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money
and
meaning
 money
and
meaning
New Ways to Have Conversations
about Money with Your Clients—A
Guide for Therapists, Coaches, and
Other Professionals

Judith Stern Peck

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

1
Copyright # 2008 by Judith Stern Peck. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Peck, Judith Stern.

Money and meaning: new ways to have conversations about money with your clients: a guide for
therapists, coaches, and other professionals / by Judith Stern Peck.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-470-08342-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Finance, Personal—Psychological aspects. 2. Money—Psychological aspects. 3. Values.
4. Interpersonal relations—Economic aspects. 5. Personal coaching. I. Title. II. Title:
Conversations about money with your clients.
HG179.P3623 2007
332.024—dc22
2007028032

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 My children and their children
Josie, Ben, Maxine, Gabriel, Avery,
Simon, Eliana, Ezra, Oliver, Stephen

. . . Day after day the word goes forth;

night after night the story is told.

Soundless the speech, voiceless the talk,

yet the story is echoed throughout the world.

—Psalm 19
 Contents

Foreword by Peter Steinglass, Ackerman Institute ix

Preface: Talking about Money and Values xv
Acknowledgments xix

Introduction: The Money and Family Life Project at the

Ackerman Institute 1
PA RT O N E
The Professional’s Toolbox
Chapter 1 Tools for Talking about Money and Values 13
Chapter 2 Using the Tools to Locate Yourself and
Your Self-Awareness 29
PA RT T W O
Conversations about Money in the Relational Context
Chapter 3 Couples 47
Chapter 4 Parents of Children through Age 20 63
Chapter 5 Parents of Children 21 and Older 79
Chapter 6 Single Adults 93
Chapter 7 Life Transitions: Divorce, Illness, and Death 107

Conclusion 119
Epilogue 123
Bibliography 125
Appendix I Content Values Cards 127
Appendix II Process Values Cards 143
Index 155
 Foreword

A Family Therapist’s
View of Money and
Family Life
When family therapy was in its infancy, a major indictment leveled
against this new approach was that it undermined a core tenet of
psychotherapy—patient-therapist confidentiality. Many argued that
it was the guarantee of confidentiality that helped people talk openly
with their therapists about thoughts and actions that they were loath
to tell anyone else. Family therapy, so the argument went, violated
this rule of confidentiality and therefore could easily do more harm
than good when the issues at hand involved the private (and
conflicted) fantasies and emotions of people in trouble.
How could it be helpful, the thinking went, for a spouse to talk
openly about being disappointed in his or her marriage and family
life, or to admit having secret anxieties about work or health issues?
Wouldn’t it simply just spread the anxiety around and undermine
the confidence of children in their parents, or of spouses in one
another? Wouldn’t it have the potential to stimulate unnecessary
rivalries between siblings, or between branches of an extended
family? Instead of viewing family conversations as a source for
solving dilemmas, families were much more likely to be the cause
of problems than the source of solutions. So the prevailing view of
most mental health professionals was to help individuals separate
from their families, emotionally if not literally.
Yet the experiences of the pioneers of the family therapy move-
ment led to a very different conclusion. Over and over again, they
found that when families had the opportunity to talk openly about

ix
x Foreword
their concerns, they left such conversations feeling relief rather than
distress. Instead of family members realizing their worst fears—that
their ideas would be rejected by other people in the family—quite
the opposite occurred. Family members typically would come out of
meetings having learned that others in the family shared similar
concerns or were worrying about the same problems.
A husband who had been holding onto some bad news about an
ominous report from his physician (whom he had perhaps consulted
without telling his wife), learns that his wife is relieved to hear he has
seen a doctor because she has been worried about his health. A child
who has been secretly anxious and confused about her mother’s
depression no longer feels alone.
These dramatic early experiences of family therapists led to two
major conclusions: (1) open conversations about individual con-
cerns are a critical initial step toward finding solutions to difficult
problems, and (2) reframing problems as shared challenges for
families rather than as the responsibility of one family member
provides access to creative new possibilities for previously intractable
issues. Put another way, family conversations about tough issues,
along with willingness to listen to and take advantage of the multiple
perspectives that family members bring to the table, can have a
transforming effect.
Over the ensuing three decades, family therapy has established
itself as a highly effective approach to a wide range of life issues.
Mental health problems—depression, substance abuse, childhood
behavioral disorders, and the like—are obvious examples. But so,
too, are other major life issues such as health crises, job loss,
traumatizing events, and family relocations. The same principles
that had proved to be a helpful approach to therapy for mental health
problems were equally valuable in helping families have problem-
focused conversations about other life issues.
A consequence of this expanded view of the potential usefulness
of the family therapy approach was a reconceptualization of the role
of the family therapist. Rather than being viewed as ‘‘therapists’’
when the issue at hand might be helping a family cope with a chronic
medical illness like diabetes or asthma, many mental health profes-
sionals preferred thinking of themselves as family consultants.
This changing and expanding role could also be seen in the
evolution of an institution like the Ackerman Institute for the
 Foreword xi
Family.1 Ackerman was founded in 1960 as the first postgraduate
family therapy training institute in the United States. Three decades
later, although still viewing its core mission as that of training the
next generation of leading family therapy practitioners and faculty,
the Institute had also expanded its mission to include work in
medical center, school, social service, and work environments. In
each of these settings, the goal was to bring a family-centered
approach to bear on issues relevant to that environment.
Many of these initiatives have proven highly successful. In the
work arena, it has turned out that the principles originally developed
for family therapy have been useful in helping the members of
family-owned businesses wend their ways through the often thorny
issues of ownership versus management roles, of intergenerational
succession, and of the role of married-in spouses. At the other end
of the income spectrum, using family therapy techniques with
homeless families who were temporarily living in a shelter setting
proved instrumental in helping these families regain a sense of pride
and successfully engage in job training programs, find employment,
and locate permanent housing.
In fact, the expanding agenda taken on by a place like the
Ackerman Institute makes it difficult to think of an important life
issue that has not been addressed using a family-relational approach.
That is, with one glaring exception—the issue of money and family
life. As is amply demonstrated in this book, money remains the last
great taboo in family life. When we talk here about money as an
issue, we are talking about family attitudes toward money and family
practices around money decisions, which are quite different from the
concrete discussions that usually occur in families about work
concerns. A simple example might be the difference between the
practical nuts and bolts of generating money—job satisfaction,
employment opportunities, and the like—versus the attitudes and
values of the family about money—spending priorities, whether
money earned belongs to the family member who generated the
income or to the family as a whole, attitudes toward philanthropy,

