There are two surefire issues that are difficult for people to confront and work through during counseling, says psychotherapist Kelly Chicas: sex and money. But that's not to say that people face these hot buttons with the same trepidation.

"I think people are much more open to talking about their sex lives than they are to talking about money," says Chicas, a Board Certified, Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor. Her practice, Albuquerque Family Counseling, focuses on couples and relationships, including pre-marital counseling.

When it comes to the sensitive topic of money—or other issues expressed indirectly through money — Chicas employs Money Habitudes™. The cards draw people into conversation and help them arrive at their own conclusions. Because so many people have issues that somehow involve money, the cards play an important, versatile role in her practice.

Individual and Couples Sessions
"When couples come to therapy, they're looking to change the status quo because it's uncomfortable. They're tired of the pain or the resentment or the anger or whatever's going on. And money is very nearly always a part of what's going on, even if it's not the presenting issue," says Chicas.
           
In the absence of a standard methodology to get at money issues, and before finding Money Habitudes, Chicas tried to tease out people's issues around money by asking a series of her own conversation starters. These included: Who has control of the money? Who handles the bills? Who is responsible for what, and how does it come about?
           
"It always comes down to power and control," she says.
           
However, for the same reasons that people don't want to think or talk about money at home, Chicas knows that they're also hesitant to dive into the subject—even within the privacy of her office. Therefore, she found that she needed to lay a strong foundation with clients, building trust and rapport, before broaching the topic of money and those concerns that orbit it.

"It's not going to be in the first session or two. It's something that you warm up to," she says.
           
Clients' hesitation, coupled with her own caution to not push too hard or move too quickly, slowed down the process. In addition, she knew that as the therapist, she herself could get "bored with the years and years of talk therapy" and could understand how clients might need a change of pace to approach a difficult topic.
"I was looking for an activity that I could do that would get people more interested than just sitting there and talking about it, and something they'd be able to identify with," says Chicas who draws upon her own experiences – including marriage, divorce, remarriage, blended families, parenting and more – to inform her practice.
           
At a Smart Marriages Conference (an offshoot of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education), she learned that other couples’ counselors were using Money Habitudes.

A New Approach to Money
"Once I discovered them, I started using them right away," says Chicas, who notes that her clients are also very quick to grasp how to use the cards and what they mean. "I think that's one of their strengths: It's simplistic in the delivery and how you manage it, so it's non-threatening and people really seem to identify with it."
           
Using Money Habitudes enabled her to approach the delicate subject in a fun, nonjudgmental way.  The cards, she finds, also allow her to hasten the process and delve into money quicker. Although her general approach has not changed, she feels that she does not need to necessarily wait a few sessions to deal with money.
           
"Since starting to use the cards with couples, I am more ready to approach it with them because the whole activity is less threatening than a barrage of questions coming from me, asking them about something they may not be comfortable talking about. Once they start going through the cards and they can start identifying with some of those behaviors then it's like, 'Oh, yeah, this is me! And that's him – he did that last week!' It opens up the whole flow of conversation."
           
Beyond replacing a battery of questions with a game-like activity—and, in the process turning over more control to the clients themselves— Chicas also finds that the cards help bridge an inevitable gender gap. It's important because so much of her work involves couples.
           
"In therapy, and generally speaking, women are communicators. They want to talk about things. They want to analyze things. Guys typically don't. And so having a hands-on activity— especially for someone who's a non-communicator and doesn't want to be here but was dragged in by his partner—it's very easy to get them going," says Chicas.

In addition, Chicas feels comfortable using the cards because of their careful, inoffensive language. Some therapy tools inadvertently set clients off with only a small misstep in the wording.
           
"Because I work with couples at all different stages in their relationships, I'm always really careful about something that will continuously use the word 'marriage' because for a couple that's living together [but isn't married], that doesn't sit well with them. They automatically focus on that word, so I'm always really careful about the language," says Chicas.

Moreover, what her clients find is that by sorting through the cards to discover their dominant Habitude type, it provides them with a common, nonjudgmental language to discuss their habits and attitudes around money. The process gives clients a methodology with which they can leave the session and use constructively at home.
           
