You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can’t wash off.
—Hugo Hamilton, The Sailor in the Wardrobe
My late father, an investment advisor like myself, was a cold, distant, and emotionally unavailable man. Though I suspected as a youngster that he loved me, he seldom displayed any affection or warmth, even as I longed, as many young boys do as they are growing up and exploring and discovering their emerging male identities, for a close connection with my father.
Instead, my father prided himself on his logic, intellect, and discipline. Emotionally fastidious, he walled himself off from feelings, and disparaged their display in others. “You have hurty feelings,” he once told me when I was a young boy, his words stinging me like garden nettles and making the young male psyche that was taking shape in me at that tender age feel an awkward mix of shame, embarrassment, and astonishment. How could someone who allegedly loved me talk to me that way? At the time I felt diminished, insignificant. Even foolish. Most of all, I felt disconnected from him. Didn’t he know how much I longed for a close relationship with him as my father?
He never knew how much his words hurt me, although, on his death bed, he whispered to me, “Suffering, suffering.”
Make no mistake. I grew up a child of privilege. My father and grandfather were descended from a long line of New York bankers, brokers, entrepreneurs, and financiers going back to the early 1800s. Their flinty resolve, steely discipline, and emotional reserve served them well in business in the early years of our country. I can remember, for example, my father telling me stories of how ancestors of mine from the Revolutionary War onward had been in the fur industry, based in Danbury, Connecticut. Beginning in the 1830s, my great-great grandfather began to crisscross multiple states, extending west to St. Louis by stage coach, steamer, rail, and foot, collecting on accounts and looking for new sources of high-quality animal pelts when his sources in New York and New England dwindled. It was a time when the U.S. banking system didn’t exist as it does today, and he became a wary trader in local bank paper, avoiding notes issued by some banks while accepting bank paper from others. He thus became an arbitrageur of local bank paper across much of modern-day Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.1 Later, he and other descendants set up a family bank that served still other states and did business overseas. All this set the stage for later descendants, my great uncles and paternal grandfather, to found and manage a Wall Street brokerage firm at the turn of the 20th century.
My family’s business acumen over multiple generations blessed us with material abundance. As a child, I grew up with servants on a 75-acre parcel of land that had been a farm in New Canaan, Connecticut. My parents built a house there soon after World War II. It was a beautiful, formal home with nine bedrooms and eight and a half bathrooms. The rear part of the house was where the servants lived: a cook and butler, a chamber maid, and the governess. Dinner was served to us each night by our butler, William, who dressed in a bow tie and jacket. As one of five boys, I grew up spending my falls, winters, and springs running across hills, playing games in the forest and on the lawns, and fording streams. Summers were spent on the pristine beaches of Cape Cod, where my father indulged his passion for sailing, a passion I too embraced from the age of 4. It is one of the few pleasant memories that connects me with my father to this day.
Yes, growing up we were materially very comfortable. But in our household, emotional distance was the norm. Both of my parents were cold and aloof, which is why, at an early age, I formed a close attachment to a woman named Bibi, who was my governess. I absolutely adored Bibi, but when I was about eight years old my parents decided that Bibi and I had grown too close for my own good. Without any warning they fired her, unbeknownst to me.
I remember the day clearly even now.
Bibi had Thursdays off, and I typically came to her room Friday mornings to say hello. On one particular Friday morning in 1959, I remember my mother coming down the hallway of our house, her crisp, pressed cotton dress rustling as she walked. She came upon me as I waited to see Bibi and told me Bibi had been dismissed. I would never see her again. I was crushed! I’d grown so attached to Bibi, closer to her, in fact, than to my own mother, which she must have realized. So, she and my father had decided Bibi needed to be erased from my life forever.
“You’ll never see her again!”
As my mother’s harsh words echoed in my innocent, eight-year-old ears, time seemed to stop.
To this day, I still remember standing and staring at the plain, white door that led to the servant’s quarters from our house, through which I always walked to connect with Bibi on Fridays. But now I felt unable to open it. In fact, what seemed to loom before me was not a door but an enormous chasm. I felt myself teetering, as if on the edge of a cliff, about to fall over.
