No Contact, Part 3: What the WSJ Still Misses About Estrangement
A Response to the Wall Street Journal Article "Why Are So Many Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?"
Key Takeaways
The Media Shift: The new Wall Street Journal piece moves from one scapegoat to five cultural drivers, but still tells the story through the parents' lens.
The Missing Inside Story: Algorithms, labels, and identity culture explain why estrangement is easier today—not why a specific child cuts off a specific parent.
State Determines Story: Parents and children encode the same events differently because they lived through them in different nervous systems, with different stakes and exits.
The Fusion-Cutoff Loop: High-surveillance, intensive parenting and adult cutoffs are two sides of the same coin: an attempt to separate when closeness was never differentiated.
From Debate to Infrastructure: Society needs repair mechanisms like mediation, structured contact, and coordinated family therapy, not endless debate over who is to blame.
This summer, more than two hundred estranged parents filled a conference room in Chicago, some of them having flown in from as far away as Australia, with another two hundred and fifty watching online. They came for one thing. A mother quoted in the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the event put it plainly: they wanted to understand what makes their children do this, because the children all seem to say the same things. Narcissist. Self absorbed. It is your fault.
I have sat with a lot of parents who could have been in that room. Their grief is real, it is underserved, and the question they carried to Chicago is the wrong one. Not because their children are right and they are wrong, but because the question keeps them exactly where they are. That room was, I suspect, the reality gap at scale: hundreds of sincere accounts of family life that do not overlap with the accounts held by the people they love most, gathered in one place to ask why the other side sees it so differently.
In January I wrote about that gap. In August I responded to the Journal’s first piece on this subject and to the wave of coverage around it. Now the Journal is back with a longer and better article by Elizabeth Bernstein, “Why Are So Many Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?”, and I want to give it a fair read, because it does something the July piece did not. It looks for causes in more than one place. It quotes real researchers. It concedes real points. And it still barely opens the front door of the house where the estrangement was actually made. This piece is about what the article gets right, where it goes wrong, and a plausible mechanism for how parents and adult children can both be telling the truth.
The Coverage Is Getting Better
Credit where it is due. July’s article had one villain. This one has five drivers, and it moves therapists from the headline to the last of them. It quotes sociologists alongside clinicians. It admits, in plain language, that nobody has good prevalence numbers since the pandemic, which is more honesty than most of this genre manages. It concedes that expanding definitions of harm have an upside, because previous generations ignored abuse that should never have been ignored. And it gives room to Rin Reczek, the Ohio State sociologist whose account of a shift from compulsory kinship to democratized kinship is the most useful idea in the piece.
Even the sharpest critique of estrangement influencers comes from inside the article: a therapist with several million followers observing that a person making short videos is not listening to you, does not know you, and cannot assess your situation. He is right. It also illustrates how a commercial ecosystem has developed around estrangement on both sides.
So this is not a dismissal. It is a reading from the chair I sit in, which is the chair across from both sides of the family. One rule for the rest of this piece, because it is the rule I am holding the Journal to: when I say the research shows something, I will cite it. When I say what I see, I mean the families who reach my practice, which is not a random sample of estranged families. They are disproportionately families where at least one side still wants a way back, and where the rupture traces to the childhood home. The estrangement literature is young and thin, and I will try not to dress clinical observation up as population fact.
The Vocabulary Argument
The article’s lead driver is what psychologists call concept creep: the expansion of harm related concepts over time, so that words like abuse and trauma now cover a wider range of experience than they once did (Haslam, 2016). The evidence offered is a September survey of about a thousand estranged parents, run by the same clinician whose survey anchored the July piece, in which 82 percent said their children’s use of labels like toxic, abusive, or unsafe contributed to the cutoff.
Two things are true here, and the article holds only one of them.
