Ken Huey 0:00

Hello, and welcome to The Voice of Hope. Today's guest is Martha Fling, founder and CEO of Casa Amara, and former president and CEO of the Ackerman Institute for the Family, where she led one of the leading institutions in family therapy while driving innovation in mental health, research, and education. Martha, thanks very much for being here with us.

Martha Fling 0:22

Ken, thank you for having me. I'm really excited. Thank you.

Ken Huey 0:25

Yeah. So I'm always interested to hear how people landed where they are. What inspired you to go from investment management to behavioral health and family therapy?

Martha Fling 0:35

Well, honestly, it wasn't a moment or a single decision. It's just been a series of life experiences that kind of all seemed to gel. And it really just started with the marriage. I married a therapist. I was a stockbroker, which sounds so quaint these days, and learned a lot just listening to him talk about families. And this was a few years ago. And it really opened my eyes. And you always know that families are important. Everyone has a family or grew up in one. And yeah, it really opened my eyes to see that we are so interconnected. And yet, a lot of times with families, things get stuck and it just doesn't work out, you know. Um, also, like growing up in Malibu, too, taught me that many families are not what you would call perfect and that money can't fix it. You had a lot of wealth, but you could see a lot of families in pain. There was divorce, abuse, substance use was really big and continues to be a huge problem. And especially for affluent families, because they have more access, there's less attention, there's so much going on, it's really a serious problem. But going back to wealth management, and how did I go from back and forth? The thing is with wealth management, you are dealing with families no matter what. And it's not much different. And there's all the complexities of what people want, what they're hiding, their own relationships. Sometimes you have a husband who doesn't want his wife to know what's going on financially. And that tracks back to their relationship where she is in the dark about a lot of things and it creates problems. You have it with children. They don't trust their children. I don't want them to know how much money we have. And that also creates friction because the kids are getting older and they want to understand what's going on, or they've been given so much because the parents are busy. And there is this tendency, especially if the first generation did not come from money, that you want to make things easier for your children. And trying to make things easier actually complicates things for the kids. And a lot of issues around self-esteem because everything's given to them and they're they just never get to be their own individuals.

Ken Huey 2:52

Yeah.

unknown 2:53

Yeah.

Ken Huey 2:54

Great wealth can come lots of possibility, but really I hear you're saying there's a lot of issues that can surface because of it.

Martha Fling 3:00

Yeah, absolutely. And I've seen close friends who said, Well, my kids got it made, they're gonna have money and an education. And they think that's all that is needed because they never had anybody modeled for them what success looks like, and yet having a healthy family life. And so they just think if they provide the children with everything they didn't have, that the children will have a happier life. And that just doesn't track in the real world. Yeah.

Ken Huey 3:30

How do you get somebody to understand that great wealth isn't going to solve their child's problems? What do you do to help them see the issues ahead of them?

Martha Fling 3:41

Well, I think that it is very hard. I can think of an individual that I was friends with for many years, and this subject would come up a lot. And I said, I can see where you're going to have issues with your children. They're going to be fine, they're smart, they'll be beautiful. I mean, he was European and just but had really struggled and worked hard all his life, but sometimes you can't, or it's too late. And I think that the other thing is you have to look at children. We're so used to them being considered to be things that had to be managed, their behavior. You're always talking about child behavior. And I think that when you don't see your child as having a very rich inner life that needs to be honored and respected and developed, I think that's a big issue for people. But it's not until the cracks really start to open up that families seek help.

Ken Huey 4:41

Well, all right. So you spent quite a bit of time at the Ackerman Institute to some amazing things. What shifts did you see in how families approach healing during that time?

Martha Fling 4:52

Oh, well, I think that would happen is that COVID, because this was around the time of COVID when I first started there as president. CEO and being chair of the board is one thing. It's very well-intentioned. You're raising money, raising awareness. But when you step into that office and you are taking control of the actual institute, it was really eye-opening. And at the same time, COVID hit. And so it kind of really took the wheels off the bus a bit for many families. But then in the same vein, I think what happened is that people started seeing, wait a minute, we need help. We're entitled to help. And I think that was, it was a real turning point, not just a disruption, because I think it continues to this day that people have started to really see that talking to somebody can really help. And then the stigma has also dropped, too. That's really important to understand because especially during COVID, everyone was suffering. And you'd have families that would never think about should we share this with anybody? But as they started seeing other people do it, and people were talking about mental health issues so much that they could start asking questions that they really didn't think they had permission to ask before. And I think that's been a real lasting shift in our culture and much needed one. Families stopped waiting for a crisis. They could start seeing that there were cracks that are were developing. And once again, the media speaking so much about mental health, I think really took down a lot of the barriers that people had. And they stopped postponing having some hard conversations. And that's very important. I think also that there was the need for the entire family to heal became a lot more clear, too. Families were, at least in urban areas in very close quarters. And a lot of the behavior, a lot of the issues, the emotions and trauma that's been papered over, and you can present a nice face to the outside world. Well, when your family is suffering and there's no place to go, I think that's what really started people looking at the entire family, not just the individual, that everybody needed to get some help. And I think that they really wanted something more meaningful in their lives and their relationships. And it it really did change things, I think.

