Derrick A.
Mason
Founder, Human Nature Advisory
“It’s impossible to be fully human by yourself.”
On first read that sounds paradoxical, but nothing is more true.
In 28 years of working with people, 17 of them in clinical marriage and family therapy, I’ve learned something that won’t appear in any diagnostic manual: your degree of mental health is directly correlated to the quality of your closest relationships. Not your individual resilience, not your coping strategies, not your mindset. It’s the state of your relationships that matters most.
Most people know this but they can’t necessarily name it. They know that when things are genuinely good in their closest relationships, everything else in life feels manageable. When those relationships are broken or strained, it doesn’t matter how well everything else is going. The weight of that strain follows you everywhere. The holiday dinner where the tension is palpable for days before you even get there. The family vacation that everyone agreed to and nobody wanted. The conversation you keep putting off because the last time you tried went badly. Nothing got resolved and some things got much worse.
What I kept seeing in clinical practice was this: whatever brought someone to see me was rarely the real problem below the surface. It almost always had roots in a long-standing pattern of unhealthy relationship dynamics. The individual wasn’t the problem. The deep-seated interaction patterns were. The more time I spent working with couples and families, the more I started recognizing the same patterns in a different context entirely: families that also ran companies together.
When family and business intersect, the relational dynamic doesn’t stay at home. You can’t hear what your cousin has to offer in the strategic planning meeting when you’re still hurt by what he said at Thanksgiving. You can’t have a productive conversation about the succession plan when the real argument, the one nobody is naming, is about something that happened thirty years ago. The business problem and the family problem are the same problem, just showing up in different rooms.
In family office situations the dynamic becomes more complex still. The wealth creates structure: trusts, governance documents, investment committees, family councils. That structure creates the illusion that everything is being managed well. However, documents don’t resolve resentment. Governance frameworks don’t repair a relationship between siblings who haven’t been honest with each other in twenty years. Wealth both concentrates pressure and removes the natural friction that forces people to work things out. The more generations that are involved, the more entrenched the patterns, and the higher the stakes riding on patterns that nobody has been able to bring to the surface.
The more I understood this overlap, the more I realized that nobody is doing this work. Not the estate attorney. Not the wealth manager. Not the family business consultant. Each of them has their own strengths that are crucial to both business and family office success. But those skill sets don’t include resolving relational dynamics. So they work around the relationship problems, refer them out, or quietly hope they resolve on their own. It isn’t their training and it isn’t their lane. The gap that leaves is real, and the cost of that gap is high.
That’s why this practice exists.
The clinical foundation
The theoretical framework underlying this work is not a single methodology. It is a set of lenses developed over decades of clinical practice, each of which illuminates something the others do not.
Murray Bowen’s family systems theory — the idea that the problems presenting in any individual are better understood as the product of a relational system than as the property of a single person. Triangulation, differentiation of self, emotional reactivity under stress: these concepts were developed in a family context, but they describe with precision what happens in any group of people navigating shared stakes and unspoken history. There is perhaps no greater pressure on family relationships than shared ownership and inherited wealth. The dynamics Bowen described in clinical families are the same dynamics that play out in family businesses and family governance structures, often with higher financial stakes and longer timeframes.
The Gottman method, developed through decades of research on what makes relationships functional under pressure — specifically, the patterns of communication that predict breakdown long before the breakdown becomes visible to the people inside it.
Carl Rogers’ foundational work on active listening and the conditions required for genuine change — the insight that people do not change because they are told to, but because they feel genuinely heard. This shapes not just how sessions are conducted but how the entire engagement is structured.
And the thinking of Jordan Peterson on responsibility, aspiration, and the cost of avoiding hard truths — the recognition that meaningful change requires confronting what is difficult, not managing around it indefinitely.
Background
The work I do here is not therapy. It draws on everything therapy taught me about what actually changes people — and what doesn’t. The difference, in my experience, is always whether someone is willing to look directly at what’s actually happening, rather than the version of it that’s easier to live with.