The following is an interview with Karen McCall, founder of the Financial Recovery Institute. Since 1988, McCall has counseled individuals, couples, and businesses through a holistic, transformational approach that results in a stable and secure financial foundation.

Barbara Bryn Klare, a communications consultant and award-winning finance writer, is the interviewer. Co-founder of an international business writing firm, she believes women write their own financial destinies. Visit her Personal Finance and Women and Money columns at SF Examiner.com or her blog, The UpSide of Money, which takes dry financial concepts – like saving and investing – and infuses them with a fresh, UpBeat approach.

Barbara Bryn Klare: Tell me about your background and why you started the Financial Recovery Institute.

Karen McCall: Quite honestly, I was a mess with money. 25 years ago, I had a horrible secret: I had a teak bowl on top of my fridge filled with unpaid bills I had never opened, some even from the IRS. I was overextended, naïve and in a fog about money. Even though I had a Pacific Heights address, and all the right clothes, I was in trouble. People often think, “How can a financial expert know how I feel?” So many people have shame and embarrassment in their relationship with money. I’ve been there.

BBK: How did you recover financially?

KM: First I went to a budget counselor. They gave me a monthly payment plan based on a budget THEY thought up. I couldn’t stick to it. My beliefs and attitudes about money hadn’t changed.

BBK: What was lacking in their method?

KM: I believe there is a gap that therapists, budget counselors, and even financial planners don’t fill and that Financial Recovery counselors can. CPAs give tax advice, financial planners teach how to grow and invest. Even therapists didn’t take my financial problems seriously – or didn’t know how to handle them.

To tackle your money problems effectively, you have to have strong practical skills AND the ability to go inward. At the Institute, we teach our counselors that the client’s process is 1 – first getting conscious and connecting with your money, 2 – assessing, evaluating and prioritizing, then 3 – making strong choices about earning, spending and saving. We teach about needs vs. wants, and learning to go from wanting to fulfillment. All our counselors-in-training go through the process themselves, so they develop awareness and empathy.

[Writer’s note: Financial Recovery counselors are certified by the Financial Recovery Institute only, which is not an accredited program. They cannot give financial advice.]

BBK: How many people has the Financial Recovery Institute helped, do you think?

KM: With the Ripple Effect, probably thousands. I have helped hundreds in my twenty-year career [Karen retired last year from counseling].

BBK: What has been the most rewarding part of Financial Recovery counseling for you?

KM: Having long-term relationships with my clients over the years. Many come back saying, “I can’t believe I am paying you and I have more money than before!”

Ultimately, it’s watching someone go from making do and doing without, in other words, living a life of deprivation, to going to a fuller, creative quality of life – a life of fulfillment and a vision for that life.

You can achieve clarity, understanding and peace with your relationship to money instead of anxiety, stress and chaos.

BBK: What’s on the horizon for you professionally?

KM: Well, I still get responses to my first book, “It’s Your Money.” It’s just a small book that I wrote! Now I am writing the book I always wanted to write about financial recovery. It will be out soon.