Breaking free of the gilded cage — navigating shame, relationships, and the weight of wealth
Part 5 of 5: Beyond the Golden Ghetto
"This village can be a gilded cage," the pastor said. She sat in my living room in the Swiss Alps, holding a mug of warm herbal tea. It had been an intense but liberating hour. I had been sharing my fifth step—a part of the recovery process—a kind of confession delving into one’s moral inventory, focusing on resentments, the causes, how we were affected, our part in each cause, and our fears. When I described my problem with living in the idyllic place I lived—as suffocating—she had made that statement.
Her words struck a chord bringing me back to childhood. When I was around four or five, I enjoyed exploring the rooms of the French castle where we had moved to a few years prior from the Swiss Alps when my parents separated.
From the silk-covered Louis XVI loveseat, I loved playing with a golden cage that sat on a marble side table. Inside, a bird perched, its feathers real, its beak perfect—but it sat frozen, as if caught mid-song. I reached out and lifted the cage, and twisted a windup knob underneath. It reminded me of the music box in my old room back in the mountains. The bird came alive. Its beak opened, its head turned, and it chirped. It seemed so real.
But even then, I knew it wasn’t real.
The gilded cage: ornate, beautiful, and intricate. It captivates the eye, but inside sits a mechanical, confined, controlled creature.
Wealth can feel much the same. It is beautiful, alluring, enticing. But in reality, it holds shame, expectations, and burdens.
In this fifth and final post of the Beyond the Golden Ghetto series, I invite you to explore how you might escape the gilded cage.
The silent weight of shame
Having shame is better than being shameless. John Bradshaw, as cited by Jessie O’Neill in her book The Golden Ghetto, writes in his book Healing the Shame That Binds You that shamelessness occurs when a person denies or represses shame so much that they behave in a grandiose, arrogant, “better than,” moralizing, or patronizing way. Such people will often be the first to declare that they feel no shame. They will also rage, transferring their shame onto others.
There are two types of shame. Healthy shame temporarily lowers pride, reminding us of our fallibility and encouraging us to be humble. It provides an opportunity to grow. Toxic shame, on the other hand, is the core feeling that there is something intrinsically wrong with us. Bradshaw explains that toxic shame stems from unmet and invalidated childhood emotional needs. Key causes include perfectionism, neglect or abuse, enmeshment, and codependency. Enmeshment, for example, occurs when individuals feel responsible for the emotions of others, i.e., a child feels responsible for satisfying their parent’s emotional needs. Bradshaw also describes how shame can bind to other feelings—so whenever one experiences any emotion, shame immediately follows.
There are specific beliefs around affluence that feed into toxic shame. One such belief is that for someone to be rich, others must be poor. For example, my attempt to blend in with my neighbors in the Swiss Alps—which I wrote about recently—was driven by the knowledge that my neighbors had this belief.
This belief that one is benefitting at the expense of others creates guilt. For inheritors, the guilt is extreme.
“Because inheritance is entirely passive, it bypasses guilt and becomes shame,” writes O’Neill.
“I don’t experience shame,“ you might say. But if you tense up when people come to visit and your home is a mess, you are experiencing shame.
O’Neill writes, “Wealthy people often feel compelled to prove to the world that they are, in fact, ‘working’; e.g., the society matron’s hectic philanthropic activities, a wealthy heir creating and going to an ‘office’ or studio that is totally useless or unnecessary.”
But what is the definition of work? Work is “activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.” By this definition, staying home to care for children, managing investments, or working on one’s mental health is indeed “work.” Yet many of my clients feel shame that they are not working because they lack a traditional job or entrepreneurial pursuit. These same clients, however, manage family lives, stay present for their children, and oversee multiple fund managers—all of which require significant effort and purpose. Their belief surrounding their worth is dictated by doing—not being. This impacts their happiness.
Many times, boyfriends have told me to “get a job” because they wanted me to be like them. They failed to see what I do on a daily basis.
“The main function of shame becomes to drive us—away from knowledge of our true selves,” writes O’Neill. “Because we believe we are flawed beyond redemption, it becomes a matter of survival for us to create a false sense of self.”