Ken Huey 7:17

What are some of the patterns that you see in families that are struggling, but they don't realize it yet?

Martha Fling 7:25

Oh, well, I think there's this idea that as long as we're functioning outwardly, keeping schedules, driving success in your career, your kids have their sports, this and that, then that it just looks like everything's okay. And you can internally ignore a lot of things. I think that, and once again, I go back to COVID, it really started to accelerate the fact that you couldn't paper things over anymore. And I think that was really a change for them.

Ken Huey 7:59

Yeah, COVID was a real game changer. Do you see ripple effects even today from sort of the COVID experience that maybe we need to be paying attention to?

Martha Fling 8:10

I was just thinking about that this morning because I thought it was such a monumental crisis that the world went through, and yet we pushed it away as fast as we possibly could. In this country, we lost a million souls to COVID. And there's no memorial, no one talks about that, those numbers anymore. And I was reminded when there was the Spanish flu a hundred years ago, historians said the same thing happened then. It was so horrific and so many people died suddenly. And then as it kind of tampered down, tamped down, it was forgotten for many years collectively. And I think that's what has happened with COVID. It's been really interesting. Yeah. But there are the ripple effects still. But I think that they've come to understand that it's just not that kind of a trauma didn't happen to just one person. It happened to everybody. It happened to the family. And I think that it became more important that a family sees, gee, how are we communicating with each other? Do I feel safe expressing this emotion to another family member? And that's that I think it started to have people start coming back to therapy. I know a lot of people who started during COVID, then they stop for a while and now they're saying, okay, now that things have quieted down, I'm still struggling with some things. And they're going back to it. I'm not saying that everybody should be in therapy all the time, but if you have questions about how you are functioning in the world or how your family is, there's a lot of benefit to it.

Ken Huey 9:45

Well, you use the word, I think aptly, trauma from the whole COVID experience. So how do family dynamics help shape an individual's ability to cope with even that kind of trauma and have non-lasting effects?

Martha Fling 10:01

Well, again, it's how they communicate, how they handle conflict. You feel safe expressing emotions. And my family, they can either be a tailwind or they can be a headwind. And when a family can show up and validate feelings without really assigning blame, like, well, I don't like it when you are always like this. You don't do that. You talk about feelings, you don't talk about the person that becomes the feeling. And I think that when you have somebody that you want to help recover and with recovery, it's really important to show up and be steady, be able and willing to listen, not just to hear, but you've got to be able to really listen to each other and let somebody express how they feel. You might be upset hearing that, but you've just got to understand they're upset about having to express it. And I think that's really important. But if you don't resolve a conflict, if you have codependency or you're scapegoating a particular family member, or there's just a lot of patterns in your family where emotions are dismissed, it really underbine undermines individual treatment. And I've seen both sides of that. And I really strongly believe in treating the family as well as the individual.

Ken Huey 11:21

All right, you've gotten quite a foothold in the world of finance and now in mental health. How do those experiences influence the way that you lead today?

Martha Fling 11:30

Well, you'd be surprised. They're more connected than most people would think. I think that when I first got into wealth management, I was thinking, okay, it's just about investments. And that's really how I would just look at things. And then I began to realize that no, I've got to see the whole picture. And it's so wealth management isn't about numbers, it's understanding about basically what people are trying to protect. You know, you have families, you have legacies, relationships, what does the future look like? And there is the saying you learn very quickly that money is rarely just about money. And what carries anxiety, identity. There's a lot of unspoken family dynamics involved. And so you start realizing that this is a system, and you have to look at the situation holistically and then really question and have curiosity about what's going on beneath the surface. And that's really critical. When I joined Ackerman serving as the board chair, and then later on as president and CEO, it kind of gave me a front row seat to one of the most respected family therapy institutes in the world. And I got to see, I was so fortunate. I watched brilliant clinicians do transformative work, and I saw firsthand how profound the impact of family-centered care can do when it's done with intentionality and when it's done with rigor. I may not be a therapist, but I did understand the mission deeply. And over time I learned how to steward it during some really difficult years because of COVID. But the leadership position I was put in really taught me, well, basically, finance and mental health really gave me the ability to hold two things at once. You have to have operational discipline, but you have to have genuine compassion. And even though you run an organization and it requires strategy, requires financial sustainability, your structures, departments, all of that. That's one thing. But when you do it in the behavioral health space, none of that matters if you've lost the human thread. And I think that's something that I'm reminded of all the time. So you just have to lead from curiosity and not certainty. And it's interesting, but I used to think I was a very certain person. And I think over time I've just given that up. And curiosity is definitely a better way to approach any situation.

