text: Intermediate 
  Clay Cockrell is sitting in his of ce across the street from 1 Central Park West, the address of the Trump International Hotel and Tower. In front of the tower is Central Park, where Cockrell holds his popular walk and talk therapy sessions.
  Cockrell, a former Wall Street worker who is now a therapist, spends large parts of his days walking through Central Park or the Battery Park in downtown Manhattan near Wall Street, as a con dant and counsellor to some of New Yorks wealthiest people
  Many of the extremely wealthy  the 1% of the 1%  feel that their problems are really not problems. But they are, he says.
  So, what issues do Americas 1% have? There is guilt because they are rich, 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% can be lonely.
  Counsellors argue that things have become worse since the  nancial crisis and the discussion about income inequality brought on by movements like Occupy Wall Street.
  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% as something negative, said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a wealth psychologist and founder of the Wealth Legacy Group. The media, she said, is partly to blame for making the rich feel like they need to hide or feel ashamed.
  Traeger-Muney runs a global business and specializes in working with inheritors, who often get a bad reputation in the press. Sometimes, I am shocked by things that people say. You would never refer to another group of people in the way that it seems perfectly normal to refer to wealthy people.
  Its really isolating to have a lot of money. Peoples reactions to you can be scary, said Barbara Nusbaum, an expert in money psychology. We are all taught not to talk about money. Its not polite to talk about money. But its harder to talk about having money than it is to talk about not having money. Its much more socially acceptable to say I am broke. Things are hard. You cant say I have a ton of money. You have to keep a lot of your life private.
  As a result, Cockrell says, the rich usually hang out with other rich Americans who understand them and their problems.
  In the US, over the last three decades, the number of extremely wealthy people has been increasing. According to research from Spectrem Group, in 2014, the number of US households with $1m or more  excluding the value of their main home  increased by 500,000 to 10.1m. Households worth $5m or more reached 1.3m and 142,000 households are now worth $25m or more.
  Since the 2008  nancial crisis, the income gap has grown and the situation has gotten worse for the wealthy, Cockrell said. The main reason? Not knowing if your friends are friends with you or with your money.
  Someone else who is also a billionaire  they dont want anything from you. Never being able to trust your friendships with other people, I think that is dif cult, said Cockrell. As the gap has widened, the rich have become more and more isolated.
  These are real fears of the richest of the rich. In 2007, the Gates Foundation and Boston Colleges Center on Wealth and Philanthropy started to document what it felt like to be in Americas 1%. For the next four years, researchers surveyed 165 of Americas richest households  120 of those households have at least $25m. The report, The Joys and Dilemmas of Wealth, was 500 pages long and seemed to prove the old saying that money cant buy happiness.
  Wealth can stop you from connecting with other people, said the wife of a tech entrepreneur who made about $80m. Some Americans keep their wealth secret. We talk about it as stealth wealth. There are a lot of people that hide their wealth because they are worried about negative judgment, said Traeger-Muney. If wealthy Americans talk about the problems that come with their wealth, people often say Oh, poor you. There is not a lot of sympathy there, she said.
  Speaking in his soft, soothing voice that makes you want to tell him all your worries, Cockrell said that a common mistake that many of his wealthy clients make is letting their money define them.
  If you are part of the 1%, you still have problems and they are real to you. Even when you say, I dont have to struggle for money, there are other parts of your life. Money is not the only thing that de nes you, he said. Your problems are real.