Overview

Why is money so hard to talk about? Even in therapy? Even for therapists? Follow the Money addresses a critical gap in therapeutic practice: the reluctance to explore money in clients’ lives. Therapists, social workers, and coaches often avoid money conversations, leaving an essential area of identity and relational dynamics unexplored. Traditional training programs rarely provide frameworks or tools for discussing money, resulting in missed opportunities for insight and change. Judith Stern Peck and Betsy Witten offer a practical, accessible approach to integrating money into therapy. Drawing from experiential workshops, they guide professionals through exercises that build comfort and skill in addressing financial issues. Central to their method is the money-focused genogram, which reveals multigenerational patterns shaping clients’ beliefs and behaviors around money—patterns often transmitted invisibly across generations. The book combines theory with practice, presenting strategies and principles that help uncover clients’ internal money narratives and their impact on emotions, relationships, and decision-making. Through real-life examples from workshop participants, Peck and Witten illustrate common themes such as gendered money associations, class identity, and parenting challenges. These stories demonstrate how understanding money dynamics can lead to profound personal and relational change. Follow the Money provides therapists and other professionals with a new framework and practical tools to explore financial issues confidently. By “following the money thread,” practitioners can help clients achieve greater self-awareness, agency, and healthier behaviors around money—transforming an often-avoided topic into a powerful avenue for growth.

Full Product Details

Author:   Judith Stern Peck ,  Betsy Witten
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint:   Rowman & Littlefield
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.40cm , Length: 22.60cm
Weight:   0.240kg
ISBN:  

