TRANSCRIPT
I am going to take a risk and talk about a subject that not only is near and dear to my heart, but is very, very painful for me. And that is the subject of being disinherited.
When I was a child, my mother’s father had some money. He had been a psychologist. I don’t think he’d been a good one. He’d been a psychology professor. I also don’t think he’d been a good one. He’d been an author of psychology books. I actually have one. I looked it over, I read it, I didn’t think it was anything special. But he was in the system. He was a conventional guy in a lot of ways, and he made good money and he saved money.
One of the ways that he controlled his children was by using the inheritance as a manipulative tool. And so when he was on the outs with one of his children, he would say, “Well, I might cut you out of the inheritance.” I think he actually for a while did cut one of his children out of the inheritance. He later put that child back in.
As a therapist, he actually had an affair with one of his clients, and he put her in his inheritance. He gave her all sorts of stuff. And I remember when I was a kid hearing my dad talk about this with me and saying what a disgusting thing this guy was doing. What a disgusting thing my grandfather was doing, that he was manipulating his children with money. And he was even trying to control their lives from the grave. He wanted to control their lives from after he died by using this inheritance to get them to do what he wanted.
And what he wanted to do was to have them pay attention to him, love him, defer to him, bury their feelings for him, and just couch out to him, worship him, be good little soldiers in his army of life. And I remember as a child thinking, “Yeah, that really makes sense. It’s a disgusting thing to manipulate your children with money.” But I didn’t really think about it that much in my personal life. I had enough of what I needed.
I went off and I went off to college and became independent myself, became financially independent. I didn’t really worry about inheritance that much until my 30s came along. And what happened in my early 30s is I was putting together the pieces more and more about how misused and mistreated I had been by my own parents and how manipulative and horrible they were to me at some level.
But it wasn’t even that so much. What really I figured out, it was very simple. The more I take distance from them, at least temporarily, to learn about who I am and to heal, the happier and healthier I feel. The better I feel about myself, the more I feel I have self-esteem, clear thinking. I don’t feel violated by them.
So in this particular situation, in the scenario that I’m going to talk about now, I took about two years of distance from my dad. I think we exchanged emails and letters a couple of times. Maybe we talked on the phone a couple of times. But he was always pressuring me, “Come on, let’s meet, let’s see each other, let’s have lunch.” And I didn’t want to do it because what I had realized up to that point is every time that I saw him, every time I spent time with him in some way or other—and usually there were a lot of different ways—he would invade my life. He would say nasty things, he would cut me down, he would try to hurt me psychologically. He was trying to destroy me.
He didn’t like my independence. He didn’t like my independent thinking. And most importantly, he did not like my healing process. And the main reason he didn’t like my healing process is because so much of my healing process was figuring out how badly he had treated me and grieving from it, recognizing the mistreatment, recognizing the trauma and the violation, and grieving the loss. And he didn’t like that. It didn’t make him look good in his own mind.
And he had no desire to look at himself, no ability maybe even to self-reflect and to say, “Ooh, I have done those horrible things that really actually had a negative effect on my son.” And so because of that, it was like not worth it for me to be around him. He was making my life worse, and my life, on the other hand, was getting better and better.
However, I never looked at taking distance from him, breaking from him, as something that was a permanent thing. It was just something that I was doing day to day, as they say, one day at a time, just learning how I felt and learning, “Oh, this is actually working for me.” So maybe even tomorrow or the next day, I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to have contact with him.
Well, my dad did not like that. One could say narcissist or whatever he was. I don’t really like the word, but I think he fit the qualification. But what happened to him is he took it as a major affront that he couldn’t control me. And so what I heard through the grapevine of my family is that my father had disinherited me. He had written me out of the will, and everything that was supposed to go to me—stuff that I never even thought about—actually, I didn’t even think about his will. I was at a young point in my life, my young adult life, early 30s, where it was like my dad’s money was the farthest thing from my life. I was working to build my own existence and my own independence.