The labels are often clinically wrong. I made this argument myself in February, and I stand by it. In my experience, most parents who get called narcissists would not meet criteria for anything, and the base rates make that unsurprising: population estimates of narcissistic personality disorder run in the single digits (Stinson et al., 2008), and the label does not. Clinical vocabulary has become social currency, and people reach for the most serious word available because it is the word that gets taken seriously. That is a real problem and a fair critique.
The wrong label does not make the impact fake. Read the article’s own description of the disconnect. It says younger adults now regard repeated criticism, strong disagreements, and painful relationship conflict as abusive. That sentence is the reality gap described from the parent’s chair, in the parent’s vocabulary. In the families I sit with, what a parent filed under strong disagreement, a child often encoded as years of being wrong, small, and braced. In those families the child did not inflate the harm by learning a new word for it. The word arrived late for a harm that had no name in that house. The diagnosis is often mistaken. The data underneath it usually is not. I cannot tell you how often that holds across the whole population of estranged families, and neither can a survey of the parents.
Notice, too, what the survey actually measures. Parents are asked why their child left, and 82 percent locate the cause in the child’s vocabulary. In July, a third located it in the child’s therapist. One of the most consistent findings in the still small estrangement literature is that parents tend to attribute the rupture to something outside the relationship while adult children tend to attribute it to the relationship itself (Carr et al., 2015, in separate samples of parents and adult children; Pillemer, 2020), and a similar divergence shows up in the lab when people narrate a conflict from its two sides (Baumeister, Stillwell, and Wotman, 1990). Each survey reproduces the parent half of that pattern and presents it as a discovery about the children.
The Culture Arguments
The middle of the article is stronger, because it stops looking for a culprit and starts describing a shift.
Changing expectations of family. Reczek’s research describes parents who grew up believing family ties are unconditional and children who believe those ties depend on their quality: on accountability and growth, intentional connection, mutual respect, and emotional safety. The article presents this as a culture clash to lament. Read it again as a parent who wants a way back. Those four conditions are not identity verdicts. They are behaviors, and in my clinical judgment, every one of them is learnable. One of the article’s own experts has just handed estranged parents the most practical thing in this entire news cycle. I will come back to it.
Identity comes first. The article argues that young adults define themselves by identity, that parents who challenge those identities are now experienced as an opposing tribe rather than as family who disagree, and that cutting them off then becomes a virtuous act of self protection. There is truth in that, and I have seen it. I have also seen the mirror image, which the article does not mention: parents who experience a child’s identity as a rejection of them and everything they taught, and who respond with the family equivalent of a loyalty test. The New York Times ran a remarkable essay in August by a woman whose father heard her sexuality and her politics as disloyalty, and whose repair came not when either of them converted but when both stopped requiring agreement as the price of love. The tribe problem runs in both directions. Only one direction gets named here.
Social media amplifies everything. The numbers are striking: more than 138,000 new videos last month mentioning cutting off or limiting contact with parents, more than ten times the volume of August 2020, four out of five of them posted by women. Algorithms feed people scripts, and the scripts do not know them. All true. But content volume is not incidence, and the article concedes it has no incidence data. Exposure to a script and exposure to a vocabulary are also different things. Some adult children arrive in my office with a story that does not fit their history, borrowed whole from a feed. In my practice, more arrive with a history that never had a story until now, though I would not claim to know the ratio in the population. Telling those two apart is the entire clinical skill, and it requires hearing both sides of the family, which is exactly the architecture the article’s critique of one sided work implies and never proposes.
The Therapist Argument, Briefly
The article’s last driver is the July argument in miniature: therapists stopped urging families to work things out and started endorsing estrangement as an act of self care. I addressed this at length in August and will not repeat it, except to note that the claim rests on the same foundation it did then, which is assertion, and that the article has now moved it from the headline to one driver among five. That is progress, and I will take it.
What Convergent Stories Actually Tell You
The frame that holds the whole piece together is contagion. A mother notices that estranged children all say the same things. An expert calls it social contagion. The article treats the sameness as evidence that the children have been scripted.
