Psychedelic-assisted therapy and financial planning

Psychedelic drugs that have shown therapeutic promise for veterans with post-traumatic stress could help some people understand their difficult relationship with money and wealth.

But the financial planners and therapists calling for more research into the potential uses of psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, MDMA/ecstasy and ketamine in the psychology of money say they are certainly not for everyone. Such treatments would be illegal in many cases and require careful professional supervision. The possible benefits, which include pinpointing the causes and triggers of financial trauma or even developing the ability to discuss those topics, explain why there are growing calls for research into psychedelic-assisted therapy related to money, wealth and investments.

Planners who joined an informal roundtable discussion led by Rick Kahler, founder of Rapid City, South Dakota-based registered investment advisory firm Kahler Financial Group and financial therapy firm Advanced Wellbeing, at this year’s Financial Planning Association Retreat expressed a lot of interest in learning more about psychedelic-assisted counseling, he said. Kahler believes the proper application could aid some people in finding ways to avoid “financial behaviors that are costing them so much money and grief and stress in their life,” he said.   

“They help the defense mechanisms to relax, and this has been well documented in MDMA trials and in many books,” Kahler said in an interview. “A person can visit the trauma without the emotional attachment, without the fear, without the re-traumatization. It gives a person an objective way to view it.”

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A sign of the times

He and other financial advisors and professionals working at the intersection of therapy and wealth management are calling for more research into psychedelic-assisted methods at an interesting time politically for such studies. While the Food and Drug Administration rejected an MDMA-assisted medicine and psychotherapy for PTSD last year, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs launched its first study of psychedelic-assisted therapy since the 1960s with a research program on treatment for PTSD and alcoholism. President Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and conservative allies of the administration are embracing psychedelic research as well. Although most of the drugs remain illegal, the landscape has shifted away from the hard-line enforcement of the “War on Drugs” and accompanying rhetoric painting hallucinogens wholly as dangerous substances used by addicts and criminals.

“I am 65 this year, so just the thought of psychedelics for anything at all evokes fear of what happens if my brain gets broken, because that’s what we were raised to fear,” said planner, educator and coach Saundra Davis, a U.S. Navy veteran who is the founder of Sage Financial Solutions and a recently inducted member of the Financial Therapy Association’s hall of fame.

Since she isn’t an expert in psychedelic-assisted therapy, Davis said she would refer clients interested in it to those specializing in the field, such as Candace Oglesby, who is the founder of Jurnee Mental Health Consulting and a member of the Maryland Governor’s Task Force on the Responsible Use of Natural Psychedelic Substances. Since the methods have displayed some success in reducing the symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, depression and substance abuse, psychedelic-assisted therapy “may also be effective in addressing the mental health diagnoses often connected to chronic financial stress and unmet basic needs,” Oglesby said in an email.

Besides someone’s direct connections with money, the psychedelics present “a powerful lens through which to examine intergenerational trauma tied to financial insecurity,” she said. That speaks to another fact: “Cultural and historical burdens are often embedded in how people relate to money, and these cannot be ignored,” she said. “Psychedelic therapies, by softening the default mode network and reducing defense mechanisms, can create space for individuals to gently access and process the shame, guilt and fear they may carry around money. Whether it’s not earning enough, lacking savings or feeling conflicted about how they spend, I see these medicines as tools to confront these experiences. I believe psychedelics have the capacity to support and empower people in courageously facing these difficult conversations, with self-compassion and dignity.”

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Addressing the underlying issues tied to money

Advisors and clients should know going into the process that the advocates for psychedelic therapies do not view them as “the magic pill that can cure everything and everyone,” said Holistic Optimal Wealth founder Aseel El-Baba, who is working toward completing a Canadian certification in the field. That makes “proper mental health support” essential to the process, El-Baba said, citing examples of people with so much trauma connected to a topic that they aren’t open to discussing it under most circumstances.

“Psychedelic tools may be a way to support and engage someone who’s not willing to engage in talk therapy,” she said. “It allows connection between the therapist and the client in ways that that connection may not have been available.”

Trauma can run so deep in some people that they may not even be aware of their money-linked responses to it, according to Kahler, who shared the story of a patient who was a victim of sexual and physical abuse as a child. She had developed the habit of spending nearly her entire paycheck, a response tied to her first experiences in having a job. That was her means of escaping the abuse at home and protecting against a scenario in which, “if you have money, you don’t have to work,” Kahler said. The psychedelic-assisted therapy could assist people in uncovering connections between their trauma and their wealth more easily. 

In a time when psychedelics have “become so mainstream,” there are so many “people and studies talking about the efficacy of psychedelic-assisted therapy on all sorts of things,” Kahler said. At a bare minimum, it’s important that planners know that fields such as financial therapy and life planning could have answers to some of clients’ deeper underlying questions, he said. He and others often speak of clients who are in need of a referral to a therapist because they are effectively “stuck” in a mental health issue that harms their wealth.

“This is what you never get to in a planner’s office, and this is what is behind so many of the stuck issues that we planners are dealing with, and we have no clue,” Kahler said of traumatic money memories from childhood. “They don’t grow up with us. They don’t change with us when we become adults. They remain stuck in that time.”

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Learning about financial trauma

Consulting with a professional about psychedelic-assisted therapy could enable clients to seek a different course than, say, a medication that brings side effects worse than their underlying symptoms, said Davis.

“It allows clients to have access to whatever therapies are best for them,” she said. “I don’t believe financial trauma is unlike other types of trauma. So if this is promising in other areas, I can see it being promising in financial trauma as well.”

Financial trauma “doesn’t exist in isolation, and it definitely ruptures our sense of normalcy, security and safety,” said El-Baba, citing typical examples ranging from systemic racism across societies to sudden shifts in personal wealth upward or downward, infidelity between partners or simply “heightened levels of stress and anxiety in their upbringing around money.” Psychedelic therapy could deliver “shortcuts to the cause” of the trauma or show the “alternative to what our life could look like without these barriers,” she said.

“It definitely deepens awareness of the bigger picture of what’s happening,” El-Baba said. “When we have this level of awareness, we become equipped with that much more motivation and inspiration to do the work.”

The rising number of discussions about psychedelic-assisted therapy have brought, in some cases, a “lens of sensationalism and notoriety” and the risk of “exploitation or commodification” of indigenous religious practices, Oglesby said. So the potential applications to financial therapy bring some challenges.

“If financial therapists are going to explore psychedelics as a possible avenue of healing for their clients, it is their responsibility to conduct thorough research and pursue proper training,” she said. “Doing so helps ensure that they remain within the scope of their practice and avoid acting from a place of ethical irresponsibility. Based on my experience as a psychedelic-assisted therapist and the emerging body of research, I do believe psychedelics hold tremendous promise in supporting individuals on their healing journeys. But this potential must be realized within strong containers of ethical integrity, safety, cultural humility and trauma-informed care.”