Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Testamentary Capacity

People with NPD do NOT have testamentary capacity.

I am not a lawyer or a psychologist. I am a linguist; I pay attention to language. My late father was a malignant covert narcissist; of that I am certain because in my 55 years of life, I have had plenty of chance to observe him (more than a psychologist who might see him for only 55 HOURS in an office).

Testamentary capacity was originally described (what it is and what it isn't) in the 1870 decision Banks v. Goodfellow by Chief Justice Cockburn. Modern psychology's understanding and description of NPD has been refined much over the last couple of decades. I hope people who have had to deal with a narcissistic parent or spouse can look at what I have posted and agree with me that both the law and psychology need to come together to discuss this further to help end the suffering we endure even after our "loved" ones are dead and gone.

The following is a transcript of some videos I recently posted on YouTube. I’m hoping people will read this and, at the very least, find what I’ve put together here worthy of more consideration than previously received, something like: “You know, there are some points here the law and psychology should take a look at!” ... 

Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Testamentary Capacity    

Some interesting parallels appear when NPD and the 1870 decision Banks v. Goodfellow are compared side by side. These videos are my attempt to see if other people notice these connections as well…

The videos I link to were part of my learning about NPD. DISCLAIMER ON THEIR BEHALF: These people have not endorsed me and are unaware of my ideas here, pondering the possible relevance of things in their videos to the 1870 Banks v. Goodfellow decision, still considered the starting point for determining testamentary capacity of people seeking to do a will or trust. Though some legal scholars have argued it is time to update Chief Justice Cockburn’s opinion, I have found his phraseology and word choices to be eerily prescient of modern psychology’s understanding of major characteristics of NPD.

I’ve spent three years putting together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: what C.J. Cockburn wrote 148 years ago, what we know about NPD today, and what I know of my own late father through his actions and words in his estate documents, in his correspondence with me and others, and in my own private recollections in nearly 55 years as his son (though he died five years before I post this).

Although I mention several times my financial past, present, and future, I’m NOT seeking donations; this is not a GoFundMe. I am sharing my thoughts here in hopes they might make someone stop and think and my ideas might become a catalyst for much-needed discussion among professionals in psychology and the law and people who have had to deal with a narcissist’s impact on their lives and futures, as yet poorly understood by people who have not had that same agonizing experience.

Vaknin’s videos:

“Trump, Clinton: Narcissists? Experts Spew Nonsense” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpzNLVLXHt0

“Narcissist: Confabulations, Lies” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeL5HDAfklc

Narcissism Survivor’s videos:

“The Covert Narcissist” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi_-gxVsQ0s

“Narcissism LIARS” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfLH71IdSFw

Introduction

A lawyer and a narcissist walk into a bar… and he says to himself… “Didn’t we sue this place last year?”

I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not a psychologist. I have three and a half degrees in language and linguistics and quite a few hours in philosophy, including logic, ethics, and epistemology. I also had a widowed father, who left me, his only child, wondering why and how things turned out the way they did. My first awareness of my family’s dysfunction was in 1986 when I learned about Bowen or family systems theory. Thirty years later, and a couple years after my father died, I started revisiting old memories which now added up to a new understanding for me.

In these videos, I match the general and generally accepted characteristics of NPD with specific actions and “choices” of my late father after my mother predeceased him and was no longer around to inquire about his plans for their only child. Concurrent with my in-depth study of NPD, I researched testamentary capacity. For a time, I read modern paraphrases of what testamentary capacity is and isn’t and took these at face value. Then, I came across the actual 1870 opinion by Chief Justice Cockburn. I was stunned by what I read. Like a jigsaw puzzle, language in Banks v. Goodfellow seemed to fit together with what I was reading about NPD, and the completed picture looked just like my late father. I decided to use Cockburn’s phrases and clauses from 148 years ago as a framework for my analysis, as presented in these videos.

Spoiler alert: It’s downright eerie how prescient Cockburn’s phraseology and word choices are in relation to a modern understanding of NPD. For instance, Banks v. Goodfellow talks about “understanding effects” and “comprehending claims” while NPD talks about “lack of empathy” and “cognitive deficiencies.” I’ve recently come across the term “mind-blindness,” which seems a more apt and powerful term than “lack of empathy.” “Lack of empathy” has lost its punch and does not convey what I see as a profound disability, if we can briefly use that un-PC word, as much as complete blindness or deafness. Thus, thinking a narcissist can “understand the effects of his actions on someone else or comprehend their claims as heirs-at-law” might be as incorrect as the embarrassing slip of talking about a beautiful sunset to a person who has never been able to experience one.

I consider my opinion somewhere between lay and expert, leaning toward the latter, with a heightened awareness of general vs. specific, abstract vs. concrete. You might wonder why my ‘diagnosis’ should be given credence. Simply put, I’ve been my father’s son for almost 55 years, which means a lot more time for observing and taking notes than 55 hours in a shrink’s office! In fact, on page 235 of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited, Sam Vaknin writes: “The reason narcissism is underreported and healing overstated is therapists are being fooled by smart narcissists. Most narcissists are expert manipulators and learn how to deceive their therapists.” Thus, if therapists are being fooled, it’s likely estate law attorneys are also being fooled.

For independent sources, I point viewers to two other YouTube channels. First, the channel by Narcissism Survivor: Tom is a well-informed lay person; he experienced life with a narcissist causing him to pursue knowledge that is empirically verifiable and theoretically sound. He is also an effective communicator. It is interesting to consider that there are likely “degreed counseling professionals” out there who would not know a Narcissist in the same room with them while, at the same time, there are people who do not have a formal education in psychology or psychiatry but who have lived their entire lives with a narcissistic parent (or people with a narcissistic partner) yet who are experienced enough to point at someone and say: “I’d bet the bank that person right there is a malignant narcissist!” More on this later…

Second, the channel by Sam Vaknin: a self-aware, self-admitted narcissist and expert on NPD who has written one of the best books on malignant narcissism. Because he addresses the topic from an academic angle, I use observations from his 2016 video “Trump, Clinton–Narcissists? ‘Experts’ Spew NONSENSE!” to make my connections. I also quote and paraphrase statements from his other videos as well as ideas in videos by Narcissism Survivor. Other, academically qualified experts are Dr. W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia and Mr. Ross Rosenberg of Illinois, who has a noteworthy YouTube channel also.

