"Life is difficult," M. Scott Peck makes eminently clear in his monumental best-seller, The Road Less Traveled. These are the book's opening words and its guiding premise. Life is a series of emotional and spiritual challenges, Dr. Peck assures us, and enlightened discipline-not more money-is our basic tool for coping with its problems and achieving our happiness and fulfillment. The bottom line is that we're all dealt a hand of cards at birth. Our success in life is based on how we play those cards, not on the number of chips we're given to play them. Because I'm an inheritor myself, with many friends and acquaintances-including most of my clients-who are inheritors as well, I have collected a fair amount of firsthand knowledge about the benefits and pitfalls of wealth, its bounties, its perils, and its luxuries, and the silken threads of tyranny those seductive luxuries can weave. What's more, I've discovered there are few resources for people who have experienced the dark side of wealth. Their problems are invisible to most of the professional community, their challenges unacknowledged by society at large, their pains and difficulties untended by the normal systems that comfort those who are born in other circumstances. This is curious because our affluent society is turning people over to this emotional limbo with incredible speed and abandoning them in this place where fulfillment is said to be abundant yet is almost impossible to find. I grew up in an environment of affluence, so I have an intimate, firsthand knowledge of the issues explored in this book. Again, though they might seem ludicrous to some, I assure you the challenges are quite real and can be painful to inheritors, for whom I bear much compassion and admiration for confronting their endemic challenges.

Approaching the meridian of my life, I contemplated my own hellish journey to the dark side and back, accepting that the trip down had been entirely of my own making, with Satan, no doubt, right there, cheering me on.
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