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Wealth Psychology & Financial therapy
Wealth solves some problems. It creates its own set of new ones.
You built it, inherited it, or it landed on you overnight. None of that tells you how to carry it.
Wealth changes who you can trust and how you're allowed to feel. It doesn't matter how you got there. If you have money, you're probably carrying some version of:
Isolation, because you can't tell who wants you and who wants what you have
A gap between how put-together you look and how unmoored you actually feel
Guilt about needing help when, on paper, you have "everything"
A relationship that's paying the price for the wealth that was supposed to protect it
The sense that the achievement, the exit, the inheritance, whatever it was, should have felt like more than it did
Financial therapists talk about budgets. I don't. I work with what wealth actually does to your identity, your relationships, and your nervous system, because that's where the real damage shows up.
It's possible to hold wealth without it holding you.
This isn't financial planning. It's the psychological work that has to happen alongside it.
Three paths to wealth. Three different sets of challenges:
Self-made. You built your identity around building it. Rest feels like danger. Enough never arrives. The relationship, the health, the friendships, got whatever was left over. Now the thing you sacrificed everything for is asking why you're never actually present.
Sudden wealth. An exit, a windfall, an inheritance you didn't see coming. The rules changed overnight, and nobody handed you a new rulebook. It's a real identity crisis: you don't trust people the same way, you feel guilty for struggling with what looks like winning, and you're grieving a version of yourself you didn't know you'd lose.
Grew up in it. You inherited the money and the complications with it: the fear you haven't earned anything, the suspicion people love the name more than you, a legacy you didn't sign up to protect. Success feels handed to you. Failure would feel entirely your own.
Different roads. Same core problem: money became the identity, and nobody dealt with what was underneath it.
How it works
Wealth doesn't get processed with logic. It gets processed with the nervous system.
It's never really about the money. It's about what the money is standing in for. That's identity, safety, control, whatever got fused to it along the way. Here's how we get to that.
Talking about your finances in a spreadsheet-and-strategy way has its place, and it's not this. What actually shifts things is getting underneath the story wealth built for you. The hypervigilance, the isolation, the fused identity, the relationship that's been running on autopilot while you were building or protecting or managing the money.
I use Relational Life Therapy to name the patterns wealth creates between you and the people closest to you: the imbalance of power, the loss of full disclosure, the quiet resentment that builds when one partner holds the money and the other holds everything else. I use Brainspotting and Accelerated Resolution Therapy to work with what's stored in the body: the hypervigilance of sudden wealth, the grief of an inheritance nobody let you mourn, the exhaustion of a self-made identity that's never once felt safe to put down.
This work doesn't replace your financial advisor, your family office, or your estate attorney. It's the piece none of them are equipped to touch: what the money is doing to you, and to the people you love.
For couples
Wealth rarely lands on two people the same way. One partner built it and can't stop building. One partner didn't build it and doesn't feel entitled to a say in it. One partner grew up in money and can't tell if they're loved or leveraged. I work with couples where money has become the thing nobody can talk about honestly, and help you get back to a relationship that isn't organized around it.
For individuals
If you're the one holding the wealth, whatever its source, and you're the one who feels most alone in it, individual work gives you a place to actually say the parts you can't say anywhere else: to your board, your family, your spouse, your friends.
How we’ll work together
We’ll start with an in-depth intake session. This will give me an opportunity to learn more about you and your goals, answer any questions you have, and co-create a plan to track your progress throughout our work together.
You choose the format that works best for you:
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If you prefer to make progress steadily over time, we can meet on a weekly or bi-weekly basis for 50- or 80-minute sessions.
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For accelerated results, concentrated therapy in the form of intensives may be a good fit for you. Like a large dose of therapy at once, you can experience rapid relief and healing with a relatively small time investment. Click here to learn more.
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If you’re already working with another therapist and finding the work there helpful, great! Financial therapy can be a powerful addition to your work by helping to break through a specific barrier as you continue working with your therapist. Adjunct therapy can occur via ongoing or intensive therapy.
why i do this work
I work with people who have already won by every external measure, and are still not okay.
That gap between how things look and how they feel is exactly where I do my best work. Most therapists aren't trained to work with wealth as its own clinical issue, so it gets treated like a side detail instead of the thing that's actually shaping your identity, your relationships, and how safe you feel in the world. I am trained for it, and I take it seriously as its own area of competency, not an afterthought to the "real" work.
Having it all shouldn't feel like this.
There's a way through it, and you don't have to find it alone.
Frequently asked questions
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Wealth comes with its own challenges: isolation, hypervigilance, identity fused to achievement or inheritance, relationships complicated by power and money. Most therapists are excellent at their own specialties, but this is a specific competency, the same way you'd want someone trained specifically in trauma for trauma work, or in couples for couples work. Without that lens, wealth can get treated as a side detail, or worse, the therapist's own unexamined feelings about money, whether that's discomfort, judgment, or envy, can quietly interfere with the work. I've built my practice specifically around this population, so it's not a topic I'm adjusting to, it's the work I know.
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Yes. Most financial therapy addresses financial stress and money habits for people who feel behind or out of control with money. This work is for people on the other end: people who have money, sometimes a lot of it, and are dealing with the identity, relational, and psychological fallout of having it. Of course we can talk numbers if needed, but thats only a fraction of the work.
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No. This is most relevant if your financial status, however you came into it, has become entangled with your identity, your relationships, or your sense of safety. That shows up differently depending on the number, but the psychological pattern is consistent.
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No. I don't replace your financial advisor, CPA, or estate attorney. I work with the emotional and relational side of wealth, which is the piece those professionals aren't trained to touch, and often the piece that determines whether the rest of the plan actually works. When that side gets addressed, financial decisions tend to get easier: less anxiety, less conflict, less second-guessing every move.
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Often the individual work and the couples work are the same work. Wealth rarely stays contained to one person's internal experience. I work with individuals and couples, and can help you figure out which format fits where you're starting.
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Contact me to schedule a free consultation with me. It’s important that you feel comfortable with your counselor, and I’ll help you decide if I’m the right fit for you.