Before continuing, I need to address two interrelated aspects of Narcissism which estate law attorneys helping with wills, testaments, and trusts should be aware of from the moment they sit down to discuss a client’s plans. At this point in 2018, you can probably name one or two famous narcissists in the news; they are obvious and overt. But you might not so quickly see a covert narcissist. My father and his estate attorney probably met only as many times as needed to put together a standard will and trust, filling in a few blanks along the way—not much time for even an experienced attorney to detect a pathological liar, one of Vaknin’s points in the video mentioned before. Indeed, by default, don’t we believe someone undertaking something as serious and solemn as a will to take care of the living after they are gone is not going to tell lies, especially lies that will cause serious harm to their own immediate family? In his video “Abuse by Proxy,” Vaknin talks about a narcissist’s “impressive thespian acting skills” and how a narcissist enlists unwitting people, even in the legal system, to help carry out his pernicious plans. The point: Unless you knew him as well as my late mother and I knew him, you’d be very unlikely to catch on to my father’s 24/7 pathological lying and act. (John Wayne would have been impressed).

There’s something else an attorney assisting with wills, testaments, or trusts should note: a widowed testator or testatrix with NPD might kick into high gear in the lying, smearing, and twisting of reality. It might be telling to consider the degree of negativity in a testator’s remarks with how difficult it would be to (hypothetically) check up on those strong negative statements. In my case, my mother had died two years before my father did his will and trust, and I was literally half-way around the world unable to know what was going on back home behind my back, so he could and did get away with a lot.   

Turning now to Chief Justice Cockburn’s 1870 description of what testamentary capacity is and isn’t, some empirical, presenting traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and my father’s actions and “choices” …   

CLAUSE 1: “It is essential to the exercise of such a power that a testator shall understand the nature of the act and its effects;”

In the “Trump Clinton” video, Vaknin states: “All narcissists have grandiose fantasies. Coupled with a lack of empathy, it makes them cognitively deficient.” This, he says, “makes it very difficult for them to perceive reality properly. They fail the reality test.” This is where I think the concept of “mind-blindness” can be applied to narcissists, who seem potentially profoundly blind and deaf to any reality not their own, who seem to lack what is called a Theory of Mind for other people around them. As a former rhetoric instructor, I believe the most important rhetorical and cognitive strategy I used to teach was cause and effect, which I consider essential to effective and critical thinking and understanding. What I understand of “mind-blindness” is it might include a serious ‘handicap’ in regards to “effects” (more on this in a moment). For the present point, I do not believe it a stretch to see a logical relationship between Vaknin’s “reality tests” and Cockburn’s “effects” especially when elsewhere in the same video Vaknin observes narcissists as “destructive,” “abusive,” sometimes “sadistic.” (My story will give specifics to these points.)

I believe there is evidence of my father’s cognitive deficiencies in how his trust was drafted and in some of his correspondence with the trust and with me and others. He had a Bachelor of Science and was 74 when he sought an attorney’s assistance drafting his will and trust, but as for the way the trust would operate (cash assets, principal, investing, discretionary payouts), he did not seem to understand those aspects as well as my mother would have with her high school diploma. A key clause in the trust, and a focal point of so many of my headaches dealing with people associated the trust, is a clause that reads: “No further payments out of principal to (me) besides the monthly stipend.” Three effects of this clause alone indicate to me his lack of understanding.

First, cash assets ran out pretty quickly. Thus, my stipend stopped while trust attorneys sought a court Construction allowing payment out of principal as needed. I still wonder who missed this glaring issue: my father or his estate attorney. Indeed, I can easily believe a scenario wherein his attorney possibly said: “Mr. N, your cash assets will run out a few months after the stipend begins; with ‘no further payments out of principal’ your stated goal of a stipend for the remainder of your son’s life is defeated and monthly payments will cease. Is this what you intend?” Most people would take the hint things didn’t add up. Not my father. He would put on a show of looking like he was considering the issue, looking into the distance for a moment, and nodded ‘yes’; the attorney was probably mystified a moment but moved on when there seemed no point pursuing the issue. Still there are other consequences/effects my father’s NPD-caused “cognitive deficiencies” prevented him from understanding, a lá Cockburn’s first clause.

Second, despite knowing of my financially very unrewarding career in higher education, with no prospect of a retirement or health insurance; despite knowing of my having very serious asthma and how that makes getting insurance and building savings unlikely; and despite knowing my net worth as I neared 50 was zero, my father did not include in his trust any language for discretionary help with my future heart attack, stroke, or other inevitable medical crisis. Two ‘lady’ lawyers working for the trust also could not see that repeatedly turning down my well-reasoned and -explained entreaties for such an amendment would mean I might someday have to pass on life-preserving emergency care due to concerns about lack of financial means while at the same time trust principal was enough that a small discretionary payout to help with treatment for a heart attack or stroke might save my life. (I don’t expect the trust to pay for all medical events before that though a night in the hospital for life-threatening asthma usually takes a large part of my monthly stipend AFTER using that same money to pay for all my daily prescriptions as well.)

Third, preserving that ‘overly protected principal’ (as I call it) will result in a large amount ultimately going to my father’s second cousins (who, being older than I am, already have the basics everyone takes for granted), OR that same ridiculously large amount could go to people in my adopted home overseas, people who live each month on what most attorneys earn before lunch on Monday. And my father would have hated the possibility of money he worked hard for and saved for decades going to people who have never saved a dollar for a rainy day; he’s probably spinning in his grave at the very idea. But, in drafting his will and trust, HE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND because of his ‘cognitive deficiencies’ resulting from NPD. This is all deducible by language in estate documents and correspondence with me and others.

Honestly, this one is hard to pin down. Either because of NPD and the traits as described by Vaknin (such as ‘failed reality tests’), my father did not understand my financially precarious future and the potentially lethal effects on my finances and health, or he did understand and cruelly and sadistically relished the idea of my future pain and suffering. My father’s estate attorney never met me and thus did not know the major implications, the major EFFECTS, my father was deliberately not telling him about, i.e. lying about. My mother, who did not have NPD, would have pointed these out immediately and would have seen to a correction immediately, but my father steadfastly refused to do his paperwork before she died, instead waiting more than two years after. (Narcissists don’t like criticism as we regularly see in the news.)  

