The Cutoff: Threatened Disinheritance

If you grew up with money or inherited it, you already know it can mess with your head. I help you untangle your identity from the family story. Face the shame that nobody talks about and live with real integrity without destroying your relationships just to feel free. This isn’t about your portfolio. It’s about being who you truly are. Welcome home. You’re listening to Family Dough. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Family Dough. I’m your host, John Dewey, and today we are talking about the cutoff. The cutoff when we get threatened with being cut off. And I was watching Arthur and I have this favorite memory from the movie. And Arthur is in talking with his father and his father says, we want you to marry Susan. And Arthur says, I don’t want to marry her. And he says, well, then, Arthur, we will have no choice but to cut you off. And Arthur says, cut off from you and grandma and the family. And the father is like, no, the money. Arthur and Arthur changes his mind very quickly in that moment to decide that Susan is pretty enough. But the point is that it’s a funny moment. There’s a beat, there’s a pause. The dad has a very funny look on his face. But the reality of that situation is that he is being cut off. He’s being cut off from the family. This is what happens in some legacy families when there’s a stressful point, or if somebody isn’t behaving the way they’re supposed to, and so they’re cut off. 

And this happens. I’ve done it. I’ve done it to my kids in a moment of stress. But it’s been done to me many times. And the reason I’m talking about it today is because it took me a really long time. All my education, everything else. But the cut off is three years ago and I’m set. I’m an adult. I got my money, everything. But it’s so hard wired into my body. And so I wanted to buy this particular condo and I was divorced. I was single, and I had dinner with my mom, and I told her about the condo and what I was going to do, and I thought things were fine. And the next day I got a call from an attorney in the family and he said, you cannot buy that. You’ll be cut off. And so the point to all of this is that it wasn’t about not getting some inheritance later down the road. It was the fact that it was hard wired into my body, and it had been there for a long time. And I realized in that moment, this is three years ago, and this is after doing tons of interpersonal work and things like that. But I hadn’t corrected it in my body. And I realized in that moment, it’s like, no, I’m not complete myself. And because this threat can happen And the thing that’s different and it happens in families. 

People are like, I’m not going to talk to you anymore or anything like that. But when it’s an inheritance family, it goes systematically and the person that’s holding the power makes that threat. It literally reverberates through the body of the receiver. And that’s what it did to me. And that’s when I discovered somatic work, where I started really going into my body and learning how to calm myself down in these situations. And so the Arthur is a funny joke, but anybody that’s really been in that situation knows that it’s very serious. And they don’t understand that there’s not a gap in that. So when I say the gap, it’s like, you know, you hear something and then it’s like, huh, I wonder about that. No, because it’s hardwired. The term I use is hardwired into our bodies. Boom. That reaction comes out really quickly. That’s when I decided I was like, oh my gosh, I still have a lot of work to do. And so the other part of this is it’s like an electric fence. You know, with animals, they stay within an electric fence. They know they get touched. But in legacy families, families with wealth, multigenerational families, people are so scared of that electric fence. Now, for me, I was always a rebel. And so I would go over and plow into the fence. But I’m not saying that’s the way to do it.

We all work through our families the way we do. So, for example, if we’re the golden child, if we follow all the rules and we do what we’re supposed to do, that’s one way. And then there’s the lost child, and there’s people who do their own unique thing. And then there’s the rebel. And what’s funny is all of these characters play out in all of these systems, no matter what. You know, people think they’re doing something unique. Well, no, it’s not really unique. It’s been studied and but it’s just not talked about. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I talk about these issues because with other inheritors that I’ve worked with, it’s so painful and it can be so devastating. And they can’t talk to their friends about it because their friends don’t understand that it’s all melded together the money, the family, and all of that. And so when somebody starts a new relationship, let’s say they bring in an outsider and they’re talking about the clothes they wear or the jewelry they wear or the car that they drive, there can be these really strict rules in the family, and the outside person has no idea about this. And they also don’t understand why the weight of the family carries so much weight with the person, because they don’t understand this legacy, this inheritance, this inheritance of behavior, this inheritance of what we do. There’s like unspoken rules that are invisible and they change all the time. 

And when somebody in the family threatens to flip that switch, it’s like an electric switch. Boom, that thing goes off. And that’s it. It’s just trouble. There’s trouble on the horizon and it threatens their very existence. That’s the work that we do here at Family Dough is we help people navigate through these times of trouble. And when it’s the only system that you’ve ever known, you don’t know any different. And it’s because it’s a unique system. It’s not unique in the world, but it’s unique in communities because legacy families are not particularly common. Yes, there are a lot of them out there, but in the general population, they’re a small percentage. So when I got that phone call, it just reverberated through my body, and that’s when I realized it was like, okay, I got a lot more work to do. So in my family, that message carries voltage. That’s what it is. So it’s back to the electric fence. Boom. You get zapped. You don’t know what hit you And you stop and you recoil. And if you have exited your family, which I did, I sold out of the family business and I left. And that’s done. And this is about the work that I’m doing in my life as I move forward. And so being cut off is a reality. You know, it’s like if you’re not following rules, then you will be pushed out, whereas other families can kind of muster through it and keep going. 