"People like to have a frame and a name for something, so if I can say, 'I'm a Targeted Goals person and my partner is a Spontaneous person,' that means something to them. I've had comments from couples who say, 'This really illustrates how things are!' or 'It's so good to be able to put a name to it and identify what was just going around in my head before!'"

But, of course, more than simply understanding something, those coming to Albuquerque Family Counseling are typically looking to make changes, to somehow improve their lives. Implementing that change can be difficult.

"That's the crux of therapy: what motivates someone to change? I do think it [what people discover through Money Habitudes] is an epiphany. And once you have that awareness and once you're able to put a label on it and have an understanding of where it comes from, it's the first piece of then being motivated enough to make the change to do something about it."

Counseling Workshops
Beyond traditional counseling sessions behind closed doors, Chicas also frequently does workshops for community agencies and general audiences on topics ranging from relationships to parenting and stress. As a result of her success using Money Habitudes in sessions with individuals and couples, she has incorporated the cards into workshops.

At the University of New Mexico, she offered a course called "The Wealth Within: Mastering Your Money Personality" with Lisa Johnson, PhD, LMPP. The four-hour seminar provided visibility for Chicas and her practice in a non-threatening venue where people could interact with her without committing to individual sessions.
           
"You're reaching people who would not normally be coming in for therapy and educating them about money issues and really helping them out," she says.

Both individuals and couples attended the two-night continuing education class. Although money is always a timely topic when it comes to therapy, a down economy has made it even more so. Unemployment, depleted retirement accounts and mounting credit card debt can all fuel personal and interpersonal troubles.
           
Although Chicas uses other materials, including handouts, the only training tool she uses for "The Wealth Within" is Money Habitudes. In money and relationship workshops, the cards are often employed as an introductory activity, but, instead, Chicas structured the class so the bulk of the time was spent sorting through the Money Habitudes statement cards, interpreting the results and then having people set personal goals based on their findings. The course was designed to be quick and informative and speak to personality challenges rather than specific dollar-and-cents recommendations. The description of the course that UNM published in its course catalog declares:

Other money courses teach budgeting and planning, but do not examine the WHY of your personal spending habits and attitudes. This class will help you to identify and examine your money personality – characteristics that motivate your spending patterns, goals, choices and priorities. You will understand your core financial story, where your specific behaviors come from, and what to do about the behaviors that are keeping you from financial success. This class will provide you with specific, goal-oriented changes you can use immediately that will change your behavior with money.

"The budget part is good but it's just like going on a diet. If you don't understand why [you're gaining weight or experiencing health problems], then going on a diet is kind of a Band-Aid."

In between the two classes, Chicas gave her students homework. Using some of the discussion questions included with the Money Habitudes Guide for Professionals, she had them reflect on their in-class discoveries.
           
"When they go home [after the first class], they've identified what their primary Habitude is. And now that they know that, how does that affect them? If they look at their behaviors and their motivations behind spending or saving or investing – how does that look to them from a therapeutic point of view? The other homework was trying to trace back their family of origin and asking, 'Do you see any similarities between your Habitudes and those of your family?'"
           
By reputation, homework is rarely well received by students, but Chicas found a good response to her assignment: "They really enjoyed it because, for people who've never really looked at this – or just always wondered 'Why am I like this?' – there was a lot of really good awareness and introspection that came out."
           
During the second session, she broke up the class into small groups, based on individuals' dominant Money Habitudes types. Although not quite a mini support group, the sub-grouping allowed people to talk about common challenges with others like them—and share solutions.

Initially Chicas had concerns when designing the class as to whether people would feel comfortable talking about their personal money issues in a public, classroom setting. However, she found that "they enjoyed opening up because after hearing others' stories, they felt that they were not the 'only one' to have the experience."

Even with more than three hours of in-class work with Money Habitudes and a homework assignment stemming from the cards, her students still reported they would have spent more time using them. She also learned after offering the course the first time that students wanted to bring the cards home to use in the future, either on their own or with a partner, leading her to add the cards to the course's materials fee.
           
"The value behind it is identifying those behaviors," says Chicas, "and the questions that are asked on the cards themselves are so applicable to most couples situations as far as how they spend, how they save, how they invest, and why they have the thoughts behind their money behaviors."