Financial Abuse in Relationships: When Money Becomes a Weapon
LAST UPDATED: JULY 2026
You earned it. You saved it. You built it. And by the time you understood what was happening, a significant portion of it was gone: redirected, hidden, spent, or borrowed against without your authorization. Financial abuse is common and rarely recognized, especially in relationships with sociopathic and narcissistic partners. This guide names the eight tactics. It explains why financial independence doesn’t protect you, and it maps the path back to trusting your own judgment.
Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
This article is educational and psychoeducational in nature. It is not a diagnostic tool, and it does not replace individualized clinical assessment. If you recognize patterns described here in your own relationship, that recognition is information, not a diagnosis of any specific person.
- When the Statements Stopped Adding Up
- What Is Financial Abuse, and Why Is It So Rarely Named?
- How Common Is Financial Abuse, and Why Does It Hide in Plain Sight?
- What Are the Eight Tactics of Financial Abuse?
- Why Aren’t Financially Independent Women Immune?
- What Does Financial Abuse Actually Do to Your Sense of Self?
- What Do You Need to Know About the Legal Landscape?
- Both/And: You Are Competent AND You Were Exploited
- The Systemic Lens: Why Is Financial Control the Abuse Nobody Names?
- How Do You Rebuild, Financially and Psychologically?
- Frequently Asked Questions
Financial abuse is a form of intimate partner abuse in which one person uses money, assets, credit, or financial access as instruments of control, deprivation, coercion, or punishment. It includes hiding income, sabotaging employment, and accumulating debt in a partner’s name, and it occurs across every income level, affecting financially independent women as often as those with fewer resources. The psychological impact extends past the financial damage, eroding a person’s sense of agency and reality over time. In my work, financial abuse is consistently underreported because a woman’s professional success makes the abuse feel implausible, to outside observers and often to herself.
In short: Financial abuse weaponizes money and assets as instruments of control in intimate partnerships, affecting financially independent and driven women as often as those with fewer resources.
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I have more than 15,000 clinical hours working with women in abusive relationships, including sociopathic partnerships, and financial abuse is among the most underidentified patterns in driven women’s presentations. Ramani Durvasula, PhD, clinical psychologist and professor at California State University, Los Angeles, has documented how financial control functions as a core mechanism of narcissistic and sociopathic coercive control, and I’ve watched her framework play out in session after session with high-earning women who assumed income made them exempt.
When the Statements Stopped Adding Up
Miriam built the company herself. Twelve years of seven-day weeks, of reinvested profits, of two-in-the-morning decisions that mostly turned out right. By the time she married Daniel, she had a logistics software company worth several million dollars, a real estate portfolio assembled piece by piece over a decade, and a spreadsheet habit her college roommate used to tease her about. She reconciled her own books every Sunday night at the kitchen table, a glass of Malbec going warm beside her laptop, a ritual she’d kept since business school.
Three years later, she sat across from a forensic accountant and a divorce attorney in a conference room with a view of the bay, learning the actual scope of what had happened underneath that Sunday ritual: a joint account slowly and methodically drained, a business loan Daniel had taken out in her name using a power of attorney she barely remembered signing, an investment account liquidated and its proceeds moved to an account she’d never heard of, tax filings bearing a signature she had never made.
“I reconcile everything,” she told me, months later. “Every Sunday. For fourteen years.” She wasn’t being defensive. She was genuinely trying to understand how a woman who built her identity around financial precision had missed this. Miriam was not naive or careless. She had simply trusted the person she married, and that trust had been exploited with a patience her attorney, twenty years into family law practice, called one of the most sophisticated cases he had seen.
I still think about the specific moment she described to me: standing at a hotel check-in desk in Lisbon, her corporate card declined on a trip she’d booked for the two of them to celebrate her fortieth birthday, while Daniel stood a few feet away looking mildly annoyed at the inconvenience, as if she were the one who had made an error. That’s the moment, she told me, when the story she’d been telling herself about her marriage started to come apart at the seams.
What Is Financial Abuse, and Why Is It So Rarely Named?