Vaknin’s videos:

“Narcissist as Compulsive Giver” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqtlfIjWxoY

“Abuse by Proxy: From Smear Campaigns to 3^rd Party Stalking and Abuse”  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0aOH6kw9ug

“Money, Narcissist’s License to Abuse”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVl7Zc9dToQ

“Idealized, Devalued, Dumped, Discarded” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvEc0ojAWqU

Narcissism Survivor’s videos:

“Narcissism VERY DANGEROUS” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=autKOOxj-Wk

“Narcissistic Smears” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBK6PljfVe0

“Narcissism Discard” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClVU-iPNSXQ

“Narcissist Needs Pity” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0XtOnd3I3w

Videos about narcissists and money:

Your Narcissistic Parent’s False Self

http://narcissismschild.com/2014/07/27/your-narcissistic-parents-false-self/

BEWARE OF NARCISSISTIC GENEROSITY

http://sharonspano.com/time-money/beware-of-narcissistic-generosity/

The Narcissist and Money

http://thenarcissisticlife.com/the-narcissist-and-money/

Economic and Financial Abuse: a Narcissist Dream Plan Exposed

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/economic-financial-abuse-narcissist-dream-plan-exposed-donna-hines

CLAUSE 2: “shall understand the extent of the property of which he is disposing;”

After discussing cognitive deficiencies, Vaknin says narcissists’ “grandiose fantasies” are “borderline delusional.” These grandiose fantasies include narcissists believing they have more status, more power, more love, and more money than they actually have. There are many good articles online about the relationship between narcissists and money. One presenting characteristic is an unfortunately-named symptom of this delusional overestimation of how much a narcissist actually has vs. how much his grandiose fantasies claim he has; it is called compulsive “giving.” Vaknin has a very informative video called: “Narcissist as Compulsive ‘Giver.’” I use air quotation marks because it is not giving in the sense we are taught from an early age as a virtue. In fact, it is a sickness, arguably an addiction like alcohol or nicotine, hence the ‘compulsive’ qualifier. Think of someone you know who compulsively bites fingernails or checks a smart phone every five minutes or someone who shops themselves into major debt, with no thought to the consequences, and you begin to get the idea. (The philosophy major in me can’t help but reflect on the question of free will vs determinism here.)

It’s quite sad really: my father equated “Thank you” with “I love you.” I suspect he never really knew love, even from his own mother, and believed all through his 81 years he had to give in order to receive appreciation from someone else as a substitute for love; he went to his death believing the more he gave, the more “love” he received in return. He told/lied to his second cousins, the beneficiaries of his largesse, “There’s enough in the trust to help with (my son’s) retirement.” This was one of his lies and/or delusions: he was deluded about how much he had and did not “understand the extent of his property” in connection with the facts of his own only child’s claims. In truth, the trust IS my retirement; it also is (or should be) my Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid) as I’ll never get those for various reasons not discussed here.

This is where compulsive “giving” isn’t really giving. The 25% my father “gave” his second cousins was in reality meant to manipulate and control them into staying with him at his deathbed, telling him every last waking minute what a grand, generous man he was. What would you do if a dying man “gave” you $100,000? Would you take the money and walk away, or would you sit with him and tell him what a good soul he was a few times before he died? I’d bet most people would be a little grateful. The narcissist needs regular praise or pity like the alcoholic needs alcohol. If this is difficult to grasp, think of bizarre televised cabinet meetings with everyone around the table taking turns kissing ass or twice-daily folders presented by West Wing staff or how often we see “very unfair!” in tweets. In a narcissist’s world, money can/does buy love (or gratitude) in amounts proportionate to amounts “given.” $100,000 buys a lot of thank you-s however fleeting. It is also ‘self-praise’ in the way imaginary laudatory letters from news anchors after a “great” televised cabinet meeting are self-ego-stroking, even if nothing but a fiction.

One website which talks about compulsive “giving” puts forward these questions to assess an act of “giving” by compulsive “givers”: “Are they boasting or bragging about their own generosity? Are they submitting others to more power and control as a result of their giving? Are they showing up as selfish and greedy in other aspects of their giving? Do they name drop to whom they gave and how much?” For each question, the answer in my father’s case is “yes.” There is proof in correspondence and depositions.

CLAUSE 3: “shall be able to comprehend and appreciate the claims to which he ought to give effect;”  

Another aspect of NPD intertwined with “cognitive deficiencies” and “failed reality tests” is a narcissist’s “lack of full-fledged empathy” or, per the cliché, inability to put himself in someone else’s shoes and understand their needs, wants, and feelings, especially if those differ from his own. In Kantian terms, narcissists treat others as a means to an end not as ends in their own right. This is one of the major presenting traits as described in DSM-4 and -5. An everyday metaphor for a narcissist’s lack of empathy is he views others as life-sized cardboard cutouts like those at mall novelty shops. Perhaps, it should be the other way around: narcissists are two-dimensional with no feelings or ability to comprehend or appreciate the needs of others.

As before, hard to pin down. As I mentioned before, “lack of empathy” can also be seen as a kind of “mind-blindness” where there is possibly not even an awareness of something missing in the input of a sensory awareness. My father knew my financially and physically precarious future, but in his “mind-blindness,” he might not have ‘understood’ how different my later years would be ‘effected’ by both my bad luck with my career and health or ‘effected’ by his ‘choices’ regarding me. Thus, either because of his lack of empathy, he was unable to comprehend and appreciate his only child’s claim (and I believe my claims to be more unambiguous than others’), or he did comprehend and knew the “effects” of what he was doing were sadistic, abusive, and evil (with help from an unwitting, uninformed legal system), in which case... Cockburn’s next points.  

