S1 E13: 💸🥲 How I became a Financial Art Therapist
How really, did Rachel become a Financial Therapist? This episode weaves together Rachel's childhood counting coins, a love of bugs, college surprises, being "office mom", and getting a C in self care.
🎯 Key Moments:
- Were you ever the banker in Monopoly too?
- The Feminism & religion that changed how I see everything
- My love/hate relationship with being "Office Mom"
- How can Art therapy and financial therapy work together?
- Why financial therapy needs to be part of all mental health education
From Monopoly Banker to Money Healer: Rachel's Wild Ride to Financial Therapy
Rachel Duncan spills the tea on her journey from coin-counting kid to full-fledged financial therapist. Spoiler alert: it involves charging her parents for coffee in their own home.
The Origin Story
Rachel's financial therapy Monopoly banking prodigy and proprietor of "Catherine's Cafe," where she gleefully charged her parents 10 cents per cup of tea... that they bought. Born "a 37-year-old woman," as she puts it, Rachel was basically rehearsing adulthood, and still does.
Meanwhile, her parents were living that "we're poor but proud" life (narrator voice: they weren't actually poor), instilling both useful money habits (fix don't toss) and some questionable beliefs ("only wealthy people invest"—which Rachel now knows is really unhelpful).
Plot Twist! The Biology Bug Lover Becomes... a Religion Major?
Rachel headed to college ready to study all things creepy-crawly (fitting for a self-described Scorpio), but then—dramatic music—took a feminism and religion class that blew her mind. Her family was shocked. She was thrilled. The religion department became her safe haven after her father's death, teaching her the invaluable skill of "talking about things we don't usually say."
The "Office Mom" Years (Not as Fun as it Sounds)
Armed with a religion degree (which is super practical, obvs), Rachel spent her twenties as the ultimate "office mom" at small consulting firms. Translation: she did everything except the actual consulting while taking care of everyone's emotional well-being.
By 30, she hit the classic "this isn't working anymore" wall, met a cute Ukrainian guy named Alex (who talked about MONEY on their SECOND DATE—scandalous!), and moved to Seattle for a fresh start.
Art Therapy School: Where Rachel Was the Weird Money Person
In grad school, Rachel was that student asking about session rates while everyone else discussed psychodynamic theories. When her professor asked the class about self-care plans and Rachel mentioned "paying bills," her professor let her know she was doing selfcare wrong. That stuck with her.
The Pandemic Plot Twist That Changed Everything
Just when Rachel thought her love of money talk and her therapy skills would forever live separate lives, along came a New York Times article about—gasp—financial therapy! Suddenly, Rachel had permission to bring her spreadsheet obsession into the therapy room.
The Money Healing Club: Where Financial Self-Care Is Actually Self-Care
Teaming up with former client Thea Wayne, Rachel created the Money Healing Club, which she describes as "the AA of impulse spending." Now with 45 current members and 160 alumni, Rachel gets to indulge both her practical and woo-woo sides—running spreadsheet workshops one week and art therapy sessions about money boundaries the next.
Why This Actually Matters (No Jokes for This Part, It's Important)
Rachel's discovered that even the most emotionally intelligent people often "feel like a kid about money." Her club creates a space where people can finally stop avoiding their financial reality without shame or judgment. As Rachel puts it, "There is no one right way to do money, but you can find the right way for you."
The Big Takeaway
Financial self-care is real self-care. And if the thought of checking your bank balance makes you want to hide under the bed, you're not alone—and there's help that doesn't involve a financial boot camp or shame spiral. You are always welcome to join the Club.
Resources:
Center for Financial Social Work Training (Affiliate link)
NY Times article about financial therapy
🎧 Your next listen: Cultural perspectives on money with a Ukrainian twist. Get to know my husband, Alex!