This sense of self often doesn't develop properly in wealthy families, especially if they are raised by surrogate caretakers who aren't given full discretion to set boundaries. A child who grows up without limits is likely to develop toxic shame. I was fortunate—our nanny had total discretion to raise me, setting limits and boundaries, and she did so 24/7. She was incredibly strict.
Most caregivers are not given full discretion to discipline children and avoid responding when a child acts out, depriving them of the opportunity to learn how to regulate emotions. A lack of response leaves a child without healthy emotional patterns to model. There is nothing worse than seeing a 50-year-old behave like a 2-year-old.
On the other spectrum, harsh punishment for expressing feelings is incredibly damaging. This is how emotions become stuffed. How many times do women in wealthy families hear: “Being angry is unladylike.”
Teenagers struggle today in finding out who they are. In today’s “reinventing yourself” culture, Instagram-perfect lifestyles that include sexualized bodies often encourage creating a false sense of self. It’s a kind of capitalistic objectification of a false self.
So how do you deal with shame?
With empathy and illumination. Cast light on it. Even the Bible uses scars as a symbol of healing shame. When Jesus shows his crucifixion scars to his disciples, this shows that such scars can be a source of redemption. Scars are testimonies of healing and growth and transformation. They can be used to inspire and help others. I’m not a particularly religious person, but this aspect of the Bible is lovely. I love that God sees these wounds as evidence of healing and vulnerability, not shame.
Echoing this theme in a more secular explanation, shame researcher Dr. Brené Brown observes, “If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive.”
Similarly, O’Neill writes, “Toxic shame can only prosper in the darkness of the unexamined mind and the unexpressed heart. When we bring it into the light, look at it, and tell the truth about it, eventually it can no longer hold us in its power.”
Another thing to get rid of shame is boundaries. Remember: boundaries are meant to keep you safe, but not control others.
Basically, every time you hear “should”—stop! Replace it with “could” or “get to.” Observe how your body responds to replacing the word.
“When we give because we feel as if we have to, or we should, our emotional state becomes clouded, angry, and tinged with resentment and shame,” writes O’Neill. “Shoulds are irrevocably tied with shame.”
Breaking free from the silent weight of shame requires us to name it, examine it, and expose it to the light of empathy. Only then can we begin to reclaim our true selves. And this means, we can now explore shame’s cousin: impostor syndrome and how we believe others see us. The two often hang together, especially for those with inherited wealth.
Impostor Syndrome
In 1978, psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes first identified Impostor Syndrome in their groundbreaking paper. They described it as the psychological pattern in which one downplays their achievements and believes that they are secretly a fraud undeserving of their accolades. While their research initially focused on high-achieving women, particularly white middle- to upper-class women between the ages of 20 and 45, we now know this experience transcends gender.
For those with inherited wealth, impostor syndrome becomes a big problem. The question isn't just "Do I deserve my success?" When your security comes through inheritance rather than through your own efforts, the fraud feelings are real. Each time you achieve something, such as getting into a school or landing an internship, you question your achievement.
This leads to either working yourself until burnout, as I did, or withdrawing entirely. When I became manager of my mother's newspaper at 25, I had to overcompensate, working myself to exhaustion to prove my worth. And more recently, I've also withdrawn, fearing that anything I might do in the realm of coaching and consultancy might confirm my perceived inadequacy. Both reactions stem from the same root: my struggle to separate my worth from my family's financial reputation.
But perhaps I've been asking the wrong questions. A powerful perspective comes from Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money. In a recent conversation with Andrew Huberman, he suggested examining our lives through the lens of future regrets. Write your obituary, he suggests. Will it mention the size of your house? How hard you worked? Or will it celebrate a life rich with experiences, meaningful relationships, and positive impact? I'd rather be remembered for having lived a long life filled with exercise and great times with friends and family, for having loved and helped my family, for helping children connect to the arts and healing, and for protecting the environment.
Finding meaning in your life might be the key to breaking free. But first, we need to address another aspect of the gilded cage - one that becomes particularly apparent in our closest relationships.
