What the Will Cannot Settle

Webinars

A Guyanese-American clinical psychologist offers a psychological companion to the legal diagnosis of inheritance gridlock.

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · May 18, 2026

A few weeks ago in this space, attorney Nigel Hughes laid out the legal anatomy of the inheritance gridlock — the systematic destruction of generational wealth in Guyanese families through intestacy, fractional undivided shares, and the slow administrative paralysis that consumes a family home one generation at a time. His diagnosis was clean. His prescriptions — monetize, corporatize, plan, communicate — were sound. Yet as I tried to write that conversation up, I kept returning to something Hughes, as a lawyer, could only gesture toward. He spoke of “family-owned properties with various issues,” and we all know what that phrase is doing. It is doing the work of not naming the kitchen-table arguments. The siblings who have not spoken in fifteen years. The mother who will not write a will because, in her mind, to write one is to invite her own death.

Avoidance as a Symptom, Not a Failing

Dr. Caldeira’s central clinical insight reorganized everything that followed. The avoidance that animates the inheritance gridlock — the refusal to write the will, the decades of silence around the family property, the diaspora child who lives a successful life in Brooklyn but leaves the Guyana house to rot — is not a character flaw, and it is not idiosyncrasy. It is a recognizable symptom of trauma.

Persistent avoidance, she explained, is a hallmark feature of post-traumatic stress, and Guyanese families carry a great deal of trauma in their inheritance — the long shadow of enslavement and indentureship, the disruptions of colonial rule and migration, layered atop the individual interpersonal traumas any family also accumulates over its lifespan. We may keep functioning. We may earn the degrees, build the careers, send the remittances. But in the background, the avoidance keeps doing its work, and it shows up most visibly precisely where the stakes are highest — around money, debt, and dying. The three hardest conversations.

When Raymond McMillan, watching live, asked the question I think many in the audience were thinking — how can people who have built rational, successful lives abroad leave Guyanese assets fallow for decades? — Dr. Caldeira pushed back on the premise. The behavior is not rational; the behavior only looks rational on paper. Underneath the avoidance there is almost always an emotional reason, and very often that reason is something about Guyana itself that the person has not gone back to face.

Land as Triumph, Not Only Trauma

One of the most important refinements Dr. Caldeira offered came when I asked about the symbolic weight of land. I had assumed the weight was largely a weight of trauma — land as the inheritance of bondage and dispossession. She corrected me gently. For many Guyanese families, the land is also tied to a profound sense of triumph. To own a piece of ground was to no longer be ground. The first generation to acquire a home, a plot, a deed, did so against the full weight of history. When we ask the next generation to sell or restructure that property, we are asking them to perform a psychological transaction whose terms most of us have never named.

This is why families freeze. Not because they are foolish, and not because they do not understand the math. But because the math is asking them to liquidate something whose value was never economic to begin with.

A Path Forward: From Trauma to Tools

Dr. Caldeira did not leave us in the diagnosis. The second half of the hour was as practical as the first half was clinical, and three ideas in particular deserve to travel beyond the webinar.

First, listen to understand. Guyanese culture rewards debate; we love to challenge. But the family conversation about inheritance is not a debate to be won. Dr. Caldeira offered a simple discipline: when a parent or sibling says something difficult, repeat it back. *Is this what you said? Tell me more.* That small skill, practiced often enough to become natural, may be the single most useful tool a family can deploy.

Second, solve the solvable problems. Most families approaching an inheritance dispute try to settle every grievance at once — birth order, gender, who did the work, who left, who stayed. Dr. Caldeira urged a different approach. Identify what everyone can agree on. Almost every Guyanese family can agree that the original work of the parent or grandparent who acquired the asset deserves to be honored, and that the family deserves to benefit from that work. Build outward from that one shared point. Leave the unsolvable conflicts for another conversation, or for another generation.

Third, start with regular family meetings. The pandemic taught many Guyanese families to gather on Zoom on a Sunday afternoon. Dr. Caldeira’s recommendation was to keep that habit and use it. Half an hour. Light agenda. No heavy decisions in the first sitting. The goal is not to resolve the inheritance question in a single meeting; the goal is to make the family a body capable of having the conversation when the time comes.

For families already in serious conflict, professional support matters — and Guyana now has more of it than a generation ago: a mental health unit at the Ministry of Health, clinical psychology training at the University of Guyana, and an updated Mental Health Act, championed by our fellow Queen’s College classmate Dr. Frank Anthony, that finally retired the colonial-era statute criminalizing attempted suicide. Practitioners in private practice are oversubscribed, which is itself, paradoxically, evidence of progress.

The Two Truths We Must Hold Together

The challenge, perhaps, is learning to hold two truths together at once.

The family home is both memory and instrument. The family itself is both wound and resource. The history we inherit is both burden and gift. Dr. Caldeira asked us to add one more pair to that list: we can embrace, with our full intellectual force, the academic and economic intelligences that have served us well, and at the same time we can embrace the emotional intelligence we have too often left untrained. These are not competing investments. They are the same investment.

Repair, she insisted, is possible. The only condition under which it is not possible is the presence of violence or its threat — there she was unflinching. Everywhere else, repair is on the table.

The inheritance gridlock will not be unlocked by lawyers alone, nor by economists alone. It will be unlocked, family by family, by people willing to sit at a kitchen table and say to one another the things our parents and grandparents could not bring themselves to say. The legal instruments will follow. The wealth will follow. But first, the conversation.

“Repair is possible. We have all the resources available to us now. We should access them.”

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