Pandemic Has Increased Money Anxiety. Therapists Hope to Cure That.

A few years into the recovery, Kansas State University, which runs a leading undergraduate program for financial planning, started a financial therapy clinic to study people’s emotions around money. With electrodes attached to their bodies, participants had their responses measured during a series of financial discussions. (When I participated in 2012, the results showed that I was far more anxious talking even generally about my financial situations than I thought.)

Despite the interest, the field of financial therapy remains nascent. Besides Kansas State, Creighton University in Omaha has a financial therapy program. But none of the major financial services firms have anything approaching full-scale financial therapy for the majority of their customers. The nature of such therapy is beyond the training of most financial advisers. It’s also an area fraught with risk for an industry that is paid on the advice it gives for the assets it manages.

But now is the time to engage, because Americans are going to emerge from the coronavirus recession emotionally scarred in a way similar to the military veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, said Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist in Boulder, Colo., and a pioneer in the field of financial therapy.

“We’re experiencing a mass trauma across the United States, if not the world,” Dr. Klontz said. “Our illusion that we’re safe has been shattered. It’s like a psychological earthquake.”

He is optimistic, though, that people can use this experience to think more deeply about their financial values. “It’s been a forced wake-up call for everyone in the world,” he said. “We have just been offered a crisis to give us an opportunity to think about money.”

At home in Knoxville, Ms. Mackey said she was coming to terms with the loss of security she had gained in the past two years. “I was in my groove, and I was pretty content,” she said. “I was working a reasonable amount, earning a reasonable amount, able to take some time off of work here and there.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/your-money/coronavirus-money-fears-financial-therapy.html