CLAUSE 4: “and with a view to the latter object, that no disorder of the mind shall poison his affections,” Interesting how, in 1870, Justice Cockburn used the word “disorder” …  

To grasp fully how pervasively NPD affects thinking and feeling, I invite viewers to watch some of Vaknin’s other videos, such as “Abuse by Proxy,” “Idealized, Devalued, Dumped, Discarded,” and “Money, Narcissist’s License to Abuse.” Specifically, narcissists deflect attention from themselves and their “destructive,” “sadistic,” “exploitative,” and “abusive” behaviors; to do this, they use scapegoats, and the projection of negative sentiments inherent in scapegoating tacitly and implicitly involve “poisoned affections” even for one’s own flesh and blood. For instance, …

No one is surprised anymore when a parent exaggerates or lies about a child’s accomplishments. Most people, however, probably deem it too ugly to be true that some parents deliberately and actively go on smear campaigns to hurt or harm their own children, perhaps even going so far as to discard a son or daughter for knowing the true nature of that parent. For independent description, I refer viewers to videos by Narcissism Survivor, especially his “Narcissism VERY DANGEROUS.” (Side note: Though not parent/child relationships, in 2017 we saw many examples of Narcissistic Smear and Discard: Mika and Joe, Jeff Sessions, the judiciary and intelligence communities; the first three were initially close allies, but when they challenged the truth of a narcissist’s shaky narrative, they were thrown under the bus. It appears there is abundant explanation and evidence of how Narcissistic Personality Disorder poisons affections!)

Detailing all of my late father’s affections poisoned by NPD would take up too much time. I have a detailed essay that I will share with anyone who asks. Here, I give three short examples:

1) Since in my father’s universe, no one ever worked harder than he did, he had to twist the facts of my work history to my face and behind my back to others. He told me several times I “never worked hard a day in (my) life” even after I had a job pushing twice my own weight in soft drinks around on a delivery cart ten hours a day. He also lied to other family members saying I “never keep a job,” which was a real kick in the gut because he knew some of my community college teaching jobs didn’t keep me! Part-time temporary instructors are the disposable, seasonal help of academia. One whiny, self-entitled student and there’s no contract and no work next year.

2) My father lied about my marriage and family in my adopted home overseas to get pity from his unknowing listeners. Though he never met my wife and refused to come to my wedding, he claimed he tried to stop my getting married. He lied about my not taking responsibility for my own child (‘not keeping a job’), again to get pity from people he told this lie to, people who never heard facts from me. (He was actually talking about his own absent father during the Great Depression and WWII.) But, here, he got caught changing his story by later intimating in an email to another family member that my wife should abort my late mother’s grandchild and namesake. Like most grandmothers to be, my mother would have hauled off and slapped him. I never found out his reasoning; he might have been playing on his listeners’ prejudices because my daughter would be ‘mixed race,’ or maybe because she would be the product of a non-Christian marriage and thus illegitimate in his eyes she should be aborted. Whatever the reason, if a man wanting his own grandchild aborted isn’t poisoned affections, I don’t know what is. Stay tuned…  

3) Another lie of another sort: My father liked to warn people about my temper. I haven’t described everything he did yet, but I firmly believe that, knowing the facts and knowing the things he did, most people would say my anger is completely justifiable. Stay tuned for more about that… But the lie this time is he made his listeners believe HE never got angry or did things out of anger, hate, or rage. Here, I’d like to quote a website called www.narcissistschild.blogspot.com:

“When someone says ‘rage,’ we tend to think of someone screaming and yelling and waving their arms and being loud and angry. We are probably also familiar with the quiet rage: the seething but controlled anger that manifests as clenched fists and jaws, giving the fear that the person could burst into some kind of physical fury at any moment. But with narcissists there can be yet another kind of rage: the silent, subterranean rage that simmers, often for years, before being released, and the release can be in a long-planned and carefully executed manner.” (Wait for it!)

Today, five years after his death, people who claim to have known my father would probably say he never got angry and never did harmful things to anyone, even to his own flesh-and-blood. They probably would not believe he did things that will seriously harm his own flesh and blood due to his “poisoned affections.” Let me tell how their perception of him as a humble, pious, good man is false… (in addition to his wanting his late, “beloved” wife’s namesake aborted…)

After writing this segment, I found a video by Ross Rosenberg entitled: “Covert Narcissists: Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing.” While Rosenberg does not use the term ‘scapegoat,’ the idea is still there as he describes what I see as ‘poisoned affections’ and how these arise in a narcissist: “If you confront the covert narcissist about their narcissism, about their façade, about their duplicity, they will get really angry; I promise you that... If you out them, if you uncover their true narcissistic tendencies, you are likely to be at risk personally, emotionally, financially... they will do anything they can to keep where they are professionally, personally, and financially even if it’s at the expense of a child and a spouse. So, be warned that sometimes people who are kind and giving, altruistic may be faking it… The covert narcissist will get mad and angry, but because they are adept at hiding their true selves, they will come up with a plan on how to hurt you, how to defend themselves, how to take away your credibility...”

Ross Rosenberg video:

“Covert Narcissists: Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vi6GT8TMm8

Vaknin’s videos:

“The Abuser’s Mind” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gWiVSmjTas

“The Abuser’s Life, A Prolonged Nightmare” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoUqM-_EEUY

CLAUSE 5: “pervert his sense of right, or prevent the exercise of his natural faculties--”

In the video “The Abuser’s Mind,” Vaknin talks about how NPD affects a narcissist’s mind, or I’d say his “natural faculties.” Vaknin says: “To the abuser’s mind, his victims do not merit humane treatment, nor do they evoke empathy because they don’t exist as human beings.” In another video, he says: “(N)arcissists lack a critical piece of equipment: the ability to empathize. Empathy is what binds us together. Empathy is the essence of what it is to be human. In the absence of empathy, emotions and cognitions are skewed, deformed.” I don’t think special training in semantics is needed to see connections between Cockburn’s ‘sense of right’ and Vaknin’s ‘lack of empathy’; Cockburn’s ‘natural faculties’ and Vaknin’s ‘essence of what it is to be human’; and Cockburn’s ‘perverted sense of right’ and Vaknin’s ‘skewed, deformed emotions and cognitions.’

