Time for some milky and stories!

Time for some milky and stories!

Let me preface this by saying that everybody, in all walks of life, from all economic strata, can and do have serious problems that talk-therapy is an important tool for.

The Guardian did an exposé this weekend on wealthy psychiatry. It. Is. Amazing.



Dressed in comfortable pants and a flannel shirt, Cockrell, a former Wall Street worker turned therapist, spends large parts of his days walking through Central Park or the Battery Park in downtown Manhattan near Wall Street, as a confidant and counsellor to some of the New York’s wealthiest. “I shifted toward it naturally,” he said of his becoming an expert in wealth therapy. “We are trained to have empathy, no judgment and so many of the uber wealthy – the 1% of the 1% – they feel that their problems are really not problems. But they are. A lot of therapists do not give enough weight to their issues.”

And as they stroll through Manhattan, what issues are America’s 1% struggling with? There is guilt over being rich in the first place, he said. There is the feeling that they have to hide the fact that they are rich. And then there is the isolation – being in the 1%, it turns out, can be lonely.

“The Occupy Wall Street movement was a good one and had some important things to say about income inequality, but it singled out the 1% and painted them globally as something negative. It’s an -ism,” said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a wealth psychologist and founder of the Wealth Legacy Group. “I am not necessarily comparing it to what people of color have to go through, but ... it really is making value judgment about a particular group of people as a whole.”

Fair enough. You're rich. You have it all. What are you dealing with that doesn't seem like a real problem?Oh. Those aren't problems. That's your conscience screaming at you from that tiny lock box sitting where your heart used to be. The rich are historically vilified, Guardian writer Jana Kasperkevic points out. However, the new extremes of our income inequality have lead to a real boom for therapists willing to say super insane shit.[my emphasis]

AHAHAHAHAHA. I believe it was Three 6 Mafia that said that it was "Hard Out Here for a Pimp"—it was as stupid and self-serving a statement then as it is now. What say you, Barbara Nusbaum, someone that the Guardian article calls an expert in money psychology.



“There is a fair amount of isolation if you are wealthy. We are all taught not to talk about money. It’s not polite to talk about money. In itself, ironically, it’s harder to talk about having money than it is to talk about not having money. It’s much more socially acceptable to say: ‘I am broke. Things are hard.’ You can’t say: ‘I have a ton of money.’ You have to keep a lot of your life private except in small circles.”

First off, that's not irony. The reason you can't talk about money when you have a lot of it is because so many more people do not have money. If you talked about how much money you had all of the time you would probably get robbed by someone, who decided they were tired of not having any money. It is also frustrating for most people to hear about how the Pilates instructor at the club isn't as attentive as one might wish them to be when you are one paycheck away from being evicted or losing your home.

Everyone has problems but if your problems are feeling isolated by your wealth then you should follow that through and do something about that. Create a budget for how much you spend on therapists in a year, the ones that walk with you in Central Park and listen to you feel so sad about being rich. Take that dollar number and then think of how you could help people that don't have your terrible financial burden, using whatever that paltry sum is. I will bet you 50 years worth of this bullshit therapy won't give you the same results.

You can send your check to me later.