Follow the Money

Why is money so hard to talk about? Even in therapy? Even for therapists?

Every therapist (and every social worker, life coach, and financial advisor) has run up against their clients’ difficulties talking about money, whether it’s called reluctance or more formally labeled “resistance”. And they bring their own challenges to the money conversation. When therapists are themselves reluctant, they often avoid rather than engage with the topic of money. This leaves an entire area of their clients’ lives unexplored, unmined for insight, and ultimately unchanged.

Therapeutic training programs do not offer a conceptual framework or practical tools to explore money in relational dynamics, personal identity, or family history. Nor do they guide therapists in having direct and practical conversations with their clients about money. As a result, too often therapists—and their clients—miss out on exploring these critically important topics.

Judith Stern Peck and Betsy Witten believe that therapists offer their clients much more support and far greater insight when they follow the thread of money – in their client’s thoughts, their client’s relationships, and their family history, helping them develop an awareness of their internal money messages and their patterns of behavior around money, especially in their relational dynamics.

Following the Money grows out of small experiential workshops that the authors develop and run, leading participants through a series of exercises to help them become comfortable talking about money, culminating in the money-focused genogram, which allows for a deeper understanding of the multi-generational roots of current patterns. It shows how individuals’ money patterns are shaped, developed, and transmitted in the same way as other parts of identity: largely inadvertently, invisibly, and over multiple generations.

This book helps therapists understand and use the strategies and tactics that Peck and Witten have developed so successfully. It takes the reader through the exercises the authors have developed and the principles underlying them. It offers a framework and tools to fully reveal the money narrative in each person’s mind, and the manifestation of that narrative in their emotional lives, their relationships, and their actions.

Peck and Witten also weave throughout the book details from the lives of women in their workshops, what they discover while doing the exercises, and the changes they are able to make as a result. The book discusses many of the common themes that emerge through the workshops, including persistent gendered associations with regard to money, class and identity, and the challenges of parenting with honesty around money.

Following the Money offers a profound new framework and an accessible set of tools. When therapists and other professionals become comfortable and skillful in following the money thread, they can help their clients achieve greater self-awareness and agency, and ultimately change their behavior around money.

Author Biography

Judith Stern Peck, LCSW, has extensive experience as both a family therapist and a consultant to family businesses, family foundations, and family offices. She is director of a project team at the Ackerman Institute for the Family that researches, educates, and consults on Money and Family Life, and the author of Money and Meaning: New Ways to Have Conversations with Clients about Money (Wiley, 2007). She is also principal of JSP Associates, a firm that provides educational and consultation services to family businesses, family foundations, and family offices.

Betsy Witten, JD, brings her varied background to her work guiding parents looking to create healthy conversations about money with their children, young women in the early stages of navigating money, and adults with aging parents who need help talking about planning and transparency. Her work with individuals is shaped by her decades of experience working as an attorney, engaging in social justice activism, and running her family’s business and fam