Are Therapists to Blame for Family Estrangement? Part Two on Going "No Contact"

In January, I wrote about what happens when parents and adult children go no contact, and about the reality gap that sits under nearly every estrangement: two sincere accounts of the same family that barely overlap. Since then the conversation has gotten louder. In July, the Wall Street Journal published Elizabeth Bernstein's piece "Are Therapists to Blame for the Rise of Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?" and the New York Post followed with its own version, announcing that one third of parents with estranged children blame therapy and framing the trend as a symptom of a culture obsessed with trauma. As I finished writing this response, the New York Times added a third voice of a different kind: Celeste Marcus's essay "Cutting Your Parents Off Isn't the Answer," a first person account of choosing joint therapy with her father over going no contact. I will come back to her story, because it shows something the surveys cannot.

Within days, families I work with were bringing these articles into sessions. Estranged parents read them and felt seen, and angry, and vindicated. Adult children read them and felt accused. When a piece of journalism lands in that many living rooms at once, it deserves a direct response. So this is part two: my professional read of what the coverage gets right, where its evidence does not support its conclusions, what it leaves out, and what families on either side of an estrangement should do with it.

One note before I start. I am not going to defend my own field reflexively. Regular readers know I have made versions of this critique myself, in public and under my own name. In February I wrote about TikTok therapy and the victim mindset: the misuse of clinical language as social currency, the online performance of diagnosis, and the danger of a victim identity that hardens into a permanent way of being. Last month I wrote about why nearly half of men drop out of therapy, and argued that the problem is often the room rather than the man sitting in it. So when I say the frame in these estrangement articles does not fit most of the families I sit with, it is because I have looked closely at where the concern applies and where it does not.

What the Coverage Gets Right

The scale is real. The research behind the numbers is sound. Cornell's Karl Pillemer has found that roughly 27 percent of American adults have cut off contact with a family member, and about one in ten is estranged from a parent or a child at any given moment. A study in the Journal of Marriage and Family puts the figure among young adults even higher: more than a quarter have been estranged from a parent at some point. Whatever else is true, estranged families are in the company of millions, and almost none of them are talking about it.

Parental grief is real and badly served. The articles are right that the support infrastructure for estranged parents is thin compared to what exists for adult children. Parents describe something close to a bereavement that never ends, complicated by shame and by not knowing what to tell people. That is real, it is under-acknowledged, and I would not argue with a word of it.

Some clinical work is one sided. This is the strongest point in the coverage, and I agree with it. Most graduate training now produces clinicians formed in individual, symptom focused models with very little family systems coursework. A therapist who has only ever heard one account, and who has no framework for thinking about a whole system, can harden a position simply by never introducing another vantage point. That is a real failure mode. It is also a cousin of the argument I made in the piece on men and therapy: when the room is built around one way of processing, the people who process differently get labeled resistant rather than heard.

The online estrangement economy exists. Quizzes, courses, coaches, and books that treat cutoff as a product are real, and much of the loudest content comes from influencers who are not licensed clinicians. Advice delivered at scale, to people whose circumstances the advisor knows nothing about, is a poor way to make one of the largest decisions of a life.

Cutoff does not automatically heal anyone. Distance usually brings relief and grief together. That is consistent with everything I see clinically, and it was the honest note in my first post as well: adult children who go no contact describe a nervous system that relaxes and a loss that does not.

Where the Evidence Does Not Hold

The headline finding, in both papers, is that among roughly 7,000 estranged parents surveyed this spring by a Massachusetts therapist, about a third believed their adult child's therapist had influenced or recommended the cutoff. Almost everything in the coverage rests on that number, and the number cannot carry it.

The sample selects for the answer. These are not 7,000 randomly chosen parents. They are parents who identified themselves as estranged and chose to complete a survey about it, recruited through channels that serve that community, by a clinician whose practice serves that same population. None of that makes anyone dishonest. It does mean the result cannot be generalized.