The weight of wealth in relationships
The gilded cage reveals itself most clearly in romantic relationships. As O'Neill observes, many men struggle with women who have greater financial resources than them. This discomfort often manifests in subtle ways—like my experiences with one boyfriend who suggested I "get a job," despite my writing a book, coaching, running a charitable foundation, managing three homes, and parenting two children alone. Often such men feel shame when describing their girlfriends to their friends.
Despite all the advances in the workplace, society still has expectations about gender and power. Men are still seen as the providers, and when that role is challenged by women with wealth, some men will try to control women.
And then comes the complication of not wanting to diminish a man’s masculinity by paying for stuff but wanting to be generous. In my experience, paying for men only decreases their self-esteem. And a man without self-esteem is not someone any of us would want to share a life with.
When partners suggest that our work isn't "real" or that we need to conform to traditional employment models, it feeds into the toxic shame that questions our worth beyond our wealth. It's another bar in the gilded cage—the expectation that we should somehow make ourselves smaller to fit societal expectations of gender roles.
To break free from this aspect of the cage, know in your heart that you have value beyond your wealth. Set boundaries around money. Find partners who don't have limiting beliefs around privilege and are secure enough to accept a woman with money. If they have a chip on their shoulder, run. Recognize that managing wealth IS real work. Build relationships based on mutual respect. Don't hide your wealth. Find ways to be authentic. Acknowledge the difficulties around money and relationships.
The burden of administrative overload
At the end of the day, managing the practical realities of wealth will not go away and this can feel like a type of cage. From managing trusts and investments to overseeing properties and philanthropic projects, the administrative burden can overwhelm even the most organized individuals. And this burden triggers our need for control, our trust issues, and our need for integrity.
If you are a control freak, like I am, the idea of letting strangers pay your bills or having access to your bank accounts is too scary. I also have a hard time letting others do things for me.
One client said he didn’t like to be reliant on others. I get it. Here’s how you can manage the load:
Delegate but create checks and balances: One client had one firm handle his investments, accounting, and legal work and then found out that things weren’t as he thought they were. As convenient as it might be, keep everything separate, making sure communication is happening between the firms. When hiring a financial advisor, ensure they are SEC registered, custodial banks have high credit ratings, adhere to fiduciary standards, and have no conflicts of interest or formal complaints against them.
Prioritize: What are the consequences if you don’t do something? Number tasks by consequence. For example, if you don’t file your taxes, you’ll have to pay fines. If you don’t take care of home maintenance, you might end up with leaks and damage.
Align decisions with personal values: What’s important to you? Is it preserving your family’s legacy, protecting the environment, teaching people to fish, or preserving cultural heritage? To clarify these priorities, consider hiring a coach or mentor to guide you.
Identify what you are good at doing: Delegate the tasks you’re not good at or don’t enjoy. Focus on what you excel at and let others handle the rest.
Simplification as liberation
In my old Life in the Swiss Alps blog, I wrote about simplification. The Swiss have limited space, and even the graves get dug up after 25 years to make room for the new dead. But if you think about it… the dead indigenous Americans would be burned with all of their possessions. Leave no trace. They didn’t want to leave burdens on the next generation.
I’m not suggesting that you burn all of your possessions, but simplifying can help you reclaim a sense of self. A favorite saying The Minimalists say: “Love people, use things, because the opposite never works."
During Thanksgiving, my daughter and I watched the Marie Kondo series. I had actually read her book many years ago. Decluttering physical spaces is a wonderful way to gain clarity and peace. The same goes with our calendars and our emotional baggage. I am writing down all of my resentments and fears, and working through them with a mentor.
Creating intentional routines becomes a form of liberation. Like chefs who clean as they cook, we can maintain order without becoming overwhelmed. I have a repeating task that says: log into Quickbooks and categorize 10 transactions. Guess what? This is the first year that my tax info will be ready on time!
Breaking free: from Gilded Cage to open sky
As Jessie O’Neill writes in the "Golden Ghetto,” finding peace and serenity isn’t about rejecting affluence and inherited wealth but using it with intention and purpose.
The gilded cage that once held me in Gstaad has become a launching point rather than a prison. Like that mechanical bird from my childhood, we too can transform from merely mimicking life to truly living it. The cage's gold need not confine us – it can become the foundation from which we soar.
