Blue Chip Issue 96

BLUECHIPCLIENT

BLUECHIPCLIENT ENGAGEMENT | Behavioural financeBrittle financial health:the male crisis hidingin plain sightWe talk about money scripts, disorders and dysfunctions as if allfinancial distress manifests in the same way. It doesn’t, and thisis especially true for men.Financial therapy and the psychology of financial planninghas begun to gain traction in recent years as legitimatefields that combine behavioural finance with emotionalinsight. However, the conversations in these fieldsgenerally flatten gender. Some men do not unravel, and theydo not explode or collapse in ways that are easy to diagnose.They rather perform, provide and stay composed, until theydon’t. What we are witnessing is not resilience, but containment,and it is breaking men from the inside out.I call this brittle financial health and cover this in-depth in myupcoming book Financial Therapy for Men published by Springer.What is brittle financial health?Brittle financial health is not financial anxiety, overspending,avoidance or the usual list of money disorders. It is the opposite.A hard-shelled posture of relentless control, perfection and stoicprovision that fuses financial behaviour with masculine identity.This is the man who loses his identity when he loses hisincome or source of earning. The man who equates net worthwith human worth. The man who smiles while bleeding insidebecause vulnerability is risk, and risk equals failure. And failure,for such a man, is annihilation, not just a setback.Masculinity does notneed defending.Brittle financial health hides in plain sight. It may also bethe underlying psychological factor in CEOs who pursueaggressive corporate strategies under the guise of strategy butare reacting to identity threat. It is in working-class men whosilently absorb the pain of lost status, economic irrelevanceor being outearned. It’s in the “breadwinner” afraid to speak,because in this cultural moment, when provision is paired withboundary-setting, it’s no longer seen as care, it’s recoded ascontrol. And in today’s discourse, control is suspect by default.70 www.bluechipdigital.co.za

CLIENT ENGAGEMENT | Behavioural financeBLUECHIPWhy it mattersWe are not just dealing with financial mismanagement; weare watching a slow collapse of narrative coherence. Men areconditioned to view themselves as protectors, providers and“heads of home”. When those scripts are destabilised, by job loss,economic shifts or by shifting gender roles, they don’t merelyadapt, many just freeze in place, and then disappear behindthe mask.Most men are not toxic,they’re just tired.The irony is that we often mistake these men for beingfine but their emotional shutdown, their compulsive overfunctioningand their strategic withdrawals are not signs ofhealth, but emergency mechanisms in disguise.Why financial therapy or psychology isn’t reaching themFor all its value, therapy often misreads male silence. Itassumes the issue is resistance and that men need to becoaxed into vulnerability. In this context, they are required to“open up” to heal. But what if that’s the wrong entry point?What if men aren’t refusing therapy, but are structurallymismatched to it? What if their silence is not avoidance, but asurvival mechanism?When you ask a man in brittle financial health to confess,cry or collapse, without first giving him a stable narrative oremotional scaffolding, you are asking him to dissolve theonly structure holding him together, and that is not healing,it’s demolition.Toward antifragile financial identityBrittle systems break while antifragile systems don’t justsurvive pressure but evolve from it. What men need is notcatharsis on demand but sequencing. Men need:• Identity diversification. More than one role in which tobe whole.• Behavioural elasticity. Permission to try, bend and shiftwithout shame.• Temporal anchoring. A long-enough timeline to absorb strainbefore collapse.This isn’t about defending masculinityMasculinity does not need defending. It needs decoding andretooling, not to be softer but to be more adaptive. A masculinitythat can carry weight without cracking and absorb risk withoutconverting all of it into silence or domination.Most men are not toxic, they’re just tired. And most menaren’t emotionally illiterate, they are simply emotion rationing.They are walking on cognitive budgets and psychologicaltimelines, because no-one ever told them they were allowed tofall apart, let alone rebuild.This is not a clinical problem aloneBrittle financial health shows up in marriages, in boardroomsand in capital markets. It’s the silent driver of coercive leadership,of financial disengagement, of male suicide. This is not just apersonal finance issue, it’s a systemic threat and we will keepmisdiagnosing it until we name it for what it is. What some menare going through is not resistance, not stoicism and not fragility.It is containment under siege.If you are a financial planner applying the psychology offinancial planning or financial therapy, a financial coach or apartner, stop waiting for the meltdown because it may nevercome. What is needed is not permission to feel, but space tohold on until the narrative scaffolding can be rebuilt. Becausesometimes, the bravest thing a man is doing… is not collapsing.And if you don't see it, you’re not looking closely enough. Prof. Prince Sarpong, PhD, CFP®, Associate Professor, Schoolof Financial Planning Law, Faculty of Law, University of theFree Statewww.bluechipdigital.co.za71