Maybe you feel like a failure because all your friends seem to have more money than you do. Or maybe you’re up to your eyeballs in credit card debt, and no matter how many times you manage to pay off your balances, you find yourself in the hole over and over again. Or you’re a saver but your partner’s a spender, and your constant fights about money are damaging your relationship. Or you’re just constantly anxious about your finances, and your work, sleep, and social life are starting to suffer.
It might be time to see a therapist—a financial therapist, that is. Yes, that’s a thing.
Since the pandemic, experts say, there has been a sharp increase in both the number of people seeking help with the emotions they’re feeling around money and the ranks of professionals trained to provide it. “COVID was the perfect storm because it created a lot of financial stress in people’s lives, and also made people more aware of how stress impacts their mental health,” says Aja Evans, a financial therapist in New York City and incoming president of the board of the Financial Therapy Association, a professional group with about 440 members nationwide. “Money and anxiety have become less of a taboo to talk about.”
That’s a welcome development, given that money is a leading cause of stress for most Americans. “Money has such a profound emotional impact on people’s lives, and those emotions in turn have a big impact on our financial decisions and behavior,” says Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist and certified financial planner who co-founded the Financial Psychology Institute. “Everyone is stewing in their own shame bubble about their relationship with money, so it’s important to recognize how normal those feelings are—and that there’s help out there to deal with them, if you need it.”
Not everyone who’s stressed out about money needs therapy, of course. If you’re........