Before I make things clearer with specifics from my father’s actions and plans, let me quote a little more from writing contemporaneous and associated with Banks v. Goodfellow: “(T)he court pointed to ‘a moral responsibility of no ordinary importance… the instincts and affections of mankind, in the vast majority of instances, will lead men to make provision for those who are the nearest to them in kindred and who in life have been the objects of their affection.’ To disappoint reasonable expectation of this kind is to ‘shock the common sentiments of mankind and to violate what all men concur in deeming an obligation of the moral law.’” Vaknin again: “To the abuser’s mind, his victims do not merit humane treatment… they don’t exist as human beings.”

It took a few years of putting together puzzle pieces from different people, but not long ago I made a connection which landed in the middle of my understanding with a heavy thud that still reverberates months after I tied together threads from my legal research and personal knowledge of my father.

First, a brief summary: When my father died six months before my 50^th birthday, my financial assets were ZERO. In addition, I will have no retirement from anywhere, I will very likely never get Social Security, and I will never get Medicare, Medicaid, or health insurance (even overseas insurance companies don’t want someone with preexisting conditions which could be linked to other health issues). Despite knowing this and knowing what he was doing would make the difference between life and death, my father spent his last weeks diverting monies in a plan to harm me and my family and at the same time win himself praise from people around him, people who didn’t know the specifics of the claim his own flesh-and-blood had. In brief, these people had no idea of the lies he was telling them, that he was in reality ‘violating what all men concur in deeming an obligation of a moral responsibility of no ordinary importance.’

In his last weeks, my father was sending anonymous donations to widows he knew through church. He was tipping hospice staff. He was diverting major money and impoverishing the assets by 25%. Besides winning himself lots of praise for his lie and façade of generosity, he was depleting trust assets/principal as much as he could before he died, ensuring there will not be money available for his flesh-and-blood to seek medical help for a life-endangering medical event, OR he was delusional about “the extent” of the assets he had, per Clause 2 of Banks v. Goodfellow. Whichever the case, as it stands, I will one day have to tell my wife NOT to call an ambulance for me because what I have should be there for her and our child.

If this does not “shock common sentiments,” consider the following: he did this and persisted in finding a new way to inflict sadistic financial and physical suffering after he’d been challenged in this way… In 2005, seven years before he died and seven years before I found this out, he said to his former favorite nephew and my older cousin D that he planned to leave me NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, but he had to backtrack and, for a short time, save face when D responded to his pronouncement: “Uncle Ray, that’s not right!” That’s not right! Where have we heard that before? Maybe the 1870 decision on testamentary capacity, Banks v. Goodfellow, written by Chief Justice Cockburn in which he wrote of a ‘perverted sense of right’ as being an issue preventing testamentary capacity. Cousin D apparently was then able to persuade my father to go to an estate attorney he knew of and, not knowing the specifics of my career, my finances, and my health, Cousin D probably felt he’d succeeded in correcting the course of my father’s perverted sense of right. The attorney also did not know, from the way he assessed testamentary capacity, and my father’s covert NPD, that things were not really as they appeared…

My cousin was named trust advisor, but the damage had been done to his relationship with my father with his criticism, “That’s not right!” Eventually, my father replaced my cousin as trust advisor with his own second cousins, with whom he’d had very little contact the sixty years previous, meaning they would fall for his convincing act of a beleaguered, disappointed father trying to be a good father and do the best he could for his son. LIES on all fronts! In fact, with the trust limitations and his last minute “generosity,” my father still managed to do almost as much harm as he wanted to do when Cousin D told him: “That’s not right!” six years before, in which case I’d say my father’s “sense of right” was perverted both before he did a will/trust and in his last actions and “choices,” and his testamentary capacity was questionable.

(If this sounds like DT ignoring his advisors and lawyers, it is exactly the same. As I was writing this, news broke of DT ignoring an ALL CAPS WARNING about congratulating Putin for winning an election. He did so anyway. My father was warned by my cousin “That’s not right!” but he still found a way to do what he wanted anyway, literally in the end. It’s easy to confuse “narcissism” with excessive self-love, as in the story from ancient Greece, and it sounds like a banal tautology to say: “Narcissists are egocentric.” But don’t misunderstand the magnitude of the idea. Long before I realized how appropriate a diagnosis of NPD was, I regularly thought to myself, “The world is ONLY what Dad says it is!” Indeed, though I’ve not seen it described this way, narcissists have highly subjective realities of a kind with small children who have yet to learn that daydreams are not the reality we all must eventually acknowledge as we grow up.)

Two short digressions: First, just as we’ve seen in the news, narcissists rid themselves of anyone who doesn’t follow their narrative, no matter how many lies or how much nonsense. This is Narcissistic Discard. Public figures discarded the last year include Flynn, Comey, Sessions and McCabe. When my father told D his plans to leave me nothing, my father was in the midst of narcissistically discarding me, his own only child (poisoned affections!) because I saw through his 24/7 ACT and called him out on things he did and knew were wrong (please refer to the Rosenberg video I quoted before about “outing a narcissist”). After Cousin D challenged his plan, he was no longer useful to my father and a threat to his false narrative, so my father discarded him and found new, gullible Flying Monkeys, a term for people narcissists manipulate and use to carry out or assist in abusing their victims, usually immediate family. Who better to be new Flying Monkeys than second cousins who’d had no appreciable contact for 60 years and had no idea of the lies and smears he was perpetrating against his own flesh and blood, especially with ‘a long-planned and carefully executed’ smear campaign to ‘take away one’s credibility.’

Second digression: About the time I got married, my father emailed me to criticize my wife’s father, an alcoholic. He rhetorically, sarcastically, and hypocritically asked: “What kind of man doesn’t take care of his family?” And just what was my father doing at the same time? He was making plans to ensure my and my family’s fiscal and physical futures would be as painful as possible! “Perverted sense of right”?