Recalling that moment today, nearly 60 years later, I believe I was experiencing the first moments of grief, my mind racing as my eight-year-old psyche struggled to make meaning of what had just happened to me.
I’ll never forget the images of that day. On that day, in that hallway, brute reality intruded into my idyllic childhood existence, and swept away someone very dear to me. In some respects, you could liken my feelings that day to the emotions that victims of hurricanes and tornadoes feel when they experience their worlds ripped quickly asunder—without warning or explanation. On that day, I felt the emotional umbilical cord of my life was cut. The moment proved to be a traumatic loss of innocence for me that led to several years of debilitating depression. Depression that was only gradually relieved by therapy, tears, and time.
A few years later, when I was 16, I was in the library of our home when our maid, Jenny, brought someone by to see me. Jenny told me it was somebody I’d known many years before. But when I met the surprise visitor I didn’t recognize her. Only later did I learn that it was Bibi. After I failed to recognize her, I’m told that Bibi left our house, never to return. I also learned that when she left my parents’ employ, she gave up working as a governess. That day, my non-recognition of her in the library must have left her as heartbroken as her departure many years before had left me.
Bibi’s abrupt exit from my life proved, in retrospect, to be a foundational life story for me. This early and painful loss of “perfect love” affirmed in my young psyche the importance of relationships, stability, stewardship, love, and connection with others, and helped forge the “emotional template” that is the basis of the person I am today.
Bibi had abruptly left my life, but thankfully there was another person in my household with whom I could emotionally connect as a young person. William, our butler, perhaps intuitively stepped in and filled the void, becoming a surrogate father to me in the years that followed. He was so different from my father. My father had a dark side, a temper that could become volcanic, which on occasion was directed at me and my four brothers in the form of cold lectures, threats, and humiliating and shaming put-downs. At times he even whipped the family dog. For all these reasons, and the fact that he was seldom around, I never connected with him emotionally.
In contrast, William had a kind and steady way about him and was emotionally present to me in ways that reverberate to this day. It was not unusual for my parents to be gone during the day from our Connecticut house and for William and Jenny to be left to care for me and my brothers. In such instances I got to observe William up close and liked what I saw. William was, as they say, “a man’s man.” More hands-on than cerebral, he knew how to do everything. He knew how machines worked and how to fix things. He knew how to dress a turkey at Thanksgiving, as well as the fowl my parents brought home from their hunting trips in New York State. He knew how to get a carpet to lie flat. He even knew how to drive a car up a hill in deep snow without getting stuck. One year, he managed to retrieve our family car from a snow bank in our driveway, after my father ditched it there at the height of a blizzard.
Truth be told, I worshipped William as a boy, and secretly wished he was my father, just as I wished that Bibi was my mother. He held me in his thrall, and filled a tremendous emotional void. Always there, taking care of things. Taking care of me! He seemed the embodiment of responsible stewardship. His presence (like Bibi’s earlier in my life) made me realize how important connections with other people were to me, and explains why stewardship (the “looking after of things”) is a key theme of the work I do today as a wealth advisor.
At 14, I left home and went to Milton Academy, a boarding school just south of Boston. My first year there was difficult for me academically. I was at sea, and it was only through tutoring and generous teachers that I managed to pull myself up. I started at the bottom of my class but graduated in the top third! My Milton housemaster had a lot to do with this. He nurtured me and encouraged me, coordinating my efforts with my parents’ concerns and love. In tenth grade, he introduced me to Quakerism. Its subsequent influence on my life, and his abiding care of me throughout my teenage years, further cemented my attraction to stewardship and helped to create a “protector” personality in me, whose traits I bring to my work with clients today.
