What I Do
The way my clients get clarity about their family culture is organic, through attuned and curious conversation. Sometimes we start by talking about family, and other times we start with where a person feels stuck; Does their spouse say they’re cheap when they feel like the problem is that their spouse spends too much? Is it that their parents are generous but controlling? Is it that they’re scared to raise their business rates? Or that they don’t know how to talk to their kids about money? Or that they’ve inherited wealth that makes them feel uncomfortable?
Who Calls Me
A person who has avoided writing their Will, even though they have inheritable assets, two minor children, and a second spouse who does not have an income
A young woman starting a business in New York who keeps hearing her father’s voice in her head saying “why aren’t you going to law school?”
A therapist who feels reactive and ill-equipped when very wealthy clients discuss a range of activities that are foreign to her
A 26 year-old artist who inherited money whose “friends don’t understand how guilty I feel and definitely don’t want to talk about how nervous [I am] to interview a lawyer 20 years older than [I am]”
An older woman getting divorced who, faced with budgeting and investing for the first time, “secretly just wants [her] ex-husband to keep investing [her] money”
A parent whose adult children are financially dependent and call them weekly to ask for money
A financially dependent adult whose parents say “money doesn’t matter – doing what you love matters” and “all my children should have a Mercedes in the driveway”.
A couple struggling with their pre-nuptial agreement and with talking to the lawyers their families have hired
A first-generation professional who wants “to enjoy the fruits of [his] labors and vacation in the Alps” and “is trying not to spoil” his kids
What Happens
In collaboration with clients, with curiosity, and without judgment, I ask a lot of questions about their lives, their hopes, their money, their relationships, their work, and their feelings.
We talk about what their family and their communities have taught them and how they identify around money, class, and work.
We go back and forth between discussing practicalities and having and identifying feelings.
We slow down any decision making process in order to honor and examine the implications, and the underlying assumptions. Our ambition is to start hearing the silent messages clients carry and to make visible the invisible influences on their behavior around money.
This allows a client to ask for a raise without being silenced by her father’s voice in her head saying “our family doesn’t have money, we’ll never have money”. It allows someone to give away much more money to charity without feeling guilty or angry hearing their grandparents say “well that must be nice for you” or their mother say “sweetheart don’t be a show off”. It allows someone to be less impulsive and anxious, to not rush through an interview with a new financial advisor, and to get all their questions answered.
How Things Change
Ultimately, clients are able to decide for themselves if the old messages they uncover still serve them in their present circumstances.
If their parents’ mantra “don’t let anyone take advantage of you” is as important now, three generations after their family left the old country and started their own successful business. If their mother’s belief that “work is the only thing that matters” is as true today as it was when their mother fled an abusive husband in the middle of the night and needed domestic work to survive.
The result is more ease, more agency, and more competence. They get more engaged with their money. They integrate their money into their lives. I like to say that they start to own what they own.
Why I Can Help
I land here, where money and emotions meet, after a lifetime of looking at money and class through a variety of lenses.
My parents grew up poor in immigrant families, and then made more than they needed later in life. Because they were raised in families that did not have enough, they taught me the practicalities. They opened my first savings account when I was six. They taught me to balance my checkbook when I was twelve. In later years I was a Trustee of family Trusts, an Executor of a family member’s estate, and I ran my family’s business. My years as a lawyer, in social justice work, in regular meditation practice – let alone as a parent, and a sibling and a friend - have shaped my pragmatic, intuitive and respectful approach to the people I work with. I also like to laugh, a lot, about most things. So that helps too.
I have explored a variety of therapies, and took the year-long Fundamentals of Family Therapy at The Ackerman Institute for the Family, but I am not a therapist. Though I got my JD at Columbia Law School, I am no longer a lawyer. I have logged a lot of hours counseling and coaching people, but to date I have not gotten a degree in coaching. My work with clients has grown out of my lived experience and a history of friends and strangers seeking me out to talk specifically about money.