CLAUSE 6: “that no insane delusion shall influence his will in disposing of his property”

While Vaknin differentiates between narcissism and insanity, he does refer to narcissists as “delusional” due to their grandiose fantasies. (Some writers explicitly state narcissists are morally insane, and, considering my father’s and DT’s actions, the possibility DOES seem to merit further study.) I prefer to focus on the philosophical question of ‘influenced will.’ In the video “The Narcissist’s Life: A Prolonged Nightmare,” Vaknin says: “(The narcissist) does things, and he knows not why and wherefrom. He says things; he acts; he behaves in certain ways which he knows endanger him and put him in line for punishment, yet he cannot control them. The narcissist hurts people around him or breaks the law or violates accepted morality. He wants to stop but knows not how. Gradually, the narcissist is estranged from himself, possessed by some kind of demon, a puppet on invisible mental strings.” Whatever you think of determinism vs. free will, if you spend any time wondering whether addicts have control over their addictions, I think you’ll be inclined to say ‘no.’ I’m of the opinion that a narcissist’s addiction to praise (perhaps through compulsive ‘giving’), to pity (through smear stories about disappointing spouses or children), or even to condemnation (which seems a compulsively masochistic need), all highlight this issue of how much, or how little, free will the narcissist truly has. Cockburn’s “influenced will” and Vaknin’s observations just quoted seem worthy of more consideration.

In reading depositions, I became aware of several of my father’s lies in his last weeks. In my estimation, lies firmly believed by the teller qualify as delusions. I’ll use just two to illustrate what I see as Cockburn’s and Vaknin’s “delusions.” My father used two statements to ‘justify’ his late misdirection of major funds and impoverishing assets by 25%. The first was his lie, mentioned before, “There’s enough in the trust to help with my son’s retirement” as if I’ll get something else, like a pension from a job or Social Security, which I won’t. Remember also I won’t get Medicare, Medicaid, or other insurance, so what there is or isn’t in the way of trust assets will or will not be there to help as I get older and have more health problems.  

The second lie/delusion involved his mistaken perception of my work ethic, noted before. He reportedly said he “want(ed) to teach (me) a lesson about keeping a job.” This is a lie on so many levels. First, it presupposes a grown man doesn’t want to earn his own money to do the things he wants with his money, including cutting strings with home and likes having to look for new work regularly. Second, my father knew I left some jobs for health reasons: Dust storms in Saudi Arabia put me in an ICU for four days with life-threatening asthma; the SARS epidemic in China in 2003 was killing people left and right. Third, he knew some jobs did not KEEP ME; part-time instructors at community colleges are dropped faster than seasonal retail help if two or three students whine about being graded ‘too hard’! He even used to comment to me himself about how my career in higher ed did not seem as secure as his job with Uncle Sam was for thirty years. Fourth, “giving” away money I needed for my future health issues would not be a lesson to me when the asthma makes it hard for me to continue working. And fifth, it wasn’t much of a lesson because I did not find out about the last-minute transfer until my lawyers and I did a lot of digging and pushing, almost as if I wasn’t supposed to find out about that ‘lesson’!

So WHY did my father lie so many times in one statement? For one thing, it drew pity from people he told his story to: “Oh, that must be so disappointing for you to have a son like that!” For another, it allowed him to deflect attention away from his true, sadistic, and ‘shocking to common sentiments’ motive: to make sure his only child would have unending financial misery and physical pain from inability to seek medical help for things such as the cancer, which ended his life.

Whether or not his delusions were “insane,” I would say NPD did “influence his will in disposing of his property,” and I’d bet true experts on NPD would back me up on that if they could get around and over their rule about diagnosing dead people. Hypocritical that really, since the same experts would have no problem diagnosing me as having been on the receiving end of narcissistic triangulation, smear, and discard.  

Cl 7: “and bring about a disposal of it which, if the mind had been sound, would not have been made.”

This final clause made me wonder if there were someone with a sound mind I could compare with my father. I found one in the person of my late mother who predeceased him. My father and I were only children; when she died, she had six surviving siblings and twenty nieces and nephews—all closer in blood than his second cousins. Despite my disappointments to her, she would not, I believe, have had a problem comprehending or appreciating the claim her only child and grandchild would have. Further, considering the facts of my bad luck with my career and health, she would not for a second have considered doling out monies to her siblings, nieces, or nephews over her own flesh-and-blood. Going a step further, basing my comparisons on people I knew, I cannot imagine any of my twelve aunts and uncles on my mother’s side ignoring their own children and that “moral responsibility of no small importance.”

Conclusion   

There’s more I could add. I have 25 single-spaced pages of narrative describing and categorizing things internal to estate documents and correspondence, things extant in correspondence to me and others, and things unfortunately only I am aware of—which I prefer to think of as empirical/observed evidence, not merely hearsay. In fact, based on reading my lengthy correspondence with them, both of my attorneys acknowledged that my late father very likely had NPD.

However, because my father’s NPD was not officially and clinically diagnosed by a psychologist during his lifetime, none of these facts are relevant or admissible for consideration, even in negotiating a settlement with the family members who enriched themselves due to his financial incapacity and their own greed and ignorance, though their actions impoverished a trust I am sole beneficiary of until I die. As I noted at the beginning of the first of these videos, Vaknin says: “Therapists are being fooled by smart narcissists”; however, as I noted, there are no doubt hundreds, maybe thousands of self-educated people who have lived with a narcissistic parent and can identify with near certainty a narcissist standing in front of them (or the one seen on TV every day).

I’ve not researched the following, but I believe my comparison valid. First, after Alcoholics Anonymous became well-known, I imagine more people in the general, lay public were able to identify an alcoholic. I have known three alcoholics personally and would find it absurd if a court did not take as truth the word of multiple family and friends that a certain person is or was an out-and-out alcoholic. Alcoholics don’t usually go to a doctor after a certain point in their lives. Does that invalidate the reality or severity of their affliction? The same goes for a second group: people with anorexia nervosa. After Karen Carpenter died, general and public knowledge of that disorder, and the ability to know when someone has it, increased dramatically in a relatively short time. And that was decades before the internet!

I believe we are in the middle of a learning curve on NPD. A YouTube search for Narcissistic Personality Disorder reveals 174,000 videos; Google returns 624,000 hits. No, not everyone who cries NPD should be believed, but, again, (1) things in the estate paperwork and depositions should catch someone’s attention and (2) lead to curious examination of evidence in his personal correspondence with me and with others, and (3) that should lead to more curious and eager-to-know-and-get-to-the-truth questions. Instead…

My civil suit floundered because my lawyer said evidence of capacity was the word of a bank teller who saw my father ten minutes every other week for three years when he cashed a check and the word of a doctor who saw my father in a recuperative hospital, focusing on his terminal cancer for perhaps ten minutes not quite every day for six weeks only before he was moved to hospice. This same doctor put him on Ambien yet had no idea (like my father’s estate attorney) he was dealing with a pathological liar presenting a 24/7 ACT. Neither the bank teller nor the doctor probably had any idea what covert narcissism is, yet their word about my father’s capacity is more important than mine based on my 55 years as his son and having attained a level of education enabling me to understand and make valid connections between disparate fields. If you don’t know about covert narcissism, please watch “The Covert Narcissist” on Narcissism Survivor’s channel.

