Financial Family Therapy

Solution-Focused Financial Therapy 5 Step Model

Assumptions & principles

•If it’s not broken, don’t fix it

•If it works, do more of it

•If it’s not working, do something different

•Small steps can lead to big changes

•No problems happen all the time: there are always exceptions that can be utilized

FIVE STEPS ARE:

1. Want

2. Need

3. Have

4. Do

5. Plan

Want step

Step #1

–Explore couples desired financial situation & goals

–Address relationship problems & discuss desirable outcomes

Need step

Step #2

•Couple considers their financial needs without regards to their wants

•Focus on how the couples financial state correlates with relationship success

Have step

Step #3

•Compile & organize documents to examine couples current financial lifestyle

•Sharing this information will make the couple emotionally vulnerable

–A new financial lifestyle entails ending any financial infidelity

•Learning heuristics on spending and saving income.

–Examines the mental processes that have helped to create the current situation

Do step

Step #4

•Ready for the action stage of change and implement changes to their financial lifestyle

•Establish a budget that includes income and expenses.

•Utilize all solution-focused techniques

(Crystal Ball)

Plan step

Step #5

•Complete an overall financial plan with the necessary steps to successfully implement it.

•Couples are able to maintain changes
implemented in the action stage of
change and use their finished financial
plan to help make new decisions.

Cognitive-Behavioral Family Therapy (CBFT) ABC Model

•CBT focuses on modifying harmful and negative beliefs acquired by individuals that result in self-defeating behavior.

– Financial beliefs are core components that contribute to financial behavior outcomes.

ABC Model – A=activating event, B=belief, C=consequence

Techniques of CBFT ABC Model

•Restructure dysfunctional beliefs

–Identify irrational beliefs, challenge irrational beliefs, test the validity of irrational beliefs, create replacement beliefs, and modify behavior

•Negative filtering

•Harmful exaggerations

•Harmful labeling

•Adverse personalization

•All-or-nothing thinking

•Mind-reading

•Fortune telling

For each technique, the therapist helps

–Sufficiently define or quantify belief terms

–Elicit evidence supporting a belief and evidence contradicting a belief

•Deductive reasoning looks at absolute factual evidence, and Inductive reasoning looks at probable evidence.

Ford Financial Empowerment Model

•Integrates: Cognitive-Behavioral, Narrative, Satir’s Experiential, and Financial Counseling techniques

•An empowerment-based therapy approach

–Strengths-based and humanistic perspective

•The client is viewed as:

–Already having power and security within them

–Being Strong and Resourceful

–Having the ability to be creative, productive, and motivated

Theoretical View of Ford Financial Empowerment Model (FFEM)

•A lack of empowerment could be understood as:

–perpetual negative automatic thoughts  that cause clients to feel helpless, powerless, and hopeless (CBT)

–A negative, inescapable story that clients have constructed about themselves or about the world in which they live (Narrative).

–A lack of experience with empowerment, a fear of change, and the suppression of feelings and emotions related to empowerment (Satir)

Assumptions of Couple and Finance Theory

Major Assumptions

1.Financial difficulties are linked to couple relationship problems in a circular fashion.

2.Human systems are self-reflective

3.Interactions amount the individual partner attributes, couple relationship system, and financial process are based on rewards and costs.

4.Equity recognizes that rewards and costs are not exactly fair from an objective standpoint, but they can be perceived to be so.

5.Social resources give on persona the ability to reward another through interpersonal behavior exchange of a thing. 6 resources include love, status, services, goods, information, and money.

6.Couple relationships and financial process operate within a larger context called an ecosystem.