Healthy Love & Money: Financial Therapy, Intimacy, Conflict & Communication for Couples

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Today, Ed is joined by Danielle Seurkamp, Founder of Well Spent Wealth Planning. Since joining the financial planning industry in 2006, Danielle has helped hundreds of individuals and families to effectively achieve their financial goals.

As a Certified Financial Planner who jokingly also refers to herself as a “mental health hobbyist,” Danielle says that her role is “not all just numbers, logic, and common sense. Even financial planning, as much as it is about dollars and cents, is also about priorities, goals, and making things happen in our lives. Our emotions have such a big impact on all of that.”

In this conversation, Danielle explains why nobody—not even high-income earners—is immune to financial stress and hardship. She also speaks on the typical issues faced by couples when it comes to their finances, and why the key to solving the majority of these problems is by shifting the focus away from tactics and toward foundational values.

Danielle reflects on her own upbringing and how it shaped her worldview regarding finances and, later on, how that upbringing influenced her money conversations with her husband. She and Ed agree that acquiring a deeper awareness of our money beliefs shaped over the years is vital to getting clear on how to improve our relationship with our finances moving forward.

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Today, Ed is joined by Adam Kol, The Couples Financial Coach. He helps couples go from financial overwhelm or tension to clarity, peace of mind, and teamwork.

Adam brings experience as a Certified Mediator, Tax Attorney, and Financial Advisor to his financial counseling for couples. He graduated from Duke Law and has a Master’s in Tax Law from NYU. He also hosts the Couples Financial Coach Podcast.

In this conversation, Adam breaks down his process for determining where a couple is on their journey to a healthier shared relationship with money, and then getting them to the point where every discussion around money feels safe and inviting.

His goal with every couple he counsels is threefold: to change how they see themselves, to change how they see their partner, and to change how they see their relationship.

The key to seeing these changes comes down to developing a greater understanding of self and other. Adam encourages couples to create the space to be vulnerable and imperfect with each other, all while taking care to not blame one another for any money-related issue.

In other words, it all it starts with taking 100% responsibility for our words and actions.

Finally, Adam also shares that, despite differences in financial backgrounds or cultural attitudes toward money, the most important thing that couples can do to heal their relationship with money is to share with each other, and listen intently.

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Today, Ed is joined by Nathan Astle, a licensed marriage and family therapist. Through witnessing the conflict in his parents’ marriage and developing healthy behaviors in his own, Nathan developed an interest in the ways in which money impacted mental health and relationship health. He explains financial flashpoints, a term coined by Brad Klontz, which are emotionally charged memories around money. He then describes the concept of money script inventory, which is an assessment used to look at different money beliefs, like money avoidance.

Nathan highlights the importance of financial intimacy, by which he means a closeness and trust built on shared desires and values in your relationship regarding financial ventures. He shares his perspective on attachment theory, which is based in the idea that, “we have needs as humans to connect with others, and to connect in ways that help us feel safe and secure.” Trust, he explains, is built through secure attachments in our youth. For couples, this manifests in a need to feel safe in a relationship, not just physically, but emotionally.

They discuss coping mechanisms for insecurity, and why it’s difficult to recognize these behaviors in the moment they are happening. Sometimes, they explain, it can be difficult to work past attachment reflexes, even in healthy relationships. Nathan explains how couples therapy has helped work through these things in his own marriage, helping him understand his own attachment style and combat unhealthy thoughts and behaviors that might stem from it. They talk about the importance of context in analyzing these behaviors, and how it’s important to recognize missteps as an exception within and otherwise unhealthy relationship and to assign the behavior to the circumstance rather than the person’s character. 

Nathan examines the ways in which trauma can affect one’s attachment relationship, and how that then manifests in the way they approach money. He talks about EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, which is an alternative to talk therapy that has been proven beneficial to treating trauma. They close in discussing the importance of understanding control, emphasizing that a good financial therapist should ask their client, In what other areas of your life do you feel out of control? 

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Today, Ed is joined by Stephanie McCullough, CFP, speaker, and Founder of Sofia Financial, a “holistic, non-judgmental financial planner for women who want a true partner in financial decision-making.”

In this conversation, Stephanie offers a unique perspective on financial planning, relating one of her favorite activities—yoga—to the process of overcoming the mental and emotional stresses of one’s financial life.

Stephanie believes that it’s totally normal to be emotional when it comes to money. With this reality in mind as a starting point, it becomes so much easier to carve out the way forward. She breaks down the negativity bias, explaining why unproductive behavior toward money is not a character flaw, but a simple biological process that we can rewire—but it all starts with self-awareness!

She then shares several psychological concepts and tools that one can use to start gaining that self-awareness, and from there unearth those limiting beliefs that contribute to negative behavior around one’s finances—from coming to terms with the negativity bias, to the practice of mental accounting, to the secret to true money maturity!

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Today, Ed is joined by Ashley Agnew, Director of Relationship Development at Centerpoint Advisors, which provides financial therapy informed planning to its ultra-high-net-worth clients, many of which are fourth-generation business owners.

In this conversation, Ashley talks about the importance of getting crystal clear on your relationship with money. Her goal as a financial therapist is to see her clients’ “money stories come to life,” gleaning from the paradigms shaped through generations which inform their attitude towards their finances today.

Ashley has noticed after years of discussions that many people, especially those who are involved in their family-owned businesses, practically treat money as another family member. Beliefs around money, in other words, have the power to strengthen or erode one’s relationship with one’s family. Getting clear on what your beliefs are, and how to reprogram the unproductive ones, all begins with those tough discussions. Ultimately, working with a great financial therapist will put you on the path to getting rid of feelings of shame around money.

