotional blunting—was in perfect alignment with Buckwalter’s previous studies on PTSD at the University of Southern California. Not only that, but according to his research, 23 percent of adults and 36 percent of millennials experience financial stress at levels that qualify as a diagnosis of PTSD. When our minds are locked into this state of fear, it is impossible to face the reality of our financial status, let alone plan for the future.
Q- How do you define Financial PTSD or financial trauma?
A- It is the physical, emotional, and cognitive deficits people experience when they cannot cope with either abrupt financial loss or the chronic stress of having inadequate financial resources.
A more descriptive understanding of the situation of financial PTSD is the following:
- Financial PTSD is the result of living at least three months when one’s income is not adequate to meet one’s expenses. The symptoms must be so severe they disrupt home and/or work life and cause the person a sense of great distress. This may also include a traumatic financial loss, such as foreclosure on a residence; losing a large amount of money due to fraud or an unfair divorce settlement; an unexpected tax or business loss; or losing a job and one’s income.
- Physical symptoms: Nervous energy, jitteriness, insomnia, hyperreactive to situations that remind one of financial problems, such as ringing phones that may be calls from debt collectors.
- Emotional symptoms: Inability to feel close to friends and significant other, difficulty enjoying things that were enjoyable, a sense that bad things are inevitable and that life will be cut short.
- Cognitive symptoms: Persistent negative thoughts about self and the environment, difficulty concentrating.
Undoubtedly, the area of life that is always impacted and often ends up adding to the stress, when it could be an incredible resource for the person, is close relationships. Financial trauma saps the person of their desire to be intimate and open in their personal relationships. The person also becomes irritable and prone to angry outbursts, and guess who are the most frequent targets for these negative emotions? Of course, those who are closest to the person. So think how all of this would feel to the people who are close to someone with financial PTSD. The person becomes distant, they won’t talk about what is going on, and they are downright nasty at times. All of this toward the people they need the most.
Q- How does financial stress differ from other types of stress? And how does it manifest?
A- There is a condition called allostatic load, discovered by the brilliant molecular biologist Bruce McEwen, that recognizes the lifelong effects of chronic stress. Evolution has prepared our bodies to handle short bursts of intense stress incredibly well. It’s why you don’t see a lot of chronic diseases among predatory animals. Think about your average cheetah. She has some pretty intense stress to deal with. But when the hunt is done, it’s time to chill and lounge with your family and soak up some sun.
Not having enough money is a whole different kind of stress. It keeps our physiology amped up pretty much 24/7. Without the chance to recuperate, all the hormones that we need when we are truly threatened stay turned on and just start chipping away at our body. That is allostatic load: the wear and tear of chronic stress beating up the systems that are weakest in a given person. So long-term financial stress can well end up as diabetes in one person, heart disease in another person, and psychiatric problems in another.
Q- How common have you found financial PTSD to be? Who is most affected by it?
A- Our research repeatedly found that over 20 percent of the population meets the above criteria for financial PTSD. It seems to hit all demographic groups at relatively constant rates, although millennials report these symptoms more frequently than other age groups.
Q- Is a traumatic event necessary to feel the effects of financial PTSD?
There are two basic problems someone with financial PTSD needs to address to recover and develop a new relationship with money. The first are the emotional, physical, and cognitive problems that happen with financial PTSD, and the second are the financial problems that are causing all of the PTSD symptoms in the first place. For long-term change in your financial status, one either has to make more money or spend less—that’s it. Taking out another credit card won’t work. But to change your earnings or your spending takes an incredible amount of self-discipline, concentration, positive self-esteem, etc., all of which are in short supply in someone with financial PTSD.
I always encourage people with financial PTSD to first work on themselves before trying to reshape their relationship with money. Ideally one would be able to find a mental health professional who has experience in helping people deal with chronic stress or PTSD. In lieu of that, there are any number of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) exercises one can teach oneself: Negative thought stopping, journaling, progressive muscle relaxation—these are just a few exercises that most people can learn to do that are effective for many people with financial PTSD.
The goal is to gain control of the most troublesome symptoms of financial PTSD before tackling the life-changing task of developing a new relationship with money. Baby steps at first: Control the negative thoughts, learn how to relax and get that cheetah-lounging-in-the-sun vibe going, and then you can tackle the process of getting paid what you are worth and spending only on things that bring you satisfaction. Then who knows what’s next. Maybe you will be the one to tackle income inequality?
Q- Any good resources for someone who has experienced financial trauma?A- The T2 Mood Tracker, The Financial Therapy Association, Calm.com, HappyMoney, and of course Balance Wellness trauma therapy.
Tribe: I’m here. I’m open, I’m making BIG changes that started with recognition of the root of the problem, the damage that my relationship with money has caused in my personal relationships, and now an actionable plan to a way out. My life will prosper and so will yours. It’s time to step out of the tunnel.
Amy Schillinger, LMFT
Founder and Owner of Balance Stress Management & Therapy