A pattern of behavior in which one partner uses money, assets, credit, or financial access as instruments of control, deprivation, coercion, or punishment within an intimate relationship. It includes controlling access to shared resources, sabotaging a partner’s earning capacity, accumulating debt in a partner’s name without consent, and maintaining deliberate financial deception. Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and author of Trauma and Recovery, has written extensively about how control of resources functions as one of the foundational mechanisms of captivity within intimate relationships, whether or not physical confinement is ever present.
In plain terms: Financial abuse doesn’t require you to be poor, dependent, or naive. It requires only that someone has enough access to or control over shared or personal resources to make leaving, questioning, or resisting feel prohibitively expensive.
Financial abuse is rarely named for several reasons. First, it’s disguised as love or partnership: “Let me handle the finances,” or “I’m just better with numbers.” These framings aren’t inherently abusive; many healthy couples divide financial labor this way. They become abusive when used to establish unilateral control and limit a partner’s own autonomy.
Second, financial abuse develops gradually, through small steps that each seem reasonable in isolation: one account consolidated, one password shared and then quietly changed, one “I’ll take care of it” that becomes the default. By the time the pattern is visible from outside, significant damage has usually already been done.
Third, financial abuse is particularly hard to name when the victim is financially successful. The cultural script involves a dependent victim, someone with no money of her own. When the person abused is a physician, a founder, or a law partner, that script doesn’t fit, and the abuse becomes harder to see. Outside observers miss it. So does the woman herself, who cannot easily reconcile years of competence with victimhood.
“Fawners often have conflicted relationships with money. We don’t know our account balances, our debt, our log-on passwords. Money signals worth and power, and we equate being big as having power over. Power is blended with exploitation, manipulation, abuse. Of course we don’t want to step into that energy. So instead of holding money and accumulating wealth, fawners sometimes shed it like a snake shedding skin.”
Ingrid Clayton, PhD, psychologist and author writing on trauma responses and the fawn pattern
I’ve come to call this the credibility trap: the more visibly competent a woman is, the less credible her own experience of financial exploitation becomes, to herself first and to everyone around her second. It’s a trap with no obvious exit, because the credibility that built her career is the same credibility that keeps her silent about what’s happening in her marriage. Miriam fell into this trap so completely that it took a forensic accountant, not her own considerable financial literacy, to finally name what had happened to her.
How Common Is Financial Abuse, and Why Does It Hide in Plain Sight?
The National Network to End Domestic Violence estimates that financial abuse occurs in ninety-nine percent of domestic violence cases, the most consistent feature of intimate partner abuse across every demographic and income level researchers have studied. It occurs even where both partners are financially independent, and even where the victim is the primary earner holding significant assets in her own name.
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Peer-reviewed findings:
- Each additional financial stressor is associated with an adjusted odds ratio of 1.16 (95% CI: 1.09, 1.23) for threats or minor physical intimate partner violence perpetration (PMID: 27747543)
- Among service-seeking samples, roughly 76 to 99 percent of survivors report experiencing economic abuse (PMID: 35590302)
- A decrease in economic abuse contributed fifty-eight percent to the decrease in financial strain measured over time (PMID: 35529309)
- More than seventy-five percent of abused women experience economic abuse from former spouses through withheld financial resources (PMID: 36177605)
- The prevalence of any economic abuse among ever-partnered women is estimated at 15.3 percent (95% CI: 13.2, 17.6) (PMID: 39380255)
Miriam’s case is a study in exactly this invisibility. Financial abuse doesn’t fit the cultural narrative of domestic violence, and its effects often aren’t visible until the relationship ends and the damage gets tallied by a forensic accountant. By then, the person harmed faces a psychological aftermath. She also faces a financial crisis that makes housing and legal representation harder to secure.
Of course you didn’t see it while you were inside it. Hindsight is the only vantage point from which coercive control becomes legible, and by design, that vantage point only becomes available after the fact. That’s not a character flaw. That’s how the pattern is built to work. Miriam, who reconciled her books every Sunday for fourteen years without missing what was happening underneath them, understood this better than almost any client I’ve worked with.
What Are the Eight Tactics of Financial Abuse?
Financial abuse operates through a range of tactics, and the least visible ones are frequently the most damaging, as Miriam’s case, spanning five of the eight tactics below, makes plain.
Financial control and monitoring. Demanding access to every account, requiring approval for purchases above an arbitrary threshold, and building a system in which a partner must justify every financial decision. This is often framed as responsible household management. Functionally, it’s also a form of surveillance.