But then I heard he was going to give everything that was supposed to go to me to other people. And I thought, “Oh, how awful.” But then I reflected back on how he talked about my grandfather doing that exact same thing and how he spoke about my grandfather with disgust, with disrespect, that this was a bad thing.
And also I thought about how many times when I’d been a kid, my dad had shown our house to me and said, “Daniel, someday this house is going to be yours. Someday this land is going to be yours. Everything that I have someday will be yours. This is yours now, and it will be yours always.” And I remember as a kid thinking, “Well, yeah, I mean, his son, that’s natural. I guess that’s what happens. Children inherit what belongs to their parent,” especially a parent who makes it clear how offended he is by the idea of another parent not giving to their children in an inheritance.
And then fast forward 20-something years, and suddenly my dad, I’d heard, had disinherited me. Well, my first thought was disbelief. I couldn’t believe he would have done such a thing. And so I called him up and I said, “Dad, is that true that you’ve disinherited me?” And it was like he’d been waiting for that call because it was like a floodgate opened, and he suddenly raged at me and went off. “Why should I give you anything? You don’t talk to me, you don’t love me, you give me no respect, you give me no empathy, you give me no attention.” And he went on and on and on and on with this laundry list of all the reasons why he had done the right thing.
And when he was done with his litany—because I’d learned as a child, I’d been forced to learn as a child that when my dad was going off on a litany of rage of all my bad qualities, there was no stopping. And he was a horse that had escaped from the barn. And so I waited until he was done, and he kind of worked himself out of his frenzy. And I said, “So it’s true, you did actually cut me out of your will?”
He said, “Yes, I did.” And I was just like, “Okay, that’s all I wanted to know.” And I said, “I don’t want to talk anymore.” So we got off the phone, and then I remember what I did. I sat back and I just cried. And I didn’t cry because of the loss of the money. I didn’t care about the money. I didn’t need his money. I cried because it was a realization that my dad didn’t love me and never had loved me and didn’t care about me and that the way he treated me and the way he thought about me was only…
In relation to what I could give him, how I could meet his needs, but they weren’t even really his needs. Really, what he wanted me to do was to meet the unresolved needs that he still had from his childhood. The needs that his abandoning, horrible parents had never met. And the irony is, my grandfather, who was on and off disinheriting his children and giving money to his girlfriend and whatever, that wasn’t even my dad’s father. My dad’s father was even worse than that. My dad’s parents were even worse. My dad’s parents hardly loved him at all, and he was open about that. And when my father’s parents died, they didn’t give him anything. You know what they gave him? I think they gave him a few thousand dollars in money, and they gave him a few thousand dollars in debts. So he had to use their money. He had to spend time working out their estate to pay their debts. I don’t think he got anything from his parents, and that really hurt him. I remember him telling me that when I was a teenager. And yet here he was, turning it around just a couple of decades later and doing the same thing to me in his own way, manipulating with money.
I remember thinking about it, and I still think about it because I haven’t spoken about it with him. And whatever, it’s been over 10 years, 15 years, something like that, that he’s still doing that. For all I know, he still has written me out of his will. But the thing that really got me, the thing that got me most, and it’s a double-edged sword, the painful side of it still lives with me. The realization that my father really doesn’t love me. My father never really loved me. My father doesn’t really have the capacity to love. He wasn’t loved enough on the deep inside. And yes, actually, the irony is he did a better job than his parents did, and my mom was better than her parents were. So in a way, I was loved lots, lots more than my parents were. But they were still so deficient, and my dad’s love was so conditional and so mixed up, and it still is. And it’s like, huh, still painful for me to realize. Still painful for me to realize that he would be willing to cut me out because I didn’t behave.
But then there was the other side, and this is the flip side of the coin, the other side of the sword, as it were. And that’s the side that I’m glad for this realization. I’m glad to know the truth because I also realized I don’t have to live beholden to my dad. And that just because he was trying to manipulate me by writing me out of the will, I don’t have to be manipulated. And this is the other thing: I saw my mom, and I saw my mom’s siblings throughout my whole childhood jumping whenever my mom’s father would say jump. My dad even would jump whenever my mom’s father would say jump. He would manipulate with money. He would manipulate with the will. And again and again and again and again, it worked. They were living to get this money, but the money really represented love. They still wanted to get his love, and he was never going to give it except if they played his game. And then he would dole out little pieces of love.
