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Archive for April, 2011

By Irvin Schorsch, CIMA, CFP, AIF

Worries over money can cause significant emotional stress and is one of the leading causes of problems in relationships. Financial anxiety can affect anyone, regardless of income level. It can cause serious problems at home, at work and may even affect your health. As Dr. Oz often notes, prolonged stress can cause all sorts of ailments such as headaches or upset stomach and can affect your blood pressure, heart rate, sleep and blood sugar levels. Over time, these issues can lead to hypertension, heart attack, diabetes, ulcers, inflammation and mental health disorders.

Many factors in life can make you anxious about your financial situation. Some situations we bring on ourselves, like over-spending or living outside our means and accumulating unhealthy debt. Failing to sufficiently save and invest for the future can create excess fear as we approach funding our children’s education, retirement or other major milestones. But sometimes it’s just everyday life that keeps us up at night worrying and wondering how we’re going to make it financially. When this kind of financial stress hits you, it is time to check your vital signs and see a financial professional.

Here are just a few of the issues and life-changing events that can affect your financial well-being if you are unprepared.

Marital Bliss You are compatible in so many ways, but many couples find they have different ideas about spending, saving and even risk-taking. Money problems are one of the leading causes of discord in relationships. You’ll need to decide on joint or separate bank accounts. You’ll need to decide how you will share or split financial responsibilities for both your income and debt. You’ll also need to discuss priorities like saving for a home, a new car or even a vacation. Keeping lines of communication open can help you through these issues.

The American Dream Buying a home used to be the American dream. Now, to some, it has become a nightmare. The housing bust and home lending debacle of the recent “great recession” have put owning a home out of reach for many, plunged hundreds of thousands of mortgages underwater and forced many American families into foreclosure.

Bundles of Joy Children add a wonderful dimension to our lives, yet come with financial strings attached. Besides the obvious responsibilities and costs of nurturing, feeding, housing and clothing them, early on you’ll need to start thinking about their future in financial terms. There are childcare considerations and trips to the pediatrician and orthodontist, their first car and the insurance that goes with it, their recreation and their education. All of these elements carry big dollar signs.

College Savings If you are planning to send junior off to a 4-year college, you can expect to pay in tuition, room and board, books and miscellaneous fees anywhere from $80,000 – $100,000 at a state university or as much as $200,000 to $400,000 at a private, non-profit university for an undergraduate degree. That’s if they complete their degree program within 4 years, which these days only about 36% of students do so, according to the College Board. Of course many students qualify for some type of student aid, which could shave thousands of dollars off the bill. But the point remains that college is a major expense that can’t be ignored if you want your children to go to college.

All Grown Up You raised them, you educated them and now, hopefully, they’re off on their own. But sometimes your children still need a little help from the Bank of Mom and Dad. Whether they land back on your doorstep after college or a job loss, or look to you to help fund their nuptials, you’ll need a plan with an emergency fund attached to help them get back on their feet and on their way to living happily ever after.

Retirement Planning People are living as much as a decade or longer than their parents did, thanks to advances in medical science, exercise and better nutrition. But along with longevity comes the need to earn and save more or run the risk of outliving your retirement savings. In order to have sufficient means to live comfortably throughout what could possibly be several decades of retirement, you will need to start early, be well organized and equally well disciplined.

Aging Parents Just when you hit your prime, you may find that your parents are beginning to decline. Many of us will see our parents live well into their 80s, 90s and beyond. As they age, they may face physical and/or mental health issues that require your intervention and support. From the extra TLC they’ll need to the tasks of evaluating assisted living, nursing care or retirement homes, the emotional and financial burden involved with caring for your parents may fall on your shoulders.

Catastrophic Illness It seems to be happening to more and more families. The unthinkable occurs – a close member of your family is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness or injury. With skyrocketing health care costs, even the best insurance coverage may not cover everything. On top of the emotional strains that come with a serious illness, worries about how you or other family members will pay for the mounting medical bills, prescription drug costs, and extended care and therapy expenses, and possible loss of income can be devastating.

Life Happens When you get sick you call a doctor. When your financial health is in jeopardy, you may need to call in a professional like a certified financial planner or a registered investment advisor who can help you examine all aspects of your life challenges and create a “wellness” plan to get back on track to a healthy financial lifestyle. Over the coming months, I’ll tackle each of these life milestones in depth and offer suggestions on steps you can take to improve your financial well-being.

By Paul Hokemeyer, PhD, JD

As a Marriage and Family Therapist, I help people heal from unhealthy, unsatisfying and destructive relationships. Sometimes these relationships involve addictions to alcohol and drugs. Often they involve addictions to other people. The most painful of these addictions to other people occur within our families. It is here, within the family structure, that we deny painful truths and expect different behaviors from the people we love dearly.

Here are 2 examples from my clinical practice to illustrate this point.