But what happens in your body is you no longer feel safe. That is the part that is hardwired and you don’t necessarily understand it and it gets the job done. I’ve done it in moments of crisis with a couple of my kids where I’m like, I’ll stop this. And what it is, is it’s almost a panic and there’s shame behind it. There’s a lot of shame in inheritance. And that’s another thing that we’re going to talk about is the shame that exists because you’re born with more status than you’ve earned. You’re born with more material than you earned. You’re just placed there. And so there’s a bit of a legitimacy. I call it the legitimacy wound, but it’s something that happens with inheritors because they feel like impostors. A lot of times this doesn’t happen with everybody, but it happens with certain people. It definitely happened with me. That’s why I do this work, and I’m very passionate about it because it’s such an untouched audience, because people are hiding. They’re quiet. They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t talk about it. And if they do talk about it, people are like, must be nice. I’d love to have your problems. And the person might be talking about literally feeling cut off from their family, like literally cut off. So I didn’t buy the condo, by the way, if you’re wondering. 

But, uh, other things went on, but that’s that’s when I started doing somatic work and I started doing regenerating images and memory work that was created by Doctor Deborah Sandella. And that’s where I was able to really dig into the shame of what was happening in me. And it can be tough work, but there’s thousands of inheritors out there that feel this. They feel this shame, and they feel stuck and they feel like, oh my God, I can’t do anything about this because they can’t talk to anyone about it. Well, that’s what family do is here. I’m here to create a safe community for people to talk and ask these questions, because there’s this money event coming up, this giant transfer of wealth as the baby boomers die off and Gen Xers and everybody else coming up, it’s going to change hands and everything about this whole world the world of money, the world of inheritance, the world of legacy. It’s very quiet. It’s very silent. People don’t talk because it’s always about safety. It’s always about rules. And people don’t have a chance to look at their true selves and see the decisions that they want to make, to understand the decisions they want to make. Do they want to stay part of, say, a legacy company, or do they want to break out on their own? Do they want to marry someone who is not okay? Because there’s all sorts of legacy rules, and those rules have not been looked at since.

Perhaps the founder and when I say somatic, I’m talking about the body. And so they feel it in their bodies and they’ll have stomach aches over this or something like that, and body aches. And it all comes down to this feeling so alone. And that’s what Family Doe is here for. It’s here to talk about the shame of being a grown man, 57 years old. I mean, 

I’m 60 now, but it was such an impact on me, you know, that I was like, oh my God. I felt like I hadn’t gone anywhere. And as I talk about this, as I speak about this, and I go around and I’m talking to different people about it, they’re like, oh my God, that happened to me and that happened to me. But they come up silently, they come up quietly, they come up and talk to me in private because they don’t want to talk about it. This is not about weakness. This is the part that I really want people to understand. It is not about weakness. It is about conditioning and outdated rules and regulations. And yes, it can keep certain things sustained. You know, it was my maternal grandfather who was what I call a hyper agent. So hyper agents are people who are smart, they’re clever, they’re hungry for something. They’re I mean, they’re really hungry for something. 

And my grandfather was literally hungry. His father died when he was 12, and he had to take care of his mom and his sister because the sister took care of the mom and he had to do that. So he was delivering papers, delivering ice lighting, street lamps with whale fat, and there were all these different things. And he literally worked so hard. He was in the right place at the right time. And he created this, which is an amazing thing. And it’s very fortunate. But what happens then is that hyper agent who’s at the top, and you see him all over the place, want to be hyper agents. You know, Steve Jobs was one, Elon Musk is one, but they literally bend the world. They bend the rules, they bend everything to accommodate their drive. But their drive comes from a wound. It comes from an internal wound not having enough, not being enough, not being enough was my wound, you know, not good enough. It was woven throughout my entire architecture as a person. And it gets installed because what happens is, you know, it was my maternal grandfather. And then with inheritance. Inheritance is much different for females. You know, a lot of these hyper agents are men. It’s not saying that women aren’t capable of it at all. It’s just what happens in our society is that’s where the bias is. So men, typically they might inherit the whole business, but if it’s split up, the women will inherit a lot of times stock or money. 