Financial restriction. Limiting access to cash, restricting credit card use, and blocking the ability to open accounts independently. This creates material dependency even when the restricted partner is the primary earner; if access to money you earned is controlled by someone else, you are, functionally, financially dependent.
Employment sabotage. Interfering with a partner’s ability to work through manufactured conflicts timed around deadlines, demands on time that make obligations difficult to meet, and the slow erosion of professional confidence. This reduces earning capacity by design, not by accident.
Debt exploitation. Running up debt in a partner’s name without consent, coercing signatures on unread financial documents, and opening loans or credit cards using someone else’s credit history. The consequences for credit and financial recovery can outlast the relationship by years.
Asset theft and redirection. Taking money from joint accounts, redirecting income into accounts the other partner doesn’t know about, and liquidating investments without consent. This is often the most legally actionable form of financial abuse, though it requires forensic accounting to establish.
Financial deception. Lying about income, assets, and debts, and maintaining a fabricated picture of the household’s finances. This is especially common with sociopathic partners, who tend to have little discomfort lying and considerable skill maintaining a deception over years rather than months.
Using finances as punishment. Withholding money in response to perceived noncompliance, or using it as a reward for desired behavior, leveraging financial dependency to enforce compliance with demands that have nothing to do with money at all.
Post-separation financial abuse. Hiding assets during divorce proceedings, refusing to comply with disclosure requirements, and weaponizing litigation itself as a financial drain. This is extremely common, and it can extend the financial harm of a relationship for years after it has legally ended.
Miriam’s case touched at least five of these eight tactics at once: the forged power of attorney, the drained joint account, the liquidated investment account, the tax filings bearing a signature she never made, and, in the final months of the marriage, a credit card declined at a hotel desk in Lisbon that told her, more plainly than any conversation could have, exactly where things stood.
The use of financial resources, financial threats, or financial dependency to coerce compliance with demands, limit options, and maintain control. Financial coercion doesn’t require that the person harmed be financially dependent on the person causing harm. It requires only that the person causing harm has sufficient access to or power over financial resources to make the cost of noncompliance prohibitively high.
In plain terms: You don’t have to be broke to be financially coerced. If someone controls your access to your own money, has incurred debt in your name, or has made leaving financially catastrophic, you’re experiencing financial coercion, regardless of what your income statement says.
Why Aren’t Financially Independent Women Immune?
The assumption that financial independence protects against financial abuse is one of the most dangerous misconceptions in this entire area of clinical work, and Miriam’s several million dollars in assets were proof of exactly how wrong that assumption is. Financial independence doesn’t protect against financial abuse. It simply changes the shape the abuse takes.
For financially independent women, financial abuse tends to operate through access rather than dependency. He doesn’t need to control income if he can access assets directly, doesn’t need to restrict spending if he can incur debt in her name instead, and doesn’t need to prevent her from working if he can quietly redirect the proceeds of her labor into accounts she doesn’t know exist.
Oksana is thirty-nine, a supply-chain director for a mid-sized manufacturing firm outside Chicago, the kind of person who color-codes her Google Calendar and keeps a running spreadsheet of every vendor negotiation she’s ever closed. She arrives to our first session eleven minutes early, in a gray wool coat still dusted with February snow, holding a manila folder so thick the rubber band around it has left a groove in the cardboard. She sets it on the small table between us like it’s evidence, which, in a sense, it is.
“I have three years of statements in here,” she says, not sitting down yet. “I printed everything. I don’t trust the cloud version, he had access to that too.” Her husband, Peter, never once asked her for money directly. He didn’t need to. Over four years, he’d opened three credit cards using her social security number, forged on applications with a signature close enough to hers that the banks never flagged it, funding a series of investments that, it turned out, existed only in the pitch decks he’d shown her. “He knew exactly which threshold triggered a fraud alert,” she tells me, turning her wedding ring around her finger, a habit she still hasn’t broken eight months after the divorce. “He wasn’t guessing. He’d done the research.”
Miriam had asked a version of this question in the months after learning the full scope of what happened. Sitting across from Oksana that first session, I felt the particular heaviness I’ve come to recognize in driven women who arrive with the evidence already organized: not shock, exactly, but a kind of grief for the version of competence that couldn’t have prevented this no matter how thorough it was. The folder wasn’t the problem. The folder was what she had left to hold onto.