9781538183519

ISBN 10:   153818351
Pages:   160
Publication Date:   05 February 2026
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Money and Family Life Project at the Ackerman Institute for the Family The ideas promoted in this book were generated by the research of the Money and Family Life project at the Ackerman Institute led by Judith Stern Peck. As described in a previous book, Money and Meaning: New Ways to Talk to Clients about Money (Wiley, 2007), “the landscape of money and families has multiple dimensions and requires reflection through myriad lenses”. The research team initially found that introducing values was a safe language to break through the taboo of money talk in families, and served to neutralize the family’s reactivity when talking about money. In the next phase of research, Peck and Witten began helping women gain agency around money— breaking the cycle of avoidance, developing the ability to talk about money, and taking responsibility for the financial dimension of their lives—by starting with awareness, and developed an intensive experiential workshop format. Their interactive exercises surfaced repeated internal language and patterns of behavior connected to money, followed by group discussions and the final exercise, the money-focused genogram, a tool to explore and deepen clients’ awareness of their relationship with money. This book will enable therapists and other professionals to apply these ideas and exercises in their work with clients. • How we came to do this research • What we learned • Overview of exercises • The money-focused genogram ª How the reader can apply our findings in your work Part I: The Construct of the Workshop Chapter 1: Principles of the Workshop: Using The Ackerman Institute for the Family’s Relational Approach Starting in 2003, the faculty at The Ackerman Institute for the Family, led by Marcia Sheinberg, Director of Training, came together to compose a manual that would support trainees throughout their training. The latest version of the manual (2015), written by Mary Kim Brewster and Marcia Sheinberg, incorporates ideas and practices now referenced as the ARA (Ackerman Relational Approach). a systemic approach to therapy designed to strengthen and clarify relationships between couples and among family members. The foundational premises for the authors’ workshops that are taken from the ARA approach are context, critical consciousness, collaborative process, and change, ideas that have been critical to the workshops’ design and facilitation process. Familiarity with the ARA is crucial to understanding the authors’ thought process in designing their exercises and key to the success of the workshop in accomplishing changes in attitude and behavior around money. • Understanding the ARA • Elements from the ARA highlighted in our workshop: context, critical consciousness, collaborative process, change, compassion and transparency • How these elements enhance the workshop and its outcome Chapter 2: Premise of the Workshop Format: The “How” of Safe Space Because the subject of money is fraught with so many tensions, a safe environment is necessary to get participants to become more aware of their relationship to money. That safety allows participants to be open and available to the money conversation so that change of attitude and behavior can happen. Facilitators have to carefully consider the pacing and sequencing of the interactive exercises that lay the foundation for the openness required to do the money-focused genogram. In our workshops, we consider what the membership of each group will look like. More generally, in planning the workshop format, our thinking also considered the environment for the workshop, the group process we would use, and how cofacilitation would work. • Understanding the elements of safe space: size and membership, environment, group process and cofacilitation • Mapping the “itinerary” of these elements • The whole of safe space is greater than the sum of its parts Chapter 3: Interactive Exercises The workshop itself consists of a series of interactive/experiential exercises. All six exercises stimulate thought and conversation about and around money. The sequencing of the exercises is purposefully designed to help participants first feel comfortable with the subject, then begin to see patterns and attitudes, and finally look at family history and societal context to appreciate where and how these patterns and attitudes are transmitted over generations. The tools used throughout the workshop become the practical elements that enhance individual and group process and the creation of safe space for each person to share intimate and significant information about their family. Detailed descriptions are provided for each exercise, with greater exploration of each in Part II. • Tools: Hot start, introductions, talking about money, language in your head, values exercise, vignettes, money-focused genogram • Map of the tools: explanation and effectiveness Part II: Implementation of the Workshop (Chapters 4,5 and 6 will combine details of the work of the workshop with case studies and stories of our participants as they progress through the exercises) Chapter 4: Making the Invisible Visible, Part 1: Hearing the Voices in Our Heads Most people come into the workshops with both a need to talk about money and a deep feeling that talking about it is transgressive. and most participants join us also feeling that they are alone in having problems talking about money and the only person with complex money-related family and relational issues. To jump start our participants out of their silence and isolation, we use interactively a variety of experiential modalities outlined in Chapter Three and explored in more detail here. Participants write in response to prompts, interview each other, and then share with the group what they learned. They tune in to a specific moment when they considered spending money to explore and describe the specific language that occurred to them. Rather than talking about how difficult it is to talk about money, the workshop moves participants immediately into conversations with themselves, each other, and the group. They listen to the voices in their heads, in their fellow participants, and in their history. This starts the process of awareness, of making the invisible thread of money visible. • Bypassing defenses with writing and recalling • Developing compassion through interviewing and writing • Hearing internal monologues by looking at isolated choices Chapter 5: Making the Invisible Visible, Part 2: Seeing the Patterns in Relationships and Choices Therapists understand that their clients have patterns of behavior in many areas: how they choose partners, how they behave in their family of origin, how they handle stress, and how they learn—but they often do not have a conceptual framework for seeing the through line of money in those arenas of life. While all adults find themselves making financial decisions and talking to partners and family about money, too few recognize that those decisions and conversations follow consistent and identifiable patterns that have historic references. The authors’ next set of exercises help participants surface and examine these patterns, again through a diversity of experiential modalities. Participants first define their core values and then see whether and how those values and other values influence major financial choices, and where there are contradictions between the two. They come to acknowledge the discrepancy, to be able to articulate why it exists, and to start getting comfortable with their own variability and contradictions with regards to money. Additional exercises use short vignettes to trigger discussions about the choices made by the characters in these hypothetical scenarios. All of these exercises offer opportunities to spot patterns and notice the previously invisible forces at work pushing us all to financial actions, in ways that are unconscious and often misaligned with our intentions. • Values Cards • Vignettes involving dependency/identity and the relational quid pro quo • Vignettes involving Therapists’ own discomfort Chapter 6: The Money-Focused Genogram: We Come By Our Patterns Honestly While therapists are trained to trace their clients’ patterns of thinking and behavior back through generations, they are too rarely practiced at looking at money through the lens of family history. The money-focused genogram uses a process for examining participants’ family money history, drawing on a series of questions to reveal multigenerational behavior, beliefs, identity, and language that flow into participants’ present reality. As described by Monica McGoldrick, an expert in the field of family therapy: “The genogram is a tool that has been used in the family therapy field for many years. It is a graphic chart or emotional map of a family, describing membership and relationships. It highlights themes throughout a family history as well as the timeline of significant events within the family’s life cycle, such as births, deaths, divorces and the onset of disease” (citation needed). The authors have developed a version of this tool specifically to focus the themes of money and work within family life. In our workshops, we conduct a genogram with each participant, asking consistent questions as well as pulling in what we have learned throughout the workshop about the language participants use around money and its relational dynamics. Both facilitators and group participants suggest connections that have surfaced in other exercises during the workshop, helping each individual see their patterns around money. Through their completed genograms, participants see that their behaviors and beliefs around money, and what we call their “money identity”, may have been shaped generations before, outdated circumstances, and forces that may or may not serve them. Participants come to see their money identity with some detachment and clarity, allowing for greater agency and potential change moving forward. ` • Inquisitiveness and Filling in the Details • Generational Patterns • Identifying the Roots of Current Behavior and Thinking Chapter 7: Themes and Patterns Over the course of our workshops, we have found repeated patterns and themes. Despite individual differences, participants are nearly always surprised and comforted to discover others whose money experience is similar, as there are common patterns as to how money gets played out by individuals and between people. Increased awareness of these patterns within the therapeutic community will broaden and deepen therapists’ exploration of money with their clients. The sources of these patterns include historic family narratives from their class perspective, relational dynamics, generational transmission, and internal money messages. • Identifying and distinguishing patterns, themes, and emotions • Changes through lifecycle transitions: illness, death, marriage, divorce, and parenting • The impact of class, race, and gender identity • Why is the theme of money so complicated? Chapter 8: Other Tools for the Professional: Money in the Therapeutic Relationship Even with the exercises described in earlier chapters, it takes a skilled therapist to comfortably have conversations about money with clients. We have developed additional language and practices to help practitioners when they feel stuck, making it easier to facilitate that process, teasing out insights, and draw attention to patterns. Also, over the years, we have heard many therapists say that they feel at a loss for the right words to use in talking directly about money: “How exactly do I tell a client I am raising my fee?” “Is it ok to ask someone who reports ‘being broke’ how much they make or have saved?” In this chapter, we offer examples of the language we have developed to take clients through the exercises, and discuss samples of actual exchanges between a skilled therapist and a client covering a wide range of money-related topics. • Budgeting as a tool to understand clients • Budgeting as a tool to neutralize the charge around money • Language to discuss fees and other matters • Facilitation and clinical language

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Author Information

Judith Stern Peck, LCSW, has extensive experience as both a family therapist and a consultant to family businesses, family foundations, and family offices. She is director of a project team at the Ackerman Institute for the Family that researches, educates, and consults on Money and Family Life, and the author of Money and Meaning: New Ways to Have Conversations with Clients about Money (Wiley, 2007). She is also principal of JSP Associates, a firm that provides educational and consultation services to family businesses, family foundations, and family offices. Betsy Witten, JD, brings her varied background to her work guiding parents looking to create healthy conversations about money with their children, young women in the early stages of navigating money, and adults with aging parents who need help talking about planning and transparency. Her work with individuals is shaped by her decades of experience working as an attorney, engaging in social justice activism, and running her family’s business and fam

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