Financial Infidelity Therapy
Financial infidelity — hidden accounts, secret debt, undisclosed spending, or the financial wreckage of a partner’s sex addiction — is one of the most devastating betrayals a partner can experience. Yet it remains an underrecognized and undertreated wound in therapy.
If your partner has been hiding money, accumulating secret debt, or spending thousands on a sexual addiction you knew nothing about, you are not overreacting. What you’re experiencing is real, measurable, and treatable.
Debra L. Kaplan, MA, MBA, LPC, CSAT-S, treats financial betrayal and sex addiction. Debra is uniquely qualified in her clinical understanding of how sex addiction and financial infidelity are frequently two expressions of the same underlying wound.
As a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist-Supervisor and licensed financial therapist with a background on Wall Street, Debra brings clinical depth and real-world financial fluency to the therapy room. Her approach addresses the full scope of the financial betrayal as well as how sex, money, and power intersect in intimate relationships.
What Is Financial Infidelity?
Financial infidelity occurs when one partner in a committed relationship deliberately conceals financial information, decisions, or behaviors from the other. It is a form of relational betrayal that erodes trust just as surely as sexual infidelity — and in many cases, the two are directly connected.
Financial infidelity can look like:
- Secret credit cards, bank accounts, or lines of credit
- Hiding the true extent of debt from a partner
- Concealing spending on pornography subscriptions, escort services, affairs, or online sexual interactions
- Lying about income, bonuses, or financial losses
- Moving money without a partner’s knowledge to fund addictive behavior
- Staggered disclosures— revealing financial damage slowly and partially rather than all at once
- Using money as a tool of control, punishment, or reward in the relationship
When financial deception is connected to a sex addiction or compulsive sexual behavior, the financial damage is an additional trauma for the betrayed partner and family.
The Hidden Link: Sex Addiction and Financial Betrayal
Compulsive sexual behavior rarely occurs in isolation. Sex addiction is often rooted in unresolved trauma, attachment injury, and shame — and the same emotional drivers that fuel sexual acting out also drive compulsive spending, financial hiding, and the need for secrecy. The addiction requires resources. The resources create debt. The debt creates shame. The shame fuels more acting out. It becomes a cycle that devastates both the addict and their partner.
Common presentations Debra works with include:
- A partner who discovers their spouse has spent tens of thousands of dollars on pornography, affairs, or sex workers — often over years or decades
- Couples navigating disclosure of both sexual and financial secrets after an affair
- Individuals in recovery from sex addiction who are now confronting the financial wreckage they created
- Betrayed partners experiencing trauma symptoms — hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, emotional dysregulation — triggered by both the sexual and financial betrayal
- High-earning professionals and executives whose financial power has become entangled with compulsive sexual behavior or control dynamics in the relationship
What Is Financial Betrayal Therapy?
Financial betrayal therapy is treatment that addresses the emotional, relational, and psychological dimensions of deception by a partner around money. It is not financial planning, nor budgeting. It is clinical therapy that treats the trauma of financial deception.
In financial betrayal therapy the work includes:
For the Betrayed Partner
- Processing the shock and grief of discovering financial deception
- Rebuilding a sense of safety, reality-testing, and personal agency
- Understanding how the betrayal connects to deeper attachment wounds
- Setting clear expectations and boundaries around financial transparency in recovery
- Addressing co-occurring trauma symptoms, including PTSD, anxiety, and depression
For the Partner Who Has Betrayed
- Moving beyond denial and minimization toward full accountability
- Understanding the financial disorder as part of the larger addiction pattern
- Developing honesty practices and transparency structures that rebuild trust
- Addressing the shame and trauma underlying compulsive financial and sexual behavior
- Learning to tolerate vulnerability and intimacy without resorting to hiding
For the Couple
- Facilitated disclosure processes that reduce ongoing harm from omissions and partial truths
- Rebuilding financial and emotional intimacy simultaneously
- Creating new agreements around money, access, and transparency
- Working through grief together without one partner absorbing all the damage
Is Financial Infidelity A Betrayal Trauma?
Yes. Clinically and experientially, the discovery of financial betrayal — particularly when connected to a partner’s hidden sexual behavior is betrayal trauma. Betrayed partners frequently experience:
- Intrusive thoughts and flashbacks about the discovery moment
- Hypervigilance around financial accounts, statements, and partner behavior
- Difficulty concentrating, sleeping, or feeling safe
- A profound disruption of their sense of reality — “I don’t know what was real”
- Shame, self-blame, and distorted beliefs about their own worth or desirability
- Grief for the relationship, the future they believed they had, and their own previous sense of certainty
Betrayal trauma is a predictable human response to discovering that your most intimate partner has been deceiving you — often for years. It deserves support and clinical treatment, not minimization.
Who Debra Works With
Debra provides individual therapy, couples therapy, and intensive formats for:
- Individuals who have discovered a partner’s financial infidelity and are in acute distress
- Couples in early recovery from sexual addiction navigating concurrent financial disclosure
- Individuals in recovery from sex addiction working to make amends for financial damage
- High-net-worth individuals and couples managing financial betrayal involving significant assets
- Executives and professionals whose work environments have normalized financial secrecy or power-based financial control
- Therapists and clinicians seeking consultation or supervision on cases involving financial infidelity and sex addiction
Telehealth Financial Infidelity Therapy — Available Across Multiple States
Debra provides secure telehealth therapy to individuals and couples in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, Ohio, and Utah. In-person intensives are available for clients who prefer or benefit from a more concentrated treatment format.
Telehealth makes it possible to access one of the country’s most specialized practitioners regardless of your location — without the limitations of finding a local therapist with the specific training this work requires.
Taking the First Step
If you are living with the aftermath of financial betrayal — whether or not it is connected to a partner’s sexual addiction — you do not have to navigate this alone. The combination of trauma, grief, financial uncertainty, and relationship disruption is too complex, and too heavy, for one person to carry without support.
Debra Kaplan has spent decades working at the intersection of sex, money, and relationships. She understands the specific shame, confusion, and devastation that financial infidelity produces — and she knows what effective healing looks like.