It measures belief, not behavior. This is the central problem. Every respondent is reporting on a conversation they were not present for, in a room they have never entered, relayed at best secondhand by a child who is not speaking to them. The finding is not that a third of therapists recommended estrangement. The finding is that a third of estranged parents believe one did. Those are different claims, and the coverage moves between them without acknowledging the gap. Even the Journal's opening anecdote, a woman whose therapist recommended she cut off her mother in their second session, describes conduct most clinicians would consider a serious departure from competent practice.

The real finding is the question. What the number does tell us is true and important: when parents are cut off and given no explanation, a great many of them locate the cause outside the relationship. That is the thing worth studying. The coverage treats it as the conclusion instead.

The argument refutes itself. The core charge against therapists is that it is unsound to draw conclusions from one person's account. That is a fair critique. The articles then build their entire case from one side, applying full skepticism to what adult children say and none at all to what parents say. Whatever standard of evidence we are holding clinicians to, the coverage does not meet it.

The outcome claims are correlation dressed as cause. Where the reporting suggests that people who cut off family members fare worse over time, the arrow is assumed. Anyone who initiates a cutoff was, by definition, already inside a distressed family. Distress in that group may well precede the estrangement, and depression is itself a strong predictor of relational rupture, so the causation may run backward. There is also no counterfactual anywhere in this literature: no data on how those same people would have fared had they stayed in daily contact. The defensible claim is modest. Cutoff does not resolve distress. That is not the claim the headlines make.

The attribution pattern is itself a known finding. Research on estrangement consistently shows that parents attribute the rupture to outside influences and events, while adult children cite the relationship itself. That divergence is one of the most reliable findings in the field. These articles reproduce the parent side of that pattern and present it as a discovery.

What the Coverage Misses

The reality gap. This is the article I most wish someone had written, and it is the heart of part one. Parents organize memory around intention, effort, and responsibility. They remember trying hard, providing, and correcting what they knew to correct. Adult children organize memory around impact and adaptation. They remember managing someone else's mood, staying small to keep things steady, learning what was safe to say. Both accounts can be sincere and still not overlap. Two people look at the same picture and see different images. Coverage that could hold that would help families. Coverage that picks a side hands one half of the family ammunition.

Accumulation. Estrangement almost never comes from a single event. It is the slow arithmetic of many small ruptures, none of which would look serious written on a page by itself. An investigation organized around what one therapist may have said in one office is looking for a single cause in a phenomenon that does not have one.

Defensiveness as protection.

The coverage treats parental defensiveness as either justified or absent, when clinically it is neither. It is a nervous system response to shame and to the fear of losing a child. Naming that would have given parents something useful, because a parent who understands their own defensiveness can work with it. A parent who has been told the defensiveness is warranted cannot.

The middle path.

The articles present two states, contact and cutoff, when nearly all of the real work lives in between: partial connection, structured and limited contact, mediated conversation, incremental trust. The research agrees that estrangement is rarely a life sentence. The same Journal of Marriage and Family work found that most adult children who cut off a parent eventually reconcile, roughly four in five with mothers and about seven in ten with fathers. Families who find their way back do not go from silence to Sunday dinner. They go from silence to one contained conversation. Then another.

Anything a parent could actually do. This is the deepest failure. The coverage is diagnostic of a culture and useless to a household. A parent finishes these articles feeling validated, angry, and no better equipped than before. There is nothing in them that helps a mother or father prepare for the moment their child does come back, which is the only preparation that matters.

And there is a question the coverage never asks: why is estrangement so often the first time a family takes an adult child's account of their own childhood seriously?

The Essay That Shows the Alternative

The Times essay deserves its own section, because it is the only entry in this news cycle that shows repair instead of arguing about blame. Celeste Marcus grew up in a politically conservative Orthodox Jewish community. She came out to her parents at 28 by introducing them to the woman she intended to marry, and her father received the news as a threat to everything he had raised her inside. Her friends told her his reaction was disqualifying. One called continued closeness with him "not morally justifiable." A second rupture followed over Israel and Gaza, sharp enough that father and daughter did not speak for months.