But typically in the past, men have wanted to pass it to their sons, and then they teach their sons the actual business, but they don’t teach the actual business to the daughters. And so there’s a split right there. There’s a difference then in the in the children. And so cousins grow up in very different households regarding how they value what they think of whether it’s a business, it could be a foundation, it could be cash trusts. You know, there’s a world of trust, there’s rules around trusts. And we’re going to get into all of that. But today, back to the cutoff, it’s limited tools. And because there are such limited tools in, say, parenting. So it’s difficult as parents, let’s say two parents come together and they create a company and it explodes with wealth and they want to pass it to their kids, but they want their kids to have the same values as they do. Well, it’s really difficult because the kids have been raised in a different world. They’re not hungry per se for that, and they’re human architecture forms in a different way. The other thing I want to cover today is back to the hyper agents. So how I explain hyper agents is I was in Alaska, I was on a cruise, it was 2015 with my kids and my ex, and we were split up on two different boats off in the distance. 

A cruise ship was leaving the harbor, so we had gone on a day trip to go fishing, and the cruise ship that was leaving the harbor was probably a mile and a half away. But a few minutes later, our captain on our fishing boat said, everybody hold on. And we got hit by the wake of that ship. And so before I was always thinking, oh, it’s wealth and and there’s inheritance and all that, but it’s literally growing up in the presence. Or it could be a great grandfather, it could be many legacies. There’s companies and families that are many, many, many generations. Anyways, that ship was so far off in the distance it didn’t know we were there. It didn’t know we were in that boat. It didn’t care. The ship didn’t know, the captain didn’t know, and they were just plowing forward because they were going somewhere. That’s what it’s like in the wake of a hyper agent. So it’s one of these people that’s wildly successful. They are focused on their goal, and they have everything to give them that ability to do it. But in the wake of that, that’s the wake that hit our boat. That’s when it hit me. I’m like, oh, it’s the wake. It’s the wake of hyper agency. So they’re actually out in, in the boat. And this could be employees. This is family members, this is in-laws.

This is people who marry into the family. That’s a whole nother topic we’re going to cover because people think they’re, oh, they’re marrying into this family. And it can be great, all of these things. But there’s a fantasy that goes on about what the family actually is. And a lot of times, and this happened with me and my ex where she got in and she said to me one day she goes, I can’t keep it all straight. I can’t keep the rules straight. And I’m like, which part? And she said, any of it. And I still get the chills today when I think about that, because it was one of those moments where it just catches you. You’re like, wait a minute, it doesn’t make sense to them. And it’s like, oh, this is all this world that I’ve grown up in. The world of inheritance, the world of legacy, the world of wealth is again, very quiet. And it’s because there’s all these rules. A lot of them are good. A lot of them are good for sustaining, but a lot of them are outdated. A lot of times the rules get made up as they go along because it suits one person, maybe the next person in the line. Generationally, they hold the most power, not only assets and stock. Things like that get passed down, but power gets passed down. And then there’s the game of your siblings and your cousins and your all of this. 

But if you’re raised as rivals, because a lot of times they are, sometimes they’re looking for the best person to succeed. Sometimes it’s just because they came from a very competitive family. But not everybody is a true competitor in that system. Then there’s different sensitivities. There’s people that have more sensitivity. I had more sensitivity. I was tuned in to what was happening. I was always trying to make sense. Like, why that that doesn’t seem right. And then I learned to shut down my own instincts. That’s the part that really, if you’re looking to undo that, if you’re looking to change that, if you want to make a change, that’s the work we really do here is because it’s something that can just stop you dead in your tracks. And I had years of stagnation, and I had so much shame behind that, you know, that it’s like, gosh, I have different talents and I have these different skills and things like that. And I was determined to find something. So I had that drive, but it wasn’t to create more, it was to find my own answers. That’s what family dough is about. And so when you’re in the wake of a hyper agent, a person who’s really, truly successful. They have all the things that come together and they create this week and again, in-laws, other people, employees, and then people are in that world and then they’re dependent upon it. 

And heirs can be dependent upon it, and they can have somebody come into their life that they really love. And if that relationship isn’t okay, back to the Arthur scene. Liza Minnelli was the woman from Queens. She wasn’t okay. She wasn’t Susan Johnson. Susan Johnson was the character that Arthur was supposed to marry. Her father, Burt Johnson was another hyper agent, and he was very intense. He was, you know, obviously angry at Arthur. You can watch the movie. But anyways, these threats of cut off. So there’s two different scenes in Arthur where he gets threatened with the cut off. One is when he’s with his grandmother and she says, Arthur, you got to marry Susan. And then she said, she goes, you can cheat with the one from Queens, but the bigger part of it is, she said. We are ruthless. That’s what she said. It was something to the effect of Arthur, don’t fuck with us. We are ruthless and that is another reality of legacy families. That’s another reality of why heirs are so scared. A lot of times, you know, they’ll go into therapy and they’ll they’ll talk about their problems. And a lot of times the therapists don’t understand, you know, they hear progress. They’re articulate, they are well-spoken, they’re knowledgeable, they talk a good game. I was one of these guys. I became a therapist. I could talk a good game, but it was really like, you’re just kind of coasting along until there can be a disruption and there can be numbing out. 