Because of my unique upbringing with surrogate-like parents and my early childhood loss of “perfect love,” I grew up with a deep longing for connection with others, and an intense desire to understand human emotions—both mine and others’. These interests led me to choose social psychology as my major in college, because I was fascinated with the nature of interaction between people (no doubt an outgrowth of what I had observed in my own family system growing up). I was looking for clues to understand my parents’ emotional remoteness, my desires for closeness and connection with them and others, and the strong emotional pull I felt toward Bibi and William as a youngster. Social psychology thus seemed like a perfect course of study. As a discipline, it sought to unpack and explain the emotional dynamics that exist between individuals and groups. And, it put a high value on human emotions and motivations as keys to understanding human behavior and actions.
Eventually, however, my interest in social psychology waned. It became too academic for me. I sought more “juice.” So, I migrated to theater and drama, where I pictured myself exploring the world of human emotions and motivations in greater depth, and doing it on stage! Looking back on it now, I clearly was in search of an understanding of my emotional self, willing to try on roles crafted by playwrights to see if any resonated as being me. But in my school’s theatre department I encountered more adolescent egos than insights into the nature of human nature. So, after a momentary stab at acting and writing plays, I moved on again, still searching.
It was then that I discovered geology. Geology had an absence of human actors (and egos), so it was refreshing! There was plenty of drama though. Think Continental Drift, glacial flows, lunar landings and moon rocks! Talk about theater! The physical world provides a dramatic stage for a geologist, and something in this world and work resonated in me at the deepest levels of my being.
At a deeper, emotional level, geology is about stewardship of physical assets (land); about conservation; about careful observation and data-gathering of what’s in front of you, and about developing a careful frame of reference that respects not only what you observe on the surface of things but also what lies beneath. As a science it appealed to my analytical side in a very robust way. Geology also gave me the opportunity to work closely with private clients to help them with the stewardship of their land, to understand their needs and desires, and to act as a consultant in helping them achieve long-term goals from their (physical) assets. Thus, it appealed to the stewardship and servant sides of my personality.
I worked happily in the field of geology for ten years, but though I loved the work the pay wasn’t good, and I started to wonder how I was going to send my three sons to college. Moreover, I was looking for deeper, more substantive ways to be of service to others and to form long-term relationships with people. Working as a contract geologist generally meant consulting relationships of limited duration, after which I’d move on without further contact with a client.
For all these reasons, I began considering what else I could do with my life other than be a geologist. It was about this time that my interest in social psychology reasserted itself, along with what had been a long-time fascination with financial markets. As a wealth advisor himself, my father had always dissuaded my brothers and me from careers on Wall Street. He called it “dirty work.” But somehow I found the machinations and gyrations of the financial markets fascinating nonetheless. Moreover, investing was an activity that involved disciplined thinking (as geology does) and that encompassed the full suite of interests I had in social psychology, behavioral finance, and stewardship. The idea of being able to build long-term relationships with clients whose money I would manage was like icing on the cake!
My move over 25 years ago from a career in geology to one in business and finance was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. For more than a quarter century, I’ve had some wonderful mentors who helped me chart a course first to business school (Columbia) and then to jobs at CIGNA; Shawmut Bank in Hartford, Connecticut; Boston Private Bank and Trust; Fiduciary Trust; and several other companies. Today, I am a senior portfolio manager at Hemenway Trust Company.
Human emotions and their role in driving investor behavior have continued to fascinate me since the day I entered the wealth advisory business. Rewardingly, I’ve built my entire career as a wealth advisor around understanding the role that emotions and human psychology play in investor behavior, both in low-stakes and high-stakes situations.
As wealth advisors, we must pay attention to the rich human dramas that reside in our clients and understand the experiences, stories, hurts, fears, and moments of love and triumph that make them the unique individuals they are as adults.
Don’t be afraid to discover this treasured material! Taking the time to unearth these dynamics is essential to helping us better serve our clients and continually deepen our knowledge and appreciation of human emotions as a wellspring of people’s motivations and actions.
Working with the Emotional Investor is intended to provide you with tools and insights I’ve gathered from a 25-year career in the wealth advisory business. It’s my hope that this book will enhance your own approach to working with clients, helping you to understand the unique dynamics of human nature and how these factors inevitably influence peoples’ thinking and decision-making about investment planning and wealth management.
Chris White
Pocasset, MA
Summer 2015