The story had every ingredient the cutoff culture looks for.

It went the other way, and the mechanics of how are worth more than any headline this summer. Her father proposed joint therapy. He offered to pay for it and to drive from Philadelphia to Washington as often as she was willing to sit in the room, in front of a therapist he took to calling a referee. What happened inside was not gentle. He theorized that her sexuality was a trauma response. She answered with accusations about his limitations that landed just as hard. Said across a holiday table, exchanges like those end relationships. Said inside a contained, scheduled, refereed room, they moved two people toward each other. In May, her father officiated her Jewish wedding in the backyard of her childhood home and blessed the marriage from inside the tradition she was raised in.

Three details matter clinically.

Who pushed hardest for estrangement. Not a therapist. Friends, applying moral language to a relational decision. The chorus these newspapers keep attributing to clinicians lives at least as much in the group chat, which is what I argued in February when I wrote about clinical vocabulary becoming social currency.

What kind of estrangement this nearly was. Nobody in the essay alleges abuse. This was a rupture over worldview and identity, a different species from a rupture over harm, and the two need different medicine. Coverage that blends them, and most of it does, leaves families applying the wrong treatment to their condition.

What repair required and what it did not. It required structure, a third party, and sustained conduct: the father initiated, paid, drove, and kept showing up. It did not require anyone to convert. They still disagree about most of what they disagreed about. What they recovered was the ability to love and respect each other without a shared worldview, which Marcus calls a virtue rather than a settlement. I agree with her.

One caution, because this essay will be forwarded to a lot of estranged adult children this week with a message that amounts to "see, you should call your mother." Marcus made this choice freely, as an adult with resources, physical safety, and an exit she could take at any time. She had, briefly, taken it. Her story shows what becomes possible when safety is achievable and both people keep doing the work. It is not a verdict on families where safety is not achievable, and it is not ammunition. Used as ammunition, it becomes one more article that picks a side.

What I Tell Families Holding These Articles

An external cause is seductive, and it is expensive. If a therapist talked your child into this, there is nothing to look for and nothing to own. Repair, when it becomes possible, depends on the opposite: arriving with a map you drew yourself, specific moments honestly located and owned without explanation. Every hour spent on whether someone influenced your child is an hour not spent on the moments they lived through. Only one of those two lines of inquiry leads anywhere your child can meet you.

Beware the waiting posture. The Journal closes with a daughter who reconnected after she had children of her own and came to see that all parents are flawed. It is a lovely story, and it teaches a passive lesson: sit tight, and one day your child will mature into understanding you. If reconciliation arrives that way, you were a bystander to your own repair. Preparation is the alternative. When the moment comes, whenever it comes, your child should meet people who did the work rather than people who waited.

Use one question as a compass. Does this make me better prepared to sit across from my son or daughter? If something in an article sharpens how you will show up, keep it. If it mainly makes you feel less responsible, set it down and come back to the work. That question applies to everything you read between now and the day that conversation happens.

The critique of one sided work has a structural answer. The best argument in this coverage is that estrangement work goes wrong when only one person is heard. I agree. The answer is better architecture: engagements built so that parents, adult children, and their individual clinicians are each heard, and coordinated with one another rather than siloed. That is how we structure this work at YES, and it is the practical response to everything legitimate in these articles.

A Condition, Not a Verdict

The articles treat estrangement as a status. It is a condition, and conditions change. In nearly every estrangement I have worked with, love and longing are alive in the adult child alongside the hurt, and grief and hope are alive in the parents alongside the anger. The families who find their way back are not the ones who identified the correct villain. They are the ones who prepared for a conversation instead of accepting a verdict.

If your family is living inside this, on either side of the silence, that preparation is the work we do.