My guest for this episode is Khara Croswaite Brindle, who is a financial therapist and a consultant to financial therapists. She also does clinical supervision and teaches continuing education courses, and she has authored several books. She came into this field in 2020 after working for around a decade as a mental health therapist.
One intriguing part of our conversation is Khara’s description of the way her own money healing journey started in 2019. At that time she was a co-owner in a group therapy practice, and she participated in a mini MBA program through Goldman Sachs. The program included participants making a three-minute pitch to the group on what they needed funding for and wanted to work on in their businesses.
What Khara wanted to focus on was suicide prevention. She realized she couldn’t really talk about that without being vulnerable about why it was so important to her, and she did just that in her presentation. The impact of the talk, and the positive feedback she received, taught her a great deal about the power of vulnerability. That was the first time she realized she could be vulnerable and still be a good leader. The story she had previously told herself was that leaders have to be strong and purposeful; yet this message really came from protective parts of herself saying “be strong.” Being vulnerable was not weak; it was not unprofessional. It was authentic.
Khara then began doing her own internal work with a financial therapist, which she describes as “ugly crying for six months.” Then she launched her own financial therapy practice. Her focus now is working with other therapists because so many of us in the field have anxiety, avoidance, and shame around money.
Other topics we cover include:
The need for graduate-level therapy programs to teach students about business, which many of them still do not do.
That some graduate therapy programs don’t require students to do their own therapy. It is not common at all for practicing therapists to have first done their own work. For many of these “wounded healers,” the mindset seems to be that their goal is to help other people, not themselves.
That doing one’s own work is important in many ways. Part of the value is that learning exercises and techniques as a client helps you use them more effectively with your own clients. There is also the element of authenticity: whether it makes sense for clients to trust a therapist who asks them to do hard emotional work that the therapist has not done themselves.
That for many practitioners, financial therapy is a second career or a career expansion that grows out of someone’s previous experience in either financial planning or mental health.
We also share some thoughts on the future of financial therapy. I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation.
Check out The Financial Therapy Podcast by Rick Kahler concerning this topic.