Amy Sprague Champeau received treatment in the budding field of financial therapy, which helped her deal with money issues.

By SARAH KERSHAW

The country music star Wynonna Judd had essentially “won the lottery” at age 17, she said. But after amassing a fortune from her career, she squandered much of it, throwing money at her children out of guilt for missing hockey practices, and buying more cars than she could ever drive. Having grown up poor in eastern Kentucky, Judd found herself with “everything and nothing at all,” she said.
Amy Sprague Champeau was destitute following a divorce, and with no college education or job opportunities, wound up living in her car. When she finally rented a room, her only furniture was a piece of foam for a bed. Soon after she began earning some money, she ran up large credit card debts and became choked by fear.
The two women, a global celebrity and a Wisconsin divorcee trying to climb out from under a pile of bills, sought help in the budding field of financial therapy, where budget planning meets psychological counseling. They even went to a kind of money rehab, where, in six days of group therapy they dug deep into the roots of what psychologists call “money disorders,” the slew of unhealthy and self-destructive behaviors that are not as extreme as pathological gambling, kleptomania or compulsive shopping, but nevertheless afflict large numbers of people.
While it is difficult to pinpoint the number of patients or practitioners, experts in psychology and financial planning say the number of professionals offering to treat money disorders has multiplied in the last few years.
Although there are many self-help books on how to become rich, the fields of psychology and financial planning have been slow to link money and emotion. And money is still a great cultural taboo that is rarely discussed openly in the United States, experts say.
“I’m still working on my money issues and I will be for a long time,” said Ms. Champeau, 57, who went to night school and eventually became a psychotherapist herself, allowing her to earn a living. But her fear of debt is still an issue: she buys much of her wardrobe at a thrift shop. “I have always felt alone and a lot of shame around money,” she said.
Among the problem financial behaviors identified by psychologists in recent years are: overspending, underspending, serial borrowing, financial infidelity (“cheating” on a spouse by spending and lying about it), workaholism, financial incest (lording money over relatives to control them), financial enabling (throwing large sums at, say, adult children who then are not motivated to support themselves), hoarding, and plenty of guilt and shame around poverty and wealth.
The financial storm thundering from Wall Street is likely to force many people to examine their relationships with money well beyond their portfolios and bank accounts, some psychologists say. Even before the recent dire news, an online survey by the American Psychological Association in June found that 75 percent of the more than 2,500 adults said money was the No. 1 source of stress in their lives.
“This is a dangerous time,” said Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist who is one of the authors of a study published in September in the journal Psychological Services that examines the state and treatment of money disorders.
“And when people come for help around money, it goes so much deeper than what is in their bank accounts. It’s a portal into unresolved family histories and generational history patterns.”
Dr. Klontz’s study looked at various money disorders and at a treatment center, Onsite, in Nashville. The center was owned until recently by his father, Ted Klontz, a psychologist and life coach who still leads the “healing money issues” program there, along with a financial planner.
Under the American Psychological Association’s professional code of ethics, therapists should not enter into outside relationships with clients, including business arrangements like financial planning. With the field of financial therapy so new, Dr. Brad Klontz and others said that when it came to financial planners who are also therapists, the ethics were still murky.
Onsite is one of a number of programs and workshops devoted to problem money behaviors that fall short of psychiatric disorders like gambling and compulsive buying .
Both Ms. Judd, who attended the program when it started in 2004, and Ms. Champeau, who was there in July, said that they have been able to begin transforming their destructive financial behaviors. “If I can do it, anyone can,” Ms.Judd said.