🖐️Leave us a voicemail: What topics or speakers do you want to hear about next season? Click on the big orange button on our site right from your phone or browser and let me know https://www.moeyhealingclub.com/podcast
💫 Use code PODCAST for 50% off your first month and start your money healing process!
https://www.moneyhealingclub.com/club
Full transcript can be found here: https://www.moneyhealingclub.com/podcast
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Rachel: Welcome to the Money Healing Club podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Duncan. I'm a financial therapist and art therapist, and you've come to the softest place to land in personal finance. This podcast is for education and entertainment purposes only. For help with your particular situation, please seek help from a licensed professional in mental health, taxes, and finance.
Here, we talk about all the things we don't usually say when we talk about money. Let's begin.
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I'm going to tell you how I became a financial art therapist and my path to becoming one is sort of the tale of two passions. There's this passion for money and the practical stuff, as well as a passion for very deep healing and mystical, murky, transformative experiences.
So if you follow astrology at all, I am a Scorpio sun and a [00:01:00] Capricorn rising, and as I've learned a little bit more about astrology, I am not an expert. There is something about that combo that really speaks to the Scorpio side of getting into really deep, poignant conversations. And then the Capricorn side of taking very practical and aligned action.
So for those of you who are on the more woowoo, astrology track, I just wanted to share that with you.
So as a kid, I was always strong with math and science. I was always the banker in Monopoly. I was really good at mental math. I loved counting up my coins and getting those little paper tubes from the bank so I could gather up all my coins and take them in to get deposited. I remember so clearly the day my dad took me to get my very first bank account. I still remember the account number too. I was always really excited to grow up faster. I kind of feel like I was born a 37-year-old woman, so things like having a bank account and keeping track of my money. Getting little jobs and being paid for them. It just all felt like play [00:02:00] acting adulthood and I really loved it. It still feels like play acting, actually. What's the difference between real money and monopoly money? Right. Money is a fiction that we all believe.
So let me just set the scene a little bit. I have three siblings, but they were all teenagers when I was born. So in a lot of ways I grew up as an only child. It was me and my two parents, my mom and dad. An early money memory I have is starting Catherine's Cafe, so Catherine is my middle name. And a couple times a week I would say Catherine's cafe is open. This is at home, like in my kitchen, just me and my parents and I would make a little menu.
And I used like a basic computer drawing program to make a receipt. That's really what it was all about. I loved writing up a receipt, tallying it all up. I would charge my parents for serving them food in their own home that they paid for. Tea and coffee were 10 cents a cup and my mom is from England, so there was a lot of tea drinking happening and I collected 10 cents every time.
My parents [00:03:00] were super supportive of the popup Catherine's Cafe, and sometimes when their friends would come over, I would even open up Catherine's cafe to them. I don't think I ever even involved my friends in this. I maybe, I thought it was dorky. It was just something I wanted to do on my own, but it really wasn't about the cafe.
It was about making the little receipts and collecting money.
So all my growing up, my parents were pretty transparent with me. That money was tight, not only in like a practical sense, but they really identified as people who don't have a lot of money, who need to watch their spending. Both of my parents worked as educators in different capacities. But they're also of the generation where if you worked for your 30 or 40 years, you just got a decent pension and plenty of social security and you didn't really have to save to retire or even be involved in the investment decisions of that retirement account.
Sort of like we really need to these days. It was also a time when teachers could afford to pay a [00:04:00] mortgage on a suburban home. Pretty different from now. My parents were older when I was born, and my dad retired when I was pretty young. But my mom continued to work as a teacher and a teacher trainer.
I wanna talk about class for a minute because class is such an interesting thing. You know, sometimes we hear, oh, lower class, middle class, upper class, or some combo. Upper middle class, lower middle class. But they really aren't three tidy buckets like that.
And I do have trouble with these buckets. They're pejorative, they're ranking. So I like to , just describe things more accurately because in some aspects, you may experience a quote unquote upper class in some aspects, a quote unquote lower class.