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Today, Ed is joined by Emmi Fortin, a breakup and relationship coach, whose work focuses on helping people through the recovery process of a breakup and building foundations for future relationships. She talks about how her own relationship informed her work, and how she transitioned from high school biology teacher to entrepreneur. They discuss the financial responsibility of making a career change.

They discuss her book, Who Is Your Red Dress? One Woman’s Quest to Break Up With a Love Addiction, a memoir that Emmi’s friend describes as “Sex in the City meets the world of salsa dancing.” She explains love addiction, which was what she experienced in a relationship where she felt addicted to the highs and lows of the relationship. This bridges into a discussion of attachment theory, which manifests in 4 styles: the secure, the anxious, the avoidant, and the disorganized.

Emmi introduces her relationship cheat sheet, in which one identifies their core values, the qualities they want from their partner and the ones they don’t, how they want to feel in a relationship consistently, and becoming an external observer of yourself and your potential partner; and then, choosing to take action to make those things happen. Emmi shares the emotional burden of a past relationship, and she and Ed discuss the language of trauma, the impacts it can have on an individual, and how one can start moving forward from it. Even if you are a victim, they explain, you can also be your own savior. They close in comparing self-alignment with chiropractic alignment, and how sometimes a good crack in the back is all it takes.

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Today, Ed is joined by Deborah Greenhut, a PhD in English, professor, and corporate trainer specializing in communication skills and English composition. She introduces her recently published novel, The Hoarder’s Wife. After years of difficulty and a divorce, her husband took his own life, which she initially wanted to put behind her. But then she chose to re-access and investigate her own life. To protect her family’s feelings, she chose to fictionalize the story she pieced together through journals. 

Deborah shares that in looking at her journals, she discovered how giving became a detriment to her. Her desire to help took over her time, space, and energy. She explains the signs of her husbands hoarding that she retrospectively noticed, before outlining the ways in which it impacted their relationship and their family. 

Ed and Deborah talk about hoarding as a mental disorder, and how it can progress without treatment. Deborah speculates on the relationship between her husband’s success in work and the disorganization in their home, and then how she now realizes they had been approaching their problems as a marital conflict when they were actually a product of a mental disorder.

They acknowledge that though well intentioned, science is still mystifying and sometimes mental health professionals following protocols fail to take into consideration the complexities of being human. Deborah shares how much she appreciated the moments in which her therapist helped humanize her husband beneath the iceberg of his problems.

Deborah reflects on her own childhood, her mother, and her mother’s childhood. She muses on how the way her mother was treated as a child may have impacted the way she treated her, and the ways in which money factored into it. They discuss the detriments of the broader cultural dynamic of rejecting equality for women within money. In closing, Deborah emphasizes the importance of not waiting for a problem to worsen to address it, and the value in a circle of empathy.

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Today, Ed is joined by Shaun Maslyk, the host of The Most Hated F-Word and proponent of positive psychology around money, with a focus on men. They dive straight into a conversation around toxic masculinity, and how historical expectations placed on men make for unhealthy relationships, and the necessity of breaking from those expectations and finding a healthier approach to finances. This breeds the question: What is healthy masculinity?

Shaun acknowledges that finances are an inevitable “third wheel” in any relationship, as it is a necessary part of life and consequently, detaching from desired outcomes relating to it is equally necessary in maintaining your relationship. In the words of Shaun’s friend: “Money is not the boat of life, it’s just the wind in the sail.” Once you break past survival mode, it’s hard to halt the unending pursuit for more.

They navigate grappling with the inner critic, and how learning to reason with it is more useful than trying to shut it out. Within this finding of balance between vilifying and idolizing wealth is an important part of the maturing process and realizing that money won’t solve all your problems. They talk about the need for both partners to have a voice in financial conversations, especially when there is a financial literacy gap is in the intimate partnership. 

Shaun advises listeners to ask themselves, Are we avoiding emotional discomfort of diving into ourselves to understand ourselves? And, Can money offer a window into understanding ourselves on a more intimate level in a way that helps us show up for our spouses?

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For the first episode of Healthy Love and Money, host Ed Coambs introduces the show, which will explore financial intimacy through interviews with financial therapists, couples’ therapists, and financial planners. Today, he is joined by Lindsay Bryan-Podvin of Mind Money Balance. 

They begin with a discussion around Lindsay’s identity as a biracial woman, and how it has informed her perspective in her work, which is rooted in shame-free financial therapy. This opens a conversation around privilege, and the nuances around money, emphasizing the importance of therapist’s ability to be “comfortable sitting with the discomfort.”

Ed and Lindsay explore ways that they help couples get comfortable talking about money with one another. They then discuss divesting from personal finance experts to deepen money intimacy, which Lindsay explains is beneficial for over-consumers of information who develop anxiety as a result.

They investigate the things that are beneath financial anxiety, like the lack of certainty in the narrative that working hard directly correlates to increased earnings. This builds to a discussion of the value of work, beyond its monetary function. They talk about the necessity of systemic and structural changes to counter price sensitivity. In closing, they emphasize that everyone’s financial reality is different, and a lack of acknowledgement of that is shame inducing. 

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Welcome to The Healthy Love and Money Podcast! If you find money to be the number one, two, or even third largest source of stress in your relationship, then you are in the right place.

Going beyond how to budget, invest, and do your taxes, we're going to explore financial intimacy. Discover how to talk with your partner about your shared financial life. Let's take the awkward and painful out of money conversations.

Join me and hit follow to listen to weekly inspiring, healing and motivating interviews with financial therapists, couples therapists, and financial planners, and so many more.

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