Miriam’s own vigilance, practiced for fourteen years, taught her something similar in the months after her divorce. What I’ve come to think of as forensic grief is something I see often in women like Oksana: the mourning that happens when meticulousness, the trait that built her career, turns out to be useless against a partner who studied her habits closely enough to work around every one of them. Financial abuse against financially competent women is rarely clumsy. It’s precisely sophisticated enough to stay below the threshold of detection, which means the antidote isn’t more vigilance. It’s a different kind of trust, rebuilt slowly, in herself rather than her spreadsheets.
The financial abuse experienced by high-earning women tends to be more elaborate than the dependency-based version people picture. Because the target has real financial knowledge and real resources, the person causing harm has to be more creative and precise. The result is a legally complex form of exploitation that requires forensic accounting to document.
What Does Financial Abuse Actually Do to Your Sense of Self?
What financial abuse does to a person’s psychology is often invisible until named out loud. At the core of it is a dismantling of agency: the systematic removal of a person’s capacity to act independently. The practical consequences are obvious from outside. The psychological ones run deeper: eroded trust in one’s own judgment, constant second-guessing, and hypervigilance around spending that can persist for years after the relationship has ended.
A pattern of behavior in intimate partner relationships that seeks to remove a victim’s liberty and strip away their sense of self. Evan Stark, PhD, sociologist and forensic social worker, describes coercive control as ongoing intimidation, isolation, and control that extends well beyond physical violence, with financial control functioning as one of its most pervasive and durable tools.
In plain terms: Financial control isn’t only about money. It’s about power, and the gradual erosion of your belief that you’re capable of running your own life. The helplessness financial abuse produces is a feature of the pattern, not an unfortunate side effect of it.
I think, too, of a portfolio manager I worked with who could model a decade of market returns without opening a spreadsheet, and who still didn’t notice the slow restructuring of her own shared finances until her card was declined at the gate before a client flight. “I know exactly how money works,” she told me. “I couldn’t understand how I’d let this happen.” Financial abuse, I’ve found again and again, has almost nothing to do with financial knowledge. It has everything to do with the relational dynamics that make questioning a partner feel dangerous rather than reasonable.
The shame that accompanies financial abuse tends to be especially acute in driven women, because the cultural narrative insists that smart, capable women simply aren’t exploited this way. That shame often runs alongside the confusion I see in women processing gaslighting more broadly: the sense that your own read of reality can’t be trusted, even when it was accurate the whole time. The shame has no rational basis, but it’s real, and it can keep women from seeking the help they need, because getting it requires admitting, out loud, what actually happened.
For Miriam, the psychological impact turned out to be more disorienting than the financial impact itself. “I’ve rebuilt money before,” she told me. “What I couldn’t figure out was how to trust my own judgment again. I trusted him with everything, my money, my business, my future, and he used all of it against me. How do you trust yourself after that?” It’s a fair question with no fast answer, only a slow one, built session by session, each correct read of a situation slowly restoring what the deception took.
What Do You Need to Know About the Legal Landscape?
Financial abuse has legal remedies, but accessing them requires documentation, professional support, and a realistic understanding of what the legal system can do.
In divorce proceedings, financial abuse is typically addressed through the discovery process, the legal mechanism through which both parties disclose their full financial situation. If deception is suspected, a forensic accountant can investigate the marital finances, much as one would untangle the coercive control patterns underneath a relationship that never involved a single raised hand, surfacing hidden assets and transactions conducted without consent.
Debt incurred in your name without authorization may be legally challengeable, but doing so requires formal legal action, not just a phone call to the bank. An attorney who specializes in financial abuse cases can advise on the remedies available in your jurisdiction.
Documentation is essential, and the time to begin documenting is the moment you suspect financial abuse, not after the relationship has ended. That means gathering copies of every financial document you can access: tax returns, bank statements, property records, and any paperwork bearing your signature, stored somewhere your partner cannot reach. This is exactly the instinct Miriam had practiced for fourteen years at her kitchen table, and it’s part of why her case, however painful, was as well-documented as her attorney had ever seen.