Ken Huey 14:15

So a beautiful sentiment. I'm appreciative of growing older and having a lot of my certainty fall by the wait side. I think I was so sure of myself and so sure that I had the answers for a long time. And it's really beautiful to let that go. What would you say about that?

Martha Fling 14:31

Honestly, it's three. When you finally can give yourself the grace, I think, to sit there and say, I'm not perfect. I mean, I tell my children I've never been a parent before, for instance. I've been a child and I've been a sister, but I had never been a mother. So, and mothering each child, it's a whole different experience again, too. And I think that it took me a while to finally give myself that. And that was really changing, life-changing for me.

Ken Huey 15:00

Yeah. How can parents become more aware of the emotional needs of their children?

Martha Fling 15:07

Oh, well, that's I think the honest answer kind of starts with it's kind of counterintuitive, but the awareness begins with the parent, not the child. And I think that when you look at children, we look at them and they their language is behavior. We're always waiting for them to say and I identify and communicate that I'm struggling. But children, especially little ones, they don't have the vocabulary for that. They don't have the life experience for that. What they have is behavior, and that can show up in tendency to withdraw, irritability, changes in sleep or appetite, acting out, or sudden they have a sudden disinterest in things that they love to do. Those behaviors are just showing you that there are unmet emotional needs. And a parent who learns to read behavior as a communication rather than as a misbehavior, you're miles ahead. And it's not something people are accustomed to doing. And the other thing is that when you're with your children and just being in the room, it's not the same as attention. And you can be there physically, but you're emotionally absent. And I think, and children know it immediately. And what they need a parent nearby, but they need a parent who is genuinely engaged and tuned in. And that means put the darn phone down, make eye contact, especially with little ones. Why don't you get down on their level? Instead of you've got a three or four-year-old, maybe you're six feet tall. Do you know how tall? I mean, that has got to be intimidating. I can remember being a child and looking up. I had a very tall uncle. I thought he was the giant of the fairy tales. And I think that when you really do look at your child in the eyes and you just focus on them without, and you're not trying to fix anything. Do not try to fix it. Don't try to redirect the behavior. Just have the quality of presence. And if you do that, even in small doses, it shows that your child that they're safe. That's safety. And then they can be honest. And then again, also ask better questions. When you ask how is school, it gets you fine. And when you ask an open-ended question, like what was the best part of your day? Or here's a good one. Was there anything that felt hard today? And invite something real in that answer. And it's a small shift in language, but it's a fundamentally different type of conversation, if you can understand. And it teaches children over time how to think about their day and to pay attention. And that's really developmentally what you want them to do. Again, it falls on the parent, and that's the part that often gets skipped. If you as a parent haven't examined your own emotional patterns that have been laid down your entire life, trust me, you're going to inevitably project them onto your children. If a parent was raised in a household where emotions weren't discussed, they may consciously or unconsciously just shut down a child's emotional expression. It's not out of malice, but out of discomfort with feelings that they never learned to process themselves. And so you have an awareness that comes with asking, what did I inherit and what do I want to pass on instead? And that is really probably the most important work you can start on in terms of your relationship with your children, especially when you're babies, and just really do the work yourself saying, I know what family I grew up in, and I really don't want to have that experience for my own child. So it involves work. Yeah.

Ken Huey 19:00

All right. We've got people listening that are first hearing about you, Martha, for the first time. Where would they find out more about Casa Amara or any of the work that you're doing?

Martha Fling 19:10

Well, Casa Amara will hopefully be opening by the end of August. We're planning. We're still in the startup stages, but we'll have a website, Casa Amara Recovery.com, and we're very excited about it. It's going to involve as much of traditional types of treating individuals who have co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders, chronic pain, trauma, things like that. There are so many new opportunities to explore what neuroscience is discovering. And these are treatments now that are evidence-based. And I think that when you are treating an individual in recovery, the cookie-cutter approach does not work for everybody. And you really have to sit down, spend time with that person to really understand what their struggles are, what their background has been, which incidentally is what I used to do in wealth management. I would have people come in and ready to write a check. Just tell us what you're going to invest in. And I would say, no, no, I need to get to know you first and understand what your dynamics are with your yourself, your family, and understand how we're going to work together. And so Costa Amara is about, well, the name Amara comes from the Nigerian word, and it translates into grace and kindness and healing. And that's really the ethos of who we are.

Ken Huey 20:38

Fantastic. Martha, it's always a pleasure to get to meet somebody who is really taking care and connection out into the world to combat really a scattered disconnected time. So thank you for the work that you're doing.

Martha Fling 20:50

Well, thank you. This has been really lovely.