1
I mention the Ackerman Institute at this point because, as will be detailed later, the
Money and Family Life Project which was the central source of data for the ideas to be
outlined in this book was developed by Ackerman faculty members under the direction of
Judith Stern Peck, and hence formed the larger context for the work of the project team.
xii Foreword
where materialism fits in a family’s value hierarchy, and what
children should be told about a family’s financial status.
Parents who seem willing to openly discuss sexual issues with
their adolescent children (albeit not always comfortably) avoid at all
costs conversations about family wealth or family debt, about
seeming inconsistencies in spending priorities, about apparent dif-
ferences around money issues between the child’s own family and
that of his or her peers, and about the parents’ long-term decisions
for the financial well-being of their children.
This reluctance (or perhaps apprehension would be a better word)
to have family discussions about money extends to professionals who
are ostensibly there to help families make important financial
decisions. In part, this is understandable because most financial
consultants feel their expertise stems from their knowledge base
about a particular area of finance—investments, trusts, estate-
planning, and the like. But many a family can tell you a story about
how a financial plan that they put in place without understanding
the interpersonal relationships within the family led to unforeseen
and disastrous consequences.
The thesis of this book is that facilitating conversations within
families about money is not only extremely important for the well-
being of family members, but also is eminently doable with a
clear and cogent framework for carrying out these conversations.
The central contention is that the key ingredient is a focus on values.
The consultant starts by identifying those core values unique to a
particular family and its approach to life, and then examines how
those values translate into specific decisions the family makes about
important money issues. The framework we advocate to facilitate
family conversations about money is first to articulate its core values
and how money decisions are either consonant or in conflict with
these values, and then to take advantage of the multiple perspectives
of different family members in putting these values into action.
Thus Money and Meaning explores the myriad ways in which
underlying attitudes about money are embedded in family value
systems, about how children try to articulate for themselves what
these values might be, how perceived inconsistencies between stated
values and actual practices lead to intrafamily confusion and con-
flicts, and how open discussions about continuities around values
across generations can help families avoid unnecessary conflicts and
 Foreword xiii
misunderstandings that have the potential to tear families apart at
times of transition.
Simply to contend that conversations about money are a good
thing for families is unfair unless professionals have the tools (road
maps) for facilitating such discussions. Without the proper tools,
encouraging families to open up about such a potentially emotional
topic could easily exacerbate conflict instead of helping families
make more satisfying and creative decisions about issues related to
money and family life. Thus a major portion of this book is devoted
to descriptions of just such tools—process techniques and concrete
tasks that we have found facilitate healthy family discussions about
money.
In that the Money and Family Life Project evolved within a
family therapy research and training institute, it should come as no
surprise that many of its principles, techniques, and tools are
adaptations of similar ideas that have proved useful in a family
therapy setting. But it is also critical to understand that the con-
versations proposed in this book are not to be construed as doing
family therapy. They are not to be thought of as useful only for
families that are in disarray as a result of conflicts around money.
Rather they are broad-based principles that every family consultant
should embrace in helping families with specific financial decisions,
guiding families in setting up long-range financial plans, or helping
families resolve a major conflict that has already arisen because of a
disagreement involving money.

PETER STEINGLASS, MD
President Emeritus
Ackerman Institute for the Family