A 39 year-old-mother is distraught over her 14 year-old son’s marijuana use. In the very first session it becomes clear the mother suffers from an addictive relationship with her husband. Together for 17 years, the last 12 they’ve spent fighting over the important details (how to raise their son) and not so important details of life (where to go for dinner). The mother is incredibly sad over the loss of the dreams that defined the beginning of her marriage and expresses her sadness through rage.

A family enters treatment to help them deal with their oldest son’s mental illness and drug addiction. The father, a successful 55-year-old, cannot establish healthy boundaries with his troubled 32-year-old-son and continues to bail him out of financial and legal messes. As a result, the family finds itself diseased with a cancer of resentments.

Unlike other addictions where we can point to a substance or behavior and label it “bad”, relationships among family members are much more complicated. No matter how out of control or frustrating a son, daughter or spouse becomes, we stay committed to them through the primal and instinctual love that radiates from our heart.

As a general proposition, this is a beautiful thing. Marriage and families form the foundation of a meaningful life and give it richness and purpose. Too often, however, we get confused as to what’s in our family’s best interest. While our feelings may tell us something is terribly wrong, our intellect steps in and tells us “Never mind,” “Why bother,” or “It’s really not that bad.” Through denial and rationalization, the family addiction grows until it causes irreparable damage.

For this reason, early detection of an addictive relationship within a family is important. Before we can solve a problem, we must acknowledge that a problem exists. To help you in this regard, I’ve outlined several key feelings that indicate when family relationships have crossed over into an addiction:

* Feeling guilty and shameful about a family member’s behavior. Are you afraid the neighbors will find out what happens in your family?
* Feeling the need to control both the family member’s behavior and your own behavior when around them. Do you feel if you behaved differently things would be better?
* Feeling like you can’t live without the family member in your life. Does the thought of leaving the relationship or creating boundaries in it make you feel like you’re suffocating or fill you with anxiety?
* Feeling emotionally and physically exhausted from your relationship with the family member. Do you constantly attempt to enforce boundaries that inevitably get crossed?

If you can identify with 2 or more of these feelings, then you probably have an addictive relationship with a family member. While this awareness isn’t one that you relish, I encourage you hold onto it and not rationalize it away. The key to creating change is clearly understanding what we are changing.

In my next blog, I’ll discuss the steps you can take to start the process of changing addictive family relationships. Until then, hold on to your awareness. It will serve you well in the days, months and years ahead. If you’d like to receive more regular updates on addictive family dynamics find me on Twitter: @drpaulnyc.

By Paul Hokemeyer, PhD, JD

In my last blog, I identified characteristics of addictive family relationships. In this blog, I’ll discuss how we can change these addictive patterns by focusing not on individual family members, but on the family unit as a whole. This approach is based on my work with families and extensive research showing individual dysfunction cannot be properly treated without considering the contextual basis within which it arose.

Here’s an example to clarify this point:

A high school honor student began failing classes at school. His parents sent him to me for treatment. The boy refused to engage in therapy and sat through our entire session playing games on his cell phone. In a subsequent meeting with the parents, I discover they are “temporarily living apart until they can sort through the issues in their relationship.” Several months ago, the father was caught having an affair, and the mother has been in a rage ever since.

Viewed through this larger contextual frame, we can better understand the son’s behavior and the root cause of his addictive family relationship. By stepping back, we see his academic failure as a cry for help and an attempt to save his parents’ marriage from destruction.

In order to heal from addictive family relationships, we must understand them from a contextual point of view. Instead of pointing the finger at the person who bears the symptoms, we need to step back and look at the entire family. From this wide-angle, we can eliminate the individual symptoms and move the entire family toward a new paradigm of emotional health.

In evaluating a family holistically, I’m guided by the following two questions:

1. What stresses and destabilizing forces are occurring within the family? Perhaps there is an alcohol or drug problem, marital discord, economic instability, an illness or a mental health issue.

2. How does the “acting out” manifest itself? Here, I focus in on the person who is referred to in clinical parlance as the “identified patient.” This person’s symptoms often illuminate the root cause of the family’s instability. In the above example, the son is the identified patient whose academic failure mirrored his father’s checking out and failure to maintain the integrity of his marriage.

Once I understand the whats and hows in the family, I can help the members, either individually or collectively, move towards a new equilibrium. The goal is to enable the family to re-stabilize itself around things as they are – not as they wish them to be.

In the above example, until the family began discussing its problems in a healthy and constructive way, the son would continue to engage in his addictive family relationship. He loved his parents so much that he was willing to sacrifice his well being to bring the parents back together and reestablish the family.

Fortunately, by participating in family therapy, the son eventually felt safe enough to let go of his addictive family relationship. Even though the father refused to participate in therapy, the mother and son came together and talked. In a safe, structured and contained space, they processed their pain and disappointment, sadness and rage. In so doing, the son returned to his normal level of functioning and the mother resumed living her life. And while the father never fully returned, the mother and son reunited as a new and stronger family unit, better equipped to deal with the challenges and to celebrate the joys of life.