How Couples Overcome Financial Overwhelm and Master Money Together

​John* and Lisa* had a huge blow-up the night before they saw me. Lisa was sick and tired of John’s criticisms about her spending and not sticking to the family budget he had set for them. They were desperate for a better way forward, as they had each watched their parents' marriages end in bitter fights over money.

Lisa’s father was a successful attorney with a drinking problem. When she was 8 years old, he abandoned her, her two sisters, and their mother, leaving them no money to use.

John grew up in a working-class family where both parents were very frugal and focused on saving every penny. They would reuse tin foil multiple times before recycling it, and they drove the same cars for twenty years, which they bought used. His parents drifted apart after 30 years of marriage.

The Mystery-to-Mastery Cycle

When I ask couples why they fight about money, I get one of two responses.

The first is a blank stare of confusion. The second is a rapid explanation of their partner's problematic patterns around money.

That’s when I like to introduce the cycle of mystery to mastery for couples managing money together.

Mystery and mastery are two very important ingredients in the process of helping couples connect with each other and coordinate their shared financial life.

Embracing mystery helps couples get curious about their own life and financial experiences as well as those of their partners. I help couples realize that we all have some grasp of why we do what we do with money, but that we can go deeper in understanding and making connections.

It is in making these new connections between our past experiences and present mindset that we gain a sense of mastery in our financial life.

The more we embrace the mystery and become curious about why we do what we do with money, the more we move toward mastery. It is a bit of a paradox, but it builds on the psychology of curiosity.

Questions reflect our curiosity and desire to resolve the mystery. I pose this question for you: Why do you and your significant others fight about money? The reason may not always be the one you assume it is.

In my meetings with a different client Sheila*, it was not her spouse that was the concern but an older brother she had idolized during her childhood that was the source of financial resentment and frustration. She was tired of financially supporting his business, which was failing to launch.

Upon further inspection, it turned out that multiple memories and experiences were contributing to her present financial reality. Some of these included the fact that she had watched her father beat her brother with a belt for bad grades, which left her with a deep sense of protectiveness for her brother. At the same time, she also held admiration for him and his intelligence.

But supporting her brother financially was putting a strain on other relationships in her life. When I helped Sheila get curious about why she continued to support her brother even when it was no longer working for either of them, she was able to connect with childhood loyalty and admiration that had built up but no longer served their adult relationship.

With some facilitated help, she was able to reflect on those memories from her childhood and see them from an adult perspective, not as the scared, protective little girl who had witnessed them.

The mystery of how our childhoods shape up leaves us with many of the money struggles we face in adulthood and our intimate relationships, whether in our family of origin or family of creation.

Letting Go of Neutrality

I hear many individuals and couples express a desire for neutrality around money. From my experience, it is not possible to be neutral about many money situations. Yes, at times there can be indifference about a variety of money topics, but that does not render those money realities meaningless.

Another mystery is that we all have a complex relationship with money. I have yet to meet a person who has perfectly consistent thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with money. We all have a unique combination of contradictions when it comes to our finances.

By working through the mystery and mastery cycle of money, we do not end up in a neutral place about money and relationships. Rather, we take a reflective, empowered stance toward financial matters.

As a couple, the goal is not to move to a neutral state about the money topics of our lives. Rather, it is to move towards a place of mastery together. Money mastery is not your role or my role, his role or her role. It is your shared role together to navigate money. You will have different preferences, but this is not the problem. It’s how you handle each other's preferences that matters.

Embracing Past Experiences and Each Partner’s Brain

Most couples I work with have not given much thought to how their past life and money experiences are currently shaping their patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with money.

I invite couples I work with to understand some basics about their brains, as this can help them navigate the cycle of money mystery and mastery.

Neuroscience is an incredibly fascinating field of study. I know many reading this may not have fallen in love with neuroscience, and that’s okay. Yet neuroscience can help us unlock so many of our money mysteries and lead us to greater mastery of money as a couple.

Let’s stick with one basic concept for now: the role of memories.

One of the roles of our brain is to store memories. It is so easy to take this process for granted. Our brains store memories for a multitude of reasons and in varied ways. Just because we do not actively remember all the things we have experienced does not mean those memories are not there and being drawn on automatically by our brains.

John and Lisa embraced this concept to help them with mastering money. By uncovering their childhood memories surrounding money, they developed more compassion and curiosity about how to support each other and themselves.

Moving their history from mere facts to meaningful experiences that have shaped expectations profoundly revised their approach to money discussions.

Learning that these expectations get programmed into the neural pathways of their brains helped them appreciate that it would take time to develop new neural pathways that support healthy approaches to money.

For John, his goals concerned learning how to feel a greater sense of financial freedom and flexibility in his thoughts, feelings, and even bodily reactions to money conversations — especially related to spending.

He had internalized his parent's financial anxiety about frugally managing the household finances. As an adaptation, he tried to rigidly adhere to a budget, which worked well when he was single. But when he married Lisa, he could not get her to respond in the same way to the budget. He was once perplexed by this, but with increasing insight, he came to see that the budgeting was as much about him and his own experiences as it was about Lisa.

Just the thought of not being on a budget would evoke a visceral tightening in John’s chest and lead him to lash out at Lisa for not sticking to the budget. John has to learn how to navigate his bodily responses as something more about the past than about the present.

Lisa, on the other hand, has deep fears about being abandoned relationally and not having the money to buy the things she needs. Her pain about going from being the pretty, popular girl at school and having nice clothes to working part-time jobs after school to support her family left a web of shame, anger, and sadness to navigate.

John and Lisa have come to appreciate that the mystery-to-mastery cycle is an ongoing learning, healing, and growing journey. It concerns the money experiences they both lived through and healing the relational pain from the past.

As they continue to embrace and deepen their understanding of the mystery-to-mastery cycle, they come to appreciate that this is a process and that asking questions is healthy and helpful. At times, they will pass through painful things to reflect on and work through. But the result is a sense of freedom, empowerment, and flexibility.

They take deep breaths often as they work through this cycle, which is another sign of their healing and their bodies returning to homeostasis from activated states of fight, flight, fear, and fawn.

Do you need help with the mystery-to-mastery cycle of money as a couple? If so, I would love to talk with you about Therapy-Informed Financial Planning™ and how it can help the two of you.

Schedule your free 30-minute consultation here.

Embracing Mystery and Mastery,
Ed Coambs
MBA, MA, MS, CFP®, CFT-I™, LMFT

* - Names have been changed to protect privacy