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Both/And: You Are Competent AND You Were Exploited
Here is the both/and you have to hold, and it will feel contradictory before it feels true: you built significant financial resources through genuine competence and sustained hard work, AND you were financially exploited by someone who used your trust against you with intention. These two facts are not in tension. The exploitation doesn’t negate the competence. It’s evidence of his sophistication, not your naivety.
You’re also allowed to be furious about what was taken AND to grieve the future you’d planned, the one now disrupted in ways you didn’t choose. Both are appropriate. And the rebuilding, financial and psychological both, is already the next chapter, whether or not you feel ready for it yet.
Of course you’re tired. You spent years being the reliable one, the one who reconciled the accounts and read the fine print and still ended up here. That exhaustion isn’t a sign you did something wrong. It’s the accurate cost of having survived something engineered to be nearly undetectable while it was happening. Miriam named this both/and out loud in session more than once: “I built something real. And I still got taken. Both of those are true.”
The Systemic Lens: Why Is Financial Control the Abuse Nobody Names?
Driven women are socialized into a double bind that shapes how financial abuse gets missed: be independent enough to succeed, but relational enough to maintain a partnership. Be ambitious, but not so ambitious you intimidate. Manage the finances well enough that no one worries, but not so visibly you appear controlling. Hold all of it flawlessly, and never acknowledge how impossible the task is.
This double bind isn’t an accident of one couple’s personal dynamics. It’s a systemic condition, and it maps directly onto why financial abuse against driven women goes unnamed for so long. Women entered high-earning professional fields over the past several decades without a corresponding cultural expectation that men entering marriages with those women would share financial oversight equally. The result, structurally, is a landscape where a woman’s financial competence is treated as proof she couldn’t possibly be a victim, while that same competence is exactly what makes her a profitable, sophisticated target. Miriam’s own attorney admitted as much: in twenty years of family law, he had rarely seen a financially sophisticated woman taken this seriously by a court, precisely because the system wasn’t built to expect her.
In my practice, I help women see these patterns as cultural inheritances rather than personal failures. When a driven woman says she “should have caught this sooner,” she’s applying an individual standard to a structural problem. The financial industry, the legal system, and the broader culture all still default to picturing a victim as someone without resources, which is precisely what abusers with sophisticated partners are counting on. Naming that blind spot out loud is often the first moment a woman stops treating her exploitation as her own failure.
How Do You Rebuild, Financially and Psychologically?
Recovery from financial abuse requires work on two parallel tracks, practical and psychological, and neither can be fully accomplished without the other running alongside it.
The practical recovery begins with an accurate assessment of the damage, usually requiring a forensic accountant, a financial advisor, and a family law attorney working together. Once the picture is clear, a realistic plan can be built around a timeline that doesn’t assume everything gets fixed in a single quarter.
The psychological recovery requires addressing the specific damage financial abuse does to self-trust and agency. This is the work of trauma-informed therapy that understands the intersection of financial exploitation and relational trauma. The goal isn’t only to rebuild the portfolio, but the capacity to trust your own judgment and the relationship with your own competence that the abuse was designed to disrupt.
Miriam, two years after her divorce was finalized, had rebuilt her financial position to a point that surprised even her forensic accountant, who told her plainly that most of his clients don’t recover this fully this fast. But the more significant recovery, she told me near the end of our work together, happened in the room, in therapy. “I had to learn to trust myself again,” she said. “With money, yes. With my own read of a room, too. That took longer than rebuilding the portfolio, and it mattered more.” Oksana described a similar arc eighteen months out: the credit disputes resolved, the fraudulent accounts closed, and underneath it, a slower negotiation with the version of herself who hadn’t seen it coming. “I stopped needing to have caught it,” she told me. “I just needed to know I could catch the next thing. And I can.”
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- Financial abuse occurs in an estimated 99% of domestic violence cases and is not limited to relationships where one partner is financially dependent.
- Financial independence changes the shape financial abuse takes; it does not prevent it. Access-based tactics replace dependency-based ones.
- The eight core tactics are financial control and monitoring, financial restriction, employment sabotage, debt exploitation, asset theft and redirection, financial deception, using finances as punishment, and post-separation financial abuse.
- The psychological damage, eroded self-trust, hypervigilance, chronic self-doubt, is often more disorienting to rebuild than the financial damage itself.
