Sudden Wealth Syndrome: Trauma Stories of High Net Worth Individuals with Resh Joseph

0:01Light that spark fire nation, a JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Marketing Made Simple. Today, we'll be breaking down the sudden wealth syndrome trauma stories of high net worth individuals. To drop these vibe bombs, I brought Resh Joseph into EO Fire Studios. Resh is a leading psychotherapist specializing in treating trauma and sudden wealth syndrome in high net worth individuals, revolutionizing luxury rehab for lasting mental health and entrepreneurial success. In today's foundation, we'll talk about the unique aspects of sudden wealth syndrome and trauma.

0:39We'll talk about treating prisoners and addicts. We'll talk about supporting clients beyond their initial treatment, the triphasic model, and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Resh and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lance, is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business.

1:13Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever said to yourself, one day I will write a book? If yes, then I have an opportunity for you. Author 100 is a 100-day program where I will personally guide you one-on-one to create, write, publish, and market your book. I will provide daily guidance and mentorship every step of the way. Head over to author100.com to sign up for a free call with me to chat about the details. author100.com. Resh, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Hi, John. That's a very interesting question.

1:58I have a tendency to agree with the tradition laid down by Socrates a very long time ago, when he said that you're really only an intelligent or educated person when you have begun to appreciate the breadth of your own ignorance. And this was very carefully adumbrated by Bertrand Russell, Charles Bukowski and others in the 20th century when they said rather more crudely that the problem with the world is that the smart people are full of doubt whilst the stupid people are full of confidence. I've always felt that there was a level of accuracy to that. I distrust people who are certain. I always ask myself, what makes you so certain?

2:46What I do know of myself, I'm a man in my 50s, but what I do know of myself is the older I get, the more I learn, the better I become at what I do, the more uncertain I become, not less. And so to me, certainty is always a bad sign. I don't know if that's controversial, John, but that would be it for me. Now, Fire Nation, we're talking about sudden wealth syndrome, trauma stories of high net worth individuals. And Rush, the reality is a lot of people have very little to no sympathy for rich people. Why is that? I think, if I could again put it very, very bluntly, I think people labour under an assumption that wealth or extreme wealth is a sort of vaccination against human suffering.

3:43when one considers the prospect it becomes immediately apparent that it is no such thing that the human capacity for suffering is entirely independent of one's net worth or one's bank account and I think for a lot of people the confusion of or the conflation that money to some degree provides a sense of immunity or vaccination against the tribulations of life, the stresses of life, that that's a misconception that many labor under. And I think perhaps there's also some level of envy, jealousy, the idea that life isn't fair. Why do some people have so much whilst many, many people have so little?

4:34And so I would put these forward as what I think are the principal reasons why so little, so few people have any sympathy for billionaires who are suffering. So Rush, I want to dive into Highlands Recovery. It's a rehabilitation center in Sydney, Australia, that offers holistic treatment for these high net worth individuals who are suffering from trauma, from addiction, from mental health issues. Tell us more about this. The Highlands project is interesting to me because it highlights two things. The first thing that it highlights is an extension of what I previously said, which is that in individuals with high net worth, many of the difficulties we see with people with lesser means are not lesser, but actually exaggerated.

5:35So when we look at people with very high net worth, very often we find that the trauma and stressor related disorders that they suffer with are multiplied, are amplified, are greater. The severity is higher. So that would be the first reason. And the second reason, rather selfishly, was an opportunity for me, given the platform I've been given, where one of the principal considerations in constructing any clinical program is the limitations of money. You're limited by how much you can do because of how much you can spend. And well, this is one of those rare platforms where I was essentially told, build your vision, build the vision that you have of what really good treatment looks like.

6:28And someone else will take care of the money equation. And so I was presented with those two things. And the net result is the clinical program that I've built here at Highlands, which I think as closely aligns to the vision that I have of what good trauma treatment should look like. Now, give us some of the unique aspects of treating sudden well syndrome and trauma, because I think there's some confusion maybe around what that looks like. I mean, a lot of people are thinking about celebrity check-ins for addictions and things along those lines they might have seen on reality TV. So let's maybe dive a little deeper into the reality of what this is.

7:12If I begin with the term sudden wealth syndrome, I think it's useful to at least have, because it's not an actual recognized clinical syndrome. You know, it's a colloquial term that has come into use because more and more people are seeing this. So I think it's worthwhile to actually spend a little bit of time defining for ourselves exactly what sudden wealth syndrome is. I would define sudden wealth syndrome as a collection or a constellation of symptoms that present in an individual when that person has suddenly gone from one socioeconomic group, has jumped from that one to a much, much higher one, possibly the top tier.