After a year of reading my input, my lady lawyer said my case was weak because, as just explained 1) the NPD was not officially diagnosed and 2) there were two individuals—a bank teller who cashed checks for my father for three years and a doctor who knew my father a month and half—who could testify to my father’s “capacity” in his inter vivos “gift” even though what I know is THE TRUTH: it was the result of NPD in general and in particular a need to obtain ego-boosting praise at the literal expense of his own flesh-and-blood’s survival.

My recent graduate lawyer also said my argument was ‘too emotional.’ Well, when your own parent does not ‘have your back’ and instead goes behind your back to tell delusional lies to harm your reputation and effectively cut you off from family, it’s an emotional issue. When your backstabbing parent uses those same delusional lies as an excuse to divert money you needed for simple survival and had more claim to than the people who received it, it’s an emotional issue. When you’re looking at spending every day of the remainder of your life one major, unplanned expense away from financial or physical disaster, it’s an emotional issue. My family and I live in the world’s deadliest country for road fatalities involving motorcycles; we use a motorcycle because we cannot afford a car. Besides thinking of the horrifying accident videos on the news every day and lying awake thinking about them every night, I have to think about not just my own future medical expenses but those of my wife and child as well. Do I buy a car and not have money for a medical emergency? Or do I keep money for a medical emergency and every day risk death for me and my family by being hit on our motorcycle by a car, truck, or bus? Emotional? YES!

My young attorney seems to have missed something in my communications with her. Either she assumed that, as a former university English instructor, I’m conversant only with grammar and poetry, or her law school days led her to believe only the law can determine what knowledge is, what logic is, and what ethics are, and no one outside the Law can have any idea about ethics, logic, or epistemology. It’s been thirty years since my undergrad major in philosophy, but I’ve continued to read about those areas and taught tertiary students about writing logical and ethical arguments. I did not, in correspondence with my attorneys, specifically state certain actions by my father or his cousins were “good or bad,” “right or wrong,” but it should have been evident there were/are major moral/ethical issues in my case as plaintiff.

Is what my father did “good” or “right” or in keeping with “a moral responsibility of no small importance”? Was it “good” or “right” for his second cousins to take a quarter of the assets considering the facts of my life and considering how immensely and indefinitely their doing so has harmed and will harm my family? Do my father’s second cousins have a moral/ethical obligation to repay money to which they had little ‘claim’ (a lá Banks v. Goodfellow), money that will be needed for our health and safety in the future? (I don’t suppose a young lawyer with just a few years’ experience worries much about financial disaster in late life.) Another interesting quote from a web article about narcissists and money: “The narcissist will not stop victimizing others, i.e. disrupting their lives, leaving them without monetary means, and causing them unbearable distress and worry.” Sounds like the author of that webpage knew my father.

The simple facts are these: Because of my financially very unrewarding career (In thirty years in higher ed, I had just two when I earned $25K; the rest of the time I earned LESS than $12K) and because of having an uninsured medical condition requiring several daily medicines and frequent trips to the doctor, ER, or even hospital stays over that same thirty years, I’ve never been able to build and keep any savings as even people, with far less education than I have, have been able to do. My financial worth at 50 was ZERO! Add to this my father’s actions of diverting major monies, which could have alleviated those everyday concerns, to people who don’t have near the precarious future my family and I have, and the mere act of those people taking that money can accurately and simply be described as “TAKING FROM SOMEONE WHO HAS LESS.”

Moral nihilism probably has no comment on such facts, but other meta-ethical schemata (such as teleology, deontology, quality ethics, evolutionary ethics) would likely find the situation questionable. Again, contemporaneous writings associated with Banks v. Goodfellow mention in several places “moral responsibility,” “moral law,” “moral faculties,” and “moral sense.” Yet, when I pointed out the facts to my lawyer, she says I’m using an ‘emotional argument.’ In fact, I’m feeling muzzled by the Law and prevented from educating my father’s second cousin of the magnitude of the harm his greed, his dishonesty, and his ignorance have caused and will cause my family. Even today, he’s probably blissfully ignorant of the issues and sleeps soundly at night, thinking that the Law’s myopic point-of-view will absolve him of any legal obligation to pay back the money, perhaps offering the out of filing for bankruptcy though I should be the one to file for bankruptcy: I still have much less than he does. Meanwhile, I have to remain silent with the knowledge he has or should have a moral/ethical obligation to pay back what was in reality a BRIBE by my dying father to get him and his wife to sit by his deathbed and tell him every last waking minute he was a kind, thoughtful, generous, good-hearted man—they didn’t/don’t know the truth, the whole truth...

Before my last point, I need to share more of how absurd this mess is and how long it’s been going on. Five years ago, a month after my father died, I learned there was no clause in the trust for discretionary help with a future life-endangering medical crisis. This was a couple years before I realized the explanation for everything my father said and did is Narcissistic Personality Disorder. However, at 50 years of age, I did know my father well enough that I had long noted his difficulty processing information and needing someone, like his wife/my mother, to tell him the right thing to do.

In retrospect, my situation was better before he died because, for twenty-five years, if I needed help with out-of-pocket hospital expenses, I could call, and he’d help. In 1991, he paid $10K for much-needed but uninsured surgery for me. He knew I left a teaching job in Saudi Arabia after a near fatal asthma attack, and I left a job in China because of SARS (he’d even sent a care package with surgical masks and a news clipping about a mysterious disease killing people about the same time I arrived there). HOW did he forget all this in drafting his trust unless something affected his cognitive abilities, his testamentary capacity?  