Does someone have housing instability? Does someone have savings for retirement or not? Like these things are just a lot more accurate for these particular situations. So for me, growing up, we certainly weren't wealthy, but we did have stable housing. We always had food. Of course. I really don't know [00:05:00] the details of my parents' finances, but it was always really emphasized to me that they were watching our spending and I didn't get a sense there was a lot extra, although my mom did enjoy the occasional splurge at the same time. My dad had his PhD in education and my mom taught at a private school so I could go there, so I was exposed to some pretty wealthy families, very different lifestyles with the people I went to school with. I always felt really outside of the mainstream sometimes I was painfully aware that the home I came from was so different than the homes my friends came from. Look, we all learned money lessons from our parents and some of the money lessons I learned from my folks were helpful and some were less helpful.
Just like everyone, I inherited some money scripts. So some of the helpful ones were, just being watchful of spending, understanding that it's just all too easy to spend more than you mean to, learning to fix things instead of throwing them away, supporting local businesses. My dad was very serious about [00:06:00] no credit card debt.
Although I think his aversion to debt was a double-edged sword because debt can be a tool when used carefully for leverage. But all in all, I think those things have been helpful for me. Hey, I'm a lifelong thrifter and I always will be because that's a lifestyle. Some of the scripts that I have been more actively rewriting is that my parents were almost against wealth and against pursuing income. They seemed to look at people who had more visible wealth as greedy and selfish. I even remember my mom saying, oh, only wealthy people invest. I think with context at that time in the eighties, that was probably true.
You know, regular folks just didn't have access to easy investing tools and information like we do today. Both my parents were really impacted by World War II in different ways, so making do, staying humble, supporting community were really important to them. And definitely there was this family motto of, quote, we're poor but [00:07:00] proud.
However, that just wasn't accurate. We were not actually poor, but my parents' childhoods were so impacted by the war and other aspects of their growing up that they really carried this belief. This learned understanding that things could end at any minute. They firmly believe that education was the most important thing for security and personal development.
I do appreciate them for that. So with this sort of love of practical nature as well as an interest in business, I went to college wanting to study biology. I. I had a huge love of insects. Remember the Scorpio thing? I love creepy crawly things. So that's what I thought I was going to do.
But as an elective in college, I took feminism and religion. I was ready to ask the big philosophical questions that I think an 18-year-old is really ready to do usually. My life was so fundamentally changed by this class, learning what feminism really was. I hadn't ever really [00:08:00] learned that looking at the role of religion, two things I had never paid attention to, never been emphasized to me, and I learned so much about myself and people in that class, I decided to major in religion much to the surprise of my whole family because I'd been headlong on the numbers and science this whole time. So anyway, I was a religion major. It was fantastic. It was a very small department, and at the time I really needed some emotional safety. While I was in college, my dad died and I think I really needed some sort of family in college.
I was exploring bigger existential questions.
I think the most important thing I learned from my religion degree was how to talk about the things we don't usually say, like how do we put words to faith or love or community? How can we talk with each other about differences in values and morals and keep it kind and loving? So this whole degree now I can see really contributed to my work as a financial therapist because what is happening in [00:09:00] the shadows that is really impacting us day to day, but we're sort of not allowed to talk about it in a loving and natural way?
So these skills I use every day in my financial therapy work, nothing is off topic and I really value each individual lived experience as true for that person.
Okay, so I graduate with a liberal arts degree in religion. What's she gonna do with that? So I ended up working for small businesses throughout my twenties because I still had this knack for numbers and spreadsheets and getting things organized, and that was probably my biggest job skill.
So for my entire twenties I worked for two different small consulting firms and I did everything except the actual consulting work.
I became known as the office mom, which I know is a term of endearment, but also, hey, we know what that is. I was running around, putting out fires, taking care of everyone's emotional wellbeing as well, as all the logistics of the business.
It [00:10:00] was a, uh, sink or swim business management course. Really, and there was a lot I loved about it. I learned a ton about business finances and accounting and human resources. But at about age 30, I just hit a ceiling where I knew I'd be sort of in this assistant role for the rest of my life unless I made a change.
It was right about the time I met my now husband, Alex, and he was going to move to Seattle for work and he invited me to go with him, and it was just the turning point I needed. I decided to go to graduate school in art therapy, so I'd been on the other side of the couch. I'd been in therapy since I was a teenager.