There can be alcohol, there can be drugs. The other part is when there’s wealth involved, it can continue on. And so, you know, that’s what stops a lot of people in everyday life. They have only a limited amount of pay. But when alcohol, alcohol is very prevalent in wealthy families, alcoholism is very prevalent. And that’s another thing we work with is people who are impacted by that. Because if they go into therapy and they’re talking about this and the therapist hears them, but there’s no movement. And that’s the work that we do with therapists is actually teaching them about how powerful these family systems are, and that there’s invisible electric fences, that the people are scared to leave or they might leave. They might do what they call a geography and 12 step programs. You know, for example, they might move to New Zealand trying to get far enough away. But it doesn’t matter because we take our systems with us. The systems are built into us, and that’s the work that we do. Every powerful system protects itself with an invisible electric fence around the truth. And the fence is not maintained by villains. It is maintained by love, fear, belonging, and survival. The threatened cut off is the fence finally becoming visible. Most of the time, the fence is invisible. There can be a tone shift.

There can be just subtle eye movements like. Hmm, a little disappointed, I don’t know. And that’s when that shame rises up. And that’s when it can be a really lonely place for the inheritor. Because that’s the one that friends who are not in that position absolutely don’t understand and they still love you, but they’re like, I don’t know why they can’t. They’re in a rut and they just can’t get out of it. Those are the things that we’re going to talk about here at Family Dough, the dinner table. What are the rules around the dinner table? What are the rules around the lake house. What are the rules around a boat or Great grandpa’s car collection? Those kind of things. You know, a friend stumbles and bumps into one of the old cars and the great grandchild is there, panicked. Like literally probably, you know, maybe having a panic attack because it’s literally so hardwired into their system. They’re so afraid of touching the fence. But anyways, I got off script today because I wanted to talk about a lot of things, but we talked about the electric fence, the perimeter around a legacy family, and the fear that is all tied up with that fence. You know, the closer we get to it. So again, let’s say we bring home a partner who isn’t, quote, good enough, which is basically just a judgment. And judgment comes from our own egos. 

And people don’t realize this. So however, we were bumped and bruised throughout life. Our judgments are built off of that and it makes sense. You know, it keeps us alive. It keeps us safe. The ego is there to keep us safe. But what happens is, is it develops its own extra parts on it that are hot spots. So, you know, for me, not feeling good enough, not loving myself, which is also very possible. I just want to share that that learning to love yourself is possible. And I know how to do it because I did it and it took a long time, but it’s definitely possible. Anyways, I made my point clear on the cutoff. It is very serious, but it was that final blow that I was like, I got to figure this out. I got to clean this up. It was that thread of the cutoff. And again, I have been exiled out of the family and that’s okay. That was my choice. I don’t harbor ill will, but that’s what gives me a unique perspective because I was in it most of my life living in the system I broke out, and I have this fanatical desire and I don’t have all the answers. Trust me, I do not have all the answers. But I’m continuing to search. And that’s what this program is about. I do a lot of different types of work in this on myself, self-discovery, and I want to help other inheritors because there was a study done many years ago, and we’re going to be talking about this by Suniya Luthar. 

And they were doing a study on lower income families, and they needed a control group, and they actually went to a wealthy area. And what she discovered is that they had higher levels of anxiety, higher levels of drug abuse, higher levels of depression. And we’ll be talking about that. But the reality is it went unnoticed because the government’s not interested in what’s going on with the wealthier kids. But the other part of that is that the wealthy parents and legacy parents and things, they don’t want their shame out there because it’s always about the shame. And they don’t want their secrets. They don’t want the dirty laundry aired because there’s this feeling of that it’s different and it’s not different. There’s just different amounts of zeros in the bank accounts. We’re all humans. We all struggle. And I’m here to talk to the people that get marginalized and minimized because of their situations, because it can be a really lonely place. And so the cutoff is real. It gets used a lot. It gets thrown around a lot. And I’m going to end there. So have a great day and we’ll catch you next time. Remember, this isn’t about perfection. It’s about awareness, choice and forward movement. So before you go, ask yourself, are we making progress? I’ll see you next time on Family Dough.