7:56And that that jump in itself, the sudden shift from, say, socioeconomic group five to socioeconomic group one, that that shift alone can be a massive stress on the individual and cause them to maladapt in very, very specific ways. And those maladaptive strategies to deal with the sudden change circumstances are what leads to all of the difficulties and all the problems that then get exacerbated by the presence of the wealth. And the maladaptive strategies that I mentioned are specifically the first problem is that the struts, the supports, the family, the friends, all of the checks and balances that keeps the person level, keeps the person sane, keeps the person functional.

8:47Many of those struts and supports are suddenly unavailable to the person. And many of the people I've spoken to working here and in other places as well tell me, when you come into money in this way, when you succeed in life, suddenly there are lots and lots of people who want to be your friend for no other reason than access to your money. So you become paranoid, you become suspicious, you trust less. And so the first challenge in working with people who come into a place like this is actually getting them to trust us because they've learned over time. They've maladapted to this scenario where social struts, relationships, people are not to be trusted.

9:29There are also other kinds of avoidance strategies. The world becomes very threatening for a variety of reasons. And a lot of avoidance behaviours are developed as a result. One of which, by the way, is addiction. Viewed in this context, addiction is really an avoidance strategy. because when I'm high or when I'm drunk or when I'm engaged upon my addictive behaviour, I can be mentally at least somewhere else. The second cluster of symptoms we see or I very, very often encounter in these people are what we call arousal symptoms. And arousal here is not sexual. Arousal in the fact that the person is unable to soothe their nervous system.

10:16They're unable to calm themselves. They often swing between extremely high levels of anxiety, almost panic, aggression, agitation, irritability, a very elevated nervous state into a state of absolute collapse, neurological collapse, where they're depressed, lethargic, anhedonic, they don't enjoy life. They very often will come in with a long list of antidepressants they're taking. So that's the second group of symptoms. The third relates to what I call intrusive recollecting. They have very, very intrusive and ruminative thoughts that they can't get rid of. They have a mind that's just going 10 to the dozen.

11:02Fourth, the belief systems become very, very interesting. When someone has such a radical shift in circumstances, what is very often observable is that the belief systems that the person may have developed that supported them through difficult times or supported them through childhood and early adulthood, those thinking systems become fractured. And the person doesn't really know what to think about themselves. You know, they don't have a salient or a coherent or a stable view of themselves in relation to the world and other people and the future. And finally, if these individuals have been distressed for long enough, biological effects are observable.

11:48These people are discernibly ill. They will come in with a long list of disorders that have just puzzled their myriad doctors. They will very often have a history of having gone to clinics in Switzerland, clinics in Austria, clinics in the US, you know, clinics in every high net worth area you can think of trying to source a solution. But somehow the doctors can't seem to figure it out and many of these physical symptoms relate to an over activation of the immune and the inflammatory system and so there are these five broad categories of symptoms avoidance arousal intrusion cognitive and somatic that i look for and i would say in virtually all of the people i've encountered certainly here they would score fairly highly in all five of these domains.

12:46All right, Fire Nation, we have a lot more coming from Resh as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors. Picture this. You're at a party and someone asks you what you do as a marketer. How do you even begin to describe it? Not only do you brainstorm new campaigns, create compelling copy, dream up landing pages that will actually convert and generate leads, you also have to gather all the data to make sure it's even working. And tomorrow you'll do it all again. Marketers are spread way too thin, but HubSpot has a better way. With the help of Breeze, HubSpot's collection of AI tools and features like Content Remix, you can turn one piece of content into a whole suite of assets.

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14:40I've also traditionally published with HarperCollins, so I know a lot about the book publishing world and where most authors go wrong. I created Author 100 to share my experience and the lessons I've learned along the way, and I can't wait to share it with you. If you're interested in learning more, head over to author100.com and sign up for a free call with me. That's author100.com. Now, Resh, when you have somebody and you're treating them and you're trying to do all the right things and they're making progress because of the work that you're doing and, of course, the work that they're doing as well, and you see that kind of maybe in the bubble of Highlands recovery, and then individuals leave and they go back to the real world and maybe they're old triggers and things that are happening and they're surrounding themselves again with the wrong people.

15:30They don't have your support. They don't have your guidance. Talk about the importance of supporting clients beyond that initial treatment. That is such a brilliant question, John. It really is the$64 million question goes to the heart of everything that we do here. it probably is the single question that preoccupies me more than any other, which is, how do we keep the whole thing going after a person has left here? Well, I'll tell you what the research data tells us, because it's very accurate. It was done over numerous years. And what we've discovered from the data is that the success of someone when they leave an institution like this really comes down to four factors, four individual factors.

16:18By far, the most important factor is motivation. How do we sustain motivation when a person leaves a place like this? When they're in a place like this, motivation is handed to them on a platter. They, you know, everything is thought of, everything is done, everything is arranged. If they needed anything, it will be done all they really have to do is to roll out of bed and show up and so motivation is sort of a ready-made thing here but on the outside even with all of the access that they have keeping that motivation is a is a real key that's the first the second would be the ability to build some sort of community support i spend a great deal of time here on what i like to call the Highlands alumni.