Just lifelong struggles with depression and anxiety, and of course the loss of my father when I was quite young. So I had become quite accustomed to weekly therapy and really felt like I wanted to learn how to be on the other side of that couch. So at age 30 I moved to a new city with this new guy and started grad school in mental health [00:11:00] counseling with an art therapy track.
I should mention, I've always had a very strong artistic side. Even through my twenties with business management, I was always taking an oil painting class in the evenings, and so when I heard about art therapy, I felt like that would be a really good path for me.
So it felt like at the time, like 180 degree turn, I went from this grueling administrative tasky job to really deep, creative emotional work in the art therapy program at Antioch University in Seattle. And I loved it, throughout my time there, I felt a bit out of sync from a lot of the professors and the other students because I was always more interested in the practical aspects of this therapy work. Like, well, how do you set a rate? And when I was an internship, well what are they charging my clients and how does that all work out?
I love the career counseling aspect of my training. So it was clear I was just wired a little bit differently than a lot of my art therapy [00:12:00] colleagues. In graduate school for therapy, self-care is a crucial aspect of the work. It's not a nice to have, it's actually an ethical mandate, especially as students.
In internship, we are hearing really intense trauma stories all day long. So self-care and recovery are really important to not get burned out in therapy work and to provide really good mental health services for our clients.
So one day in class in graduate school, our professor asked us to go around and just share what we were gonna do for self-care during the break. So you hear the typical, I'm gonna get a massage, I'm gonna do yoga, I'm going to see a friend for lunch, all that expected stuff and it comes to me and I said, I need to take care of some bills and I need to call customer service for blah, blah, blah, something or other. And the professor gently corrected me by saying, no, no, we're talking about things that feel good. And I said, well, taking care of some of this financial stuff would feel good, and I haven't been able to during the term. Anyway, the conversation went on. But that always [00:13:00] struck me as, uh, she's wrong. Financial care really is as important as getting a massage. Maybe they're not as fun to do, but the relief on the other side is massive. It is important to spend a little time with your money every week, and that's always been an important thing for me.
I was pretty shocked that it was dismissed, I have to say. So I carried that with me. And throughout my time in graduate school, you would hear things like, oh, well we didn't get into this for the money. And I'm like, well, I have $60,000 in student loan debt. Like I was anticipating making money.
So after grad school, I went into therapy work, treating anxiety and depression, perfectionism and traumatic brain injuries with art therapy.
At the same time, friends and family and referrals would come to me to update their bookkeeping or choose an insurance policy or update their resume. It was sort of like, no matter what I did, the money work just kept following me and I still really [00:14:00] enjoyed it, but I really wanted the therapy thing to be my main thing. I didn't wanna be the office mom anymore.
So I felt really compartmentalized with these two skills.
I do wanna back up a minute and just mention my husband, because he's been a big part of this money journey for me. If you wanna hear a little more about him and us, we do a fun conversation earlier in the season called Cultural Perspectives on Money with a Ukrainian twist because my husband grew up in Ukraine.
So meeting Alex at about age 30 was so exciting for me because he wanted to talk about personal finance, like on the second date. He was so open and neutral about it, and he talks about money in a very matter of fact, daily life type of thing. And so it's always been a big part of our relationship is talking about what's going on with, with our money.
Alex is also pro wealth, pro income, and if you remember what I was saying about my parents' scripts, I think my biggest money block was accepting [00:15:00] income and leaning into building wealth instead of living paycheck to paycheck and instead of avoiding topics like investments, remember that's just for rich people, so my parents said. So Alex opened up this whole world of wealth and pursuing income in a way that felt okay, and that was really healing for me.
I ended up developing security with my money and I had never had that openness in a relationship before. So Alex is a huge supporter of my financial therapy work and developing the Money Healing Club. So shout out to Alex.
Okay, so fast forward to about five years ago, I still have these two totally separate compartments of my life, the therapy work and the money work. And then during the pandemic, I had to close up shop to take care of my kids. A friend sent me an article, I believe it was in the New York Times that was describing this new niche of financial therapy. I had no idea that I would be allowed to bring this love of [00:16:00] financial conversation into the therapy room. 'cause remember I was pretty actively dissuaded from doing that in grad school.