After he died, I had to deal with a trust officer (a lawyer and a CPA) who’d never actually met him and did not know me except by a prejudicial, smearing, “poisoned affections” letter he left in the trust. She even said she wished she’d been able to work with my father: “It looks like he went only so far in his paperwork and stopped.” For two years, I tried to explain to her and to her friend, an outside attorney for the trust, what my predicament was. I pointed out again and again how financially very unrewarding my career had been, how I had a net worth of ZERO when my father died and thus have nothing to pay for a future heart attack or stroke, yet I knew there were enough assets that there could be help with treatment for a major medical crisis. All this, I explained repeatedly to the trust officer and her gal pal, but both were downright dismissive of my concerns and entreaties.

I researched trust law, including Uniform Trust Code and Restatement (Third) of Trusts. I understand not every state has adopted every part of these, but my predicament seemed to merit closer consideration of clause § 66(1) of Restatement (Third): “If a trustee knows or should know of circumstances that justify judicial action under Subsection (1) with respect to an administrative provision, and of the potential of those circumstances to cause substantial harm to the trust or its beneficiaries, the trustee has a duty to petition the court for appropriate modification of or deviation from the terms of the trust.” I’d say whether or not someone can get life-saving medical help depending on available finances qualifies as something that could “cause substantial harm to a beneficiary.”

The trustee’s gal pal attorney, who is the wife of a preacher, declined to put the question to an objective judge, saying there was ‘nothing in the trust documents to warrant such a move for modification.’ Even after I got my own outside attorney, she still hemmed and hawed for months about whether what I saw as a life-or-death issue could be asked of the trust advisors, who are also remainder beneficiaries if I predecease them both! (Yes, a moral conflict of interest! But when it was pointed out to the preacher’s wife, she shrugged it off saying: “The conflict of interest existed when it was made.” As if that obviates it! As if it is not reason to seek a judge’s opinion about an amendment to help pay for life-preserving medical treatment when that amendment is rejected by the same people who stand to benefit if I predecease them! That’s one law degree Vanderbilt needs to rescind!) So, not only did my father forget to add a clause for help that might make the difference between life or death for me AND my family, there are two “lady” estate attorneys ignorant of a “moral responsibility of no ordinary importance”! I wonder when they last read Banks v. Goodfellow. I wonder if legal professionals contemplate how their efforts to be ‘amoral’ are sometimes ‘immoral.’

Again, all of my points can be supported by things in estate documents and correspondence and from his preserved correspondence to me and others. One more quote from the Banks v. Goodfellow case: “If the human instincts and affections, or the moral sense, become perverted by mental disease, etc. … in such a case it is obvious that the condition of the testamentary power fails.” Someone should have noticed this thirteen years ago when my father first set out to make his will and trust. If not then, then someone should have noticed it five years ago when I pointed to things which at least called for a closer, more careful forensic examination of my father’s testamentary and financial capacity, but neither the trust officer nor her gal pal outside attorney ever once came back to me with: “This seems like a pretty serious and important issue to you; let’s make sure we understand what you are asking us to consider.”

What I’ve concluded is the Law doesn’t care about the Truth or Right and Wrong. With that and my final point (next), I am putting the Law on notice: it has an intellectual and moral obligation to learn what it doesn’t know to keep from allowing immoral/unethical results to follow from its misguided attempts to be amoral. (Perhaps the scientific method and humility can be of help in this search for truth.)

My final point and reason for putting this on YouTube: I am disappointed both in my young attorney and her communication and language skills and in the system for yet another “reason” regarding the NPD issue; despite the way that it can and does explain everything, it cannot be used in court because: “It might confuse the jury.”

I had a couple thoughts when I read that in my attorney’s letter to me: Sad but true, many people on a jury are ill-equipped to follow reasoning and logic, even when spoon-fed something such as: this is what the NPD experts say and these are specific examples of Tim’s late father’s words and actions illustrating what the experts say. Life IS complicated, but we should not avoid thinking and making every effort to understand, especially when moral issues are to be considered. And that brings me to this…

My career as an academic has been about taking complicated stuff and presenting it in the least confusing way possible to people who need to learn something. So, as I tried to do at the end of every class, I ask: “Anybody got any questions? Anybody confused? If so, raise your hand” (or click thumbs down). On the other hand, if what I have presented here is not confusing, please click thumbs up and, if so inclined, leave a comment.

Thank you for reading/watching…

Suggested Further Viewing and Reading

Videos about Narcissistic Personality Disorder

From a man whose mother was a narcissist (and a very knowledgeable presenter):

Narcissism VERY DANGEROUS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=autKOOxj-Wk

The Covert Narcissist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi_-gxVsQ0s

Narcissistic Smears https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBK6PljfVe0

Narcissism Discard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClVU-iPNSXQ

Narcissist Needs Pity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0XtOnd3I3w

From Sam Vaknin, a confessed and self-aware narcissist and author of the main book on NPD:

Trump, Clinton: Narcissists? Experts Spew Nonsense https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpzNLVLXHt0

Narcissist as Compulsive Giver

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqtlfIjWxoY

Abuse by Proxy: From Smear Campaigns to 3^rd Party Stalking and Abuse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0aOH6kw9ug

Money, Narcissist’s License to Abuse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVl7Zc9dToQ

Idealized, Devalued, Dumped, Discarded

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvEc0ojAWqU

The Narcissist’s Life: a Prolonged Nightmare

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoUqM-_EEUY

From Ross Rosenberg  

“The Covert Narcissist A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vi6GT8TMm8

Some online articles about Narcissists and Money

Your Narcissistic Parent’s False Self

http://narcissismschild.com/2014/07/27/your-narcissistic-parents-false-self/

BEWARE OF NARCISSISTIC GENEROSITY

http://sharonspano.com/time-money/beware-of-narcissistic-generosity/

The Narcissist and Money http://thenarcissisticlife.com/the-narcissist-and-money/

The Narcissist as Compulsive Giver – Sam Vaknin http://samvak.tripod.com/journal96.html

Economic and Financial Abuse: a Narcissist Dream Plan Exposed

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/economic-financial-abuse-narcissist-dream-plan-exposed-donna-hines

Some online articles about NPD and testamentary capacity

https://hullandhull.com/2014/11/narcissistic-personality-disorder/  podcast below https://hullandhull.com/2014/11/hull-on-estates-395-testamentary-capacity-and-undue-influence/