Friendships and Triangles: Part 2

Mercy Burton Russell helps families understand what happens when money, property, responsibility, and family relationships become entangled. Trained as a psychotherapist and specializing in multigenerational family systems, she works at the point where technical planning meets the emotional life of a family.

Mercy’s expertise is shaped through clinical training at UCLA, postgraduate study in Bowen Family Systems Theory, doctoral study of leadership and decades of work with individuals, families, and organizations.

Early in her career, she studied with Anne Bunting, PhD before continuing her training at the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family. Bowen theory is the foundation of her clinical practice, leadership and organizational consultation and international speaking. She works with a rigorous framework for understanding how anxiety, conflict and responsibility move through families across generations.

Her focus on wealth transfer developed from observing how financial anxiety reflects family dynamics. Investments, trusts, inheritance and ownership decisions rarely remain technical matters. They are shaped by loyalty, identity, sibling relationships, marriage and expectations carried across generations. Firsthand, she has experienced different family cultures around wealth. Her insight into underlying relational patterns predicts and corrects conflict emerging from even the strongest financial and legal planning.