It felt like I was handed this permission slip to integrate these two parts of my life that I thought had to be completely separate from each other. So I dove into some additional training about financial therapy and financial social work. I read everything I could and all of this confirmed my hunch that this is the right track for me.
As I started opening up my practice again and identifying myself as a financial therapist, I started doing the most exciting work.' cause not only was I bridging these two aspects of my interest and passion and skills, but it was helping my clients bridge these two topics that had never touched before.
Therapy and money.
Then I had the great fortune of meeting Thea Wayne. Thea was one of my early coaching clients, and she's an entrepreneur. Partway through our work together, she had this idea of taking this work to a bigger audience. She was really feeling the [00:17:00] benefits of this therapeutic approach towards money and had this idea of creating a membership.
So from there, we actually created the Money Healing Club together. We worked on it for about half a year before she went on to other wonderful endeavors, and now the Money Healing Club is my main focus of work, and it wouldn't have happened without her.
This experience of creating and hosting and cultivating the Money Healing Club has been so personally gratifying because like on one hand I can run a masterclass on debt, and then a few weeks later I can do an art therapy session about boundaries and money. It might seem at first that these things are all over the place but it actually all sinks into one thing. You guys, it just works. It's so fun. At the same time, I joke that I'm a spreadsheet therapist too, look, exploring your relationship with money and the emotions and how your parents impacted you is super important, but it's just as important to sit down with a spreadsheet, get [00:18:00] some things organized, catch up to current day. It is all about improving our relationship with money from the practical to the emotional.
Through all of this, financial self-care is essential and we really bring that into the club. It's that thing that my professor didn't understand is so important to self-care.
Helping my clients come up with their self-care plan, their financial self-care plan has also really helped me in my own financial self-care, like I'm in on this process too, because we're never done with money.
You know, a lot of folks come to the club having been in therapy, loving therapy. They're very emotionally intelligent, incredible people, and they feel like a kid about money. Like it's this last thing, this one last thing I need to work on. And so when we finally work on it in a setting that is compassionate and kind. All of this amazing growth starts to happen. From being able to talk about money in your intimate relationships better, keeping an eye on [00:19:00] impulse spending in a really loving way to experiencing some money left in the bank account at the end of the month or watching your savings grow.
These are emotional experiences as much as they are practical.
And hey, these things take time. That's how therapy works. It's the effect of having a compassionate and trauma-informed approach to any kind of personal growth. We're going to see effects like this. It takes a little longer. It's not a bootcamp.
So now the club has around 45 members, about 160 members have gone through the program. It's so much more than I could have done with just one-on-ones for my whole career. In looking to the future, I want the Money Healing Club to be the AA of impulse spending.
And where I see the club going is to be more member led, have more financial therapists and more financial coaches, and maintain the integrity of this work that is cost effective and really meaningful.
And I have a little side quest that I wanna bring financial therapy into more [00:20:00] mental health training programs. Financial therapy is becoming a little bit more known, but still most of the time I'm explaining to people what I do.
I will leave you with this. There is no one right way to do money, but you can find the right way for you. And if money conversations have felt scary, have felt anxious, I really understand that.
But the Money Healing Club is a place where you can finally learn about money and work through all the big emotions that of course you have about it.
There's a bunch of us here waiting for you to have the best conversation about money that you've ever had.
So that's my story of how I became a financial therapist and art therapist, as well as ideas for the future of my work and the Money Healing Club. So with that said, I'm going to take a brief pause on this podcast. This will be the last episode of the first season.
Let me know what topic should we cover in the future. I mean, I haven't even talked about relationships or debt like you guys. There's so much more to talk [00:21:00] about. I'm here for it. It's my life's work. Look, my favorite episodes are the ones where I get to respond to your questions, so help me make this podcast by leaving a voicemail at moneyhealingclub.com/podcast. You'll see a bright orange button there. You can always send me an email too.
So again, this is Rachel Duncan, financial therapist and art therapist signing off.
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