17:05We now have a burgeoning alumni of individuals and what is observable is the people who do very well when they leave here stay in contact with each other. One of the things rather tantalizingly we have in the works is we're building our own app. We're building a purpose-made Highlands app that is going to use technology in order to create a digital community of alumni. And so that theoretically you will eventually get a platform where people who've been here five years ago can speak to and encourage and be supportive to people who've been here a month or less. So that will be the second. The third is the length and the intensity of treatment required.

17:54One of the terrible mistakes that institutions make is what I call a cookie cutter approach, where they think everyone needs to have the same length and the same type and the same intensity of treatment. not so. People are wildly different in their clinical needs and the ability of the institution to be flexible, nuanced and subtle and sophisticated in meeting those wide variety of needs and ever-changing needs, that's really key as well. And finally is the relationship that the clients build with us as an institution that trust is really critical that really keeps a lot of things going it keeps people coming back it keeps people attending the aftercare groups it keeps people attending the alumni events it keeps people engaged and so those are the four things john motivation support structures community length of treatment and trust and a therapeutic alliance that's based on the research data.

19:04And that's really what I try and deliver here and maximize as much as I possibly can. I'd like to end on the triphasic model. This is a model of treating both trauma and addiction. Can you expound upon that? Well, the triphasic model was first adumbrated in 1991 by a very famous, I don't know if I should call her a trauma psychiatrist. I don't think she'd call herself that, but a psychiatrist from the US nonetheless. Her name is Judith Herman and she wrote a monumental bestseller called Trauma and Recovery and she outlines the triphasic model for the first time here. It's really a method for treating trauma that many of us in the industry have utilized in the treatment of addiction as well because of the strong links and crossover between the two.

19:58And the triphasic model essentially says the way in which to treat or to help individuals with trauma is in three discrete phases. The first phase is referred to as stabilisation. Whatever the origins of the trauma, the net result has been marked instability in the person's life. Part of that instability is very often caused by a rampant addiction. A person who is self-soothing using vast amounts of alcohol or drugs has an inherently unstable life. And so the first port of call is we have to help the person to self-stabilize, self-soothe, get a handle on the symptoms that are causing such huge distress.

20:45And that's very present focused. It's very skills based. It would be synonymous with the USVA program, for example, that's entitled Seeking Safety. That's a stabilization program. So that's the first phase. Second phase called reprocessing, which I think is a misnomer, should really be called processing because many of these people haven't processed anything to begin with. This is the past focus, non-skills based phase where the person who's now stable enough goes back and looks at the events that have led to where they are in the present moment. And then what happens is those memories are directly addressed through specific therapies like EMDR or cognitive processing therapy or somatic experiencing.

21:34There's a whole variety of ways in which what we do is we look to radically reduce and hopefully extinguish the distress that those memories cause. The third phase is reintegration. And that's really about the future, how the person is going to move into their future, make their lives meaningful and purposeful, build the sorts of relationships that are nurturing and that they want to be in. And so you have these three phases, the first that deals with the present, the second that deals with the past, and the third that deals with the future. And that's really what we try and do here at Highlands.

22:14So Resh, you've shared a lot today about the work that you're doing and whom you're serving. What would you say is the one takeaway you really want to make sure our listeners get from the entire conversation today? I would say, give as a one bullet point takeaway, that there is hope. One of the difficulties with something like this is that people lose hope. They lose hope of ever being able to lead a normal life, of living a life that is free from very distressing symptoms. they despair at the idea of ever being in a relationship or trusting other people I would want to say to people there is hope pick up the phone call someone Fire Nation there is hope and Resh if Fire Nation wanted to connect with you wanted to learn more from you what is your call to action for our listeners today if they wanted to learn from us or they've wanted to connect with us I'm very easy to get hold off you can go to our website highlandsrecovery.com.au the way in which to get hold of me you can get hold of me through the email address that's on there or the phone number just pick up the phone and call us write us an email I've also written a book that is available on our website which we're now making available to people and yeah get in touch we'd love to chat Fire Nation you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with you've been hanging out with RJ and JLD today.

23:49So keep up that heat. For links to everything we talked about, everything that Resh just mentioned, visit eofire.com, type Resh, R-E-S-H in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. And Resh, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Been a pleasure, John. Thank you for having me. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Resh for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation. Over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, and I've created a revolutionary 17-step roadmap to your financial freedom and fulfillment.

24:27I put it all into my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. The Common Path to Uncommon Success is a step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. James, visit UncommonSuccessBook.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lance, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented.

25:03The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever said to yourself, one day I will write a book? If yes, then I have an opportunity for you. Author 100 is a 100-day program where I will personally guide you one-on-one to create, write, publish, and market your book. I will provide daily guidance and mentorship every step of the way. Head over to Author100.com to sign up for a free call with me to chat about the details.

25:44Thank you.