The difference with me in my 30s, now in my 40s, late 40s, is realizing I didn’t have to do that. I didn’t need my dad’s love anymore. And the irony being, even if my dad did love me, did change, it wasn’t going to make a difference because the problems I had in my life, the needs I had for love, and my buried unconscious childhood traumas, that unconscious buried need for love was something that they couldn’t solve anyways. My dad and my mom, no matter how much they tried to love me, which they really couldn’t do anyways, even if they did, it wasn’t going to change anything because now it was an inside job. They broke it, you fix it. I had to figure out how to heal myself. I had to figure out how to grieve and grow up and parent myself. And so in a way, this freed me from the inheritance. I didn’t have to worry about getting his money. Also, I could work, and that was good for me. It was good for me to be out in the world, working, making my own money, being a regular healthy part of society, being a part of the workforce, making my own money, doing things that I earned my own money, not waiting for free money in lieu of love.
And so that’s what I think about when I take a little step back from this whole idea of being disinherited. That yes, I was disinherited. My parents are divorced. For all I know, my mom has disinherited me too. I wouldn’t be surprised. That’s certainly within the realm of something that she would do. But I don’t know. I’ve never asked her, and I don’t wish to ask her because in another way, I’m free. I’m an adult, and I don’t care, and I don’t want to know.
And then there comes down to the other question: does a parent have a right to disinherit their child? Well, legally, in some countries, from what I understand, they actually don’t have a right. They don’t have a legal right. You cannot just inherit your children. But in the United States, you can. You can legally do that. Legally, my dad and my mom, they have a right to disinherit me. They can do whatever they want. But on an emotional level, does a parent have a right to disinherit their child? That’s a little bit trickier for me because I can certainly think of scenarios where I think, yeah, why would a parent want to give to their child? Especially if their child is really doing screwed up things. Let’s say has a terrible drug addiction or a gambling addiction or spends their money horribly or unwisely, or the child doesn’t do anything to actually behave like an adult.
Or I think of these super rich people who have worked so hard to make all this money, and their children just basically suck off their parents’ money and don’t do anything to earn it. And maybe by not giving that much money or not giving any money to the children, it actually sets up the children to be in a healthier position to go off into the world and behave as adults. So those are the examples I can think of. Or maybe it’s okay. Maybe you could argue at least that it’s okay, there’s a right for a parent not to give to their child. But even those cases, I could still come up with arguments in my mind where disinheriting a child is very disrespectful.
I can see arguments like, for example, the child who’s a drug addict and the parent, or the gambling addict, and the parent doesn’t want to give anything to the child. So often what I can see under the surface is actually it was the parent’s deficiencies, the parent’s violations when that child was young that set that child up to have these problems. Now, does that mean that the parent owes the child love, owes the child money? Maybe not. But I still think when a parent does disinherit a child, there’s something very confusing, disrespectful about it.
And then when the parent isn’t rich, when there’s not a lot of money at stake, and let’s say the child hasn’t done anything wrong, like in my case, I don’t think I actually did anything wrong at all with my parents. Actually, I think what I did is I honored their creation. I became more healthy. I became more mature. I became less traumatized. It wasn’t like I became an addict. It wasn’t like I became a disturbed, dysfunctional member of society who was harming other people. Actually, I did the opposite. I became healthier. I became less traumatized. I became less of an addict, except I didn’t meet my parents’ unconscious needs. I didn’t become the little boy who they could control as much. That’s why my dad has disinherited me. And is that right? I don’t think it is right. I think it’s disrespectful.
So for me, if I had children, I think it’s only fair that when you create children, you give them what’s yours when your time has come to depart from this earth. So I guess overall, ultimately, maybe with some exceptions, that is my opinion about inheritance.