- Documentation should begin the moment financial abuse is suspected, not after a relationship ends.
- Shame about financial abuse is common in driven women precisely because their competence makes the abuse feel implausible; that shame is not evidence of any failure on their part.
- Recovery requires two parallel tracks, practical financial rebuilding and psychological repair, and both matter for lasting stability.
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Q: I earn more than he does. Can I still be a victim of financial abuse?
A: Absolutely. Financial abuse isn’t about who earns more. It’s about who controls access to resources and who exploits trust. Women who out-earn their partners are often targeted precisely because of their resources. The form may differ, asset exploitation and debt incurrence rather than income restriction, but it’s no less real.
Q: He handled all the finances and I didn’t pay attention. Is that my fault?
A: No. Dividing financial labor isn’t inherently a problem; many healthy couples have one partner manage the finances. What makes it abuse is when that management gets used to establish control, limit your access to your own financial information, or exploit your trust for someone else’s gain. Trusting your partner is not a character flaw. The exploitation of that trust is his responsibility, not yours.
Q: What documents should I gather if I suspect financial abuse?
A: As comprehensively as you can manage: tax returns, bank statements for every account including any you didn’t know about, investment statements, property records, credit card statements, and any financial paperwork bearing your signature. Store copies somewhere he cannot access, with a trusted friend or your attorney.
Q: He’s threatening to destroy my credit if I leave. What do I do?
A: This is financial coercion, and it’s serious. Contact a domestic violence advocate who specializes in financial abuse; the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233) can provide referrals. Consult a family law attorney about protective orders, and document the threat in writing.
Q: I’m embarrassed to tell my financial advisor what happened. What do I do?
A: The shame you feel is a predictable response to financial abuse, and it’s one of the primary barriers to getting help. Your advisor needs accurate information to help you effectively. If you’re not comfortable with your current one, find one who specializes in working with survivors. They exist, and they will not judge you.
Q: Is financial abuse always intentional, or can it happen without a partner meaning to control me?
A: Financial abuse, distinct from ordinary disagreement or one partner being disorganized with money, is defined by a pattern of control, deception, or exploitation, and patterns of that kind are, by definition, not accidental. A single mistake isn’t financial abuse. A sustained pattern of hiding or exploiting resources is. A therapist who specializes in relational and financial trauma can help you sort the pattern from the incident.
- Adams AE, Sullivan CM, Bybee D, Greeson MR. Development of the Scale of Economic Abuse. Violence Against Women. 2008;14(5):563-588. PMID: 27747543.
- Postmus JL, Hoge GL, Breckenridge J, Sharp-Jeffs N, Chung D. Economic abuse as an invisible form of domestic violence: a multicountry review. Trauma Violence Abuse. 2020;21(2):261-283. PMID: 35590302.
- Postmus JL, Plummer SB, McMahon S, Murshid NS, Kim MS. Understanding economic abuse in the lives of survivors. J Interpers Violence. 2012;27(3):411-430. PMID: 35529309.
- Voth Schrag RJ. Economic abuse and later material hardship: is depression a mediator? Affilia. 2019. PMID: 36177605.
- Kutin J, Russell R, Reid M. Economic abuse between intimate partners in Australia: prevalence, health status, disability, and financial stress. Aust N Z J Public Health. 2017. PMID: 39380255.
- van der Kolk BA. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014. Related findings: PMID 38198456.
- Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. PMID: 19795402.
- Greenman PS, Johnson SM. Emotionally focused therapy: attachment, connection, and health. Curr Opin Psychol. 2022;43:146-150. PMID: 34375935.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours, working with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, on the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar therapy center she built, scaled, and exited, and a regular contributor to Psychology Today currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #95719)
15,000+ direct clinical hours
CA LMFT95719 · CO MFT.0003236 (telehealth only) · CT 003806 · DC LMFT200001447 · FL TPMF356 · IL 166.012270 · ME MF8600 · MD LCM1206 · NH 1030 · NJ 37FI00254800 · NY 002805 · TX 206391 · UT 14300323-3902 · VA 0717002589 · WA MFT.LF.70098096
Creator of House of Life™ and Fixing the Foundations™
The Everything Years (W.W. Norton)
Founder & former CEO, Evergreen Counseling
Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