A clinician hears that differently. When two hundred people who have never met describe the same experience in the same words, the first hypothesis is not that they read the same pamphlet. It is that they may be describing the same phenomenon. Shared vocabulary can come from shared exposure, and the contagion hypothesis is not absurd. But the two explanations can only be told apart by hearing the history behind the words, which is the one thing a survey of the other side of the family cannot do. If the accounts converge, the question worth asking is what could produce that convergence without a script. There is a candidate answer, and it is the piece of this story that none of the coverage has touched.
State Determines Story: A Plausible Mechanism the Coverage Never Considers
Most of the article’s explanatory weight falls outside the relationship between parent and child. Algorithms, vocabulary, norms, identity culture, therapists: all of them can make estrangement more thinkable, more available, more socially rewarded. The parts of the article that do look inside the house, intensive parenting and parental anxiety, are treated as background rather than as mechanism. And none of it explains what happened between this parent and this child, in this kitchen, over these years. Not every estrangement is made there. Some are situational: a will, an in law, a divorce, an illness, a political rupture in adulthood. But the ones that trace back to the childhood home, which are most of the ones that reach my office, split along a line the coverage never examines.
The shorthand I use with families is three words: state determines story. The state of your nervous system during an event shapes your emotional response to it, your emotional response shapes the meaning you assign to it, and that meaning is what memory keeps. A parent and a child move through the same evening in profoundly different states. Different state, different response, different meaning, different story.
One caveat before I build on that, because I have spent two articles holding newspapers to an evidentiary standard and I owe my own framework the same. The brain does not process experience in three tidy stations. Modern affective neuroscience describes distributed circuits running in loops, where interpretation shapes sensation as much as the reverse (Barrett, 2017), and the old picture of a rational brain stacked on top of an emotional one has been retired (Cesario, Johnson, and Eisthen, 2020). Treat the three word chain as a subway map: a deliberate simplification that distorts the geography to make the route usable. The findings underneath it do not depend on the simplification. They come from four separate research literatures, each replicated over decades. What those literatures establish is each step on its own. The bridge from those steps to divergent family narratives is an integrative model: theoretically reasonable, consistent with what I see, and, as far as I know, not yet tested directly in estranged families. I am offering it as the best available account of the reality gap, not as settled fact.
Arousal shapes what gets written down. Emotionally arousing events are consolidated into memory differently than neutral ones; stress hormones and the amygdala act as a highlighter (McGaugh, 2004). But the highlighter narrows the page. As arousal rises, attention constricts to the central threat and peripheral detail falls away (Easterbrook, 1959; Kensinger, 2009; Mather and Sutherland, 2011). Put that finding in a kitchen, as a composite rather than a case. For a frightened child, the central threat is the parent’s face and voice, so memory keeps a tight shot: the tone, the slammed cabinet, the feeling in the chest. For the parent, arousal that night was organized around a different center entirely, the brutal quarter at work, the marriage under strain, and their recording is a wide shot: a stressful season, a regrettable moment, dinner afterward, the apology, the beach in July. Twenty years later the daughter produces the tight shot, the father produces the wide shot, and each accuses the other of editing the film. The discrepancy does not require anyone to have deliberately edited anything. The cameras were pointed at different things on the night itself, and both recordings have been reconstructed many times since.
Same event, different stakes. Emotion follows appraisal: what an event means, measured against your resources and what you stand to lose (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984). Three decades of research on children and household conflict show that children respond to anger between the adults in their home with measurable distress even when none of it is aimed at them, and that repeated exposure sensitizes them rather than toughening them (Davies and Cummings, 1994; Cummings and Davies, 2010). The folk theory that kids get used to it has the data backwards. Part of the reason is an asymmetry of worlds. For an adult, the household is one arena among several. For a child, it is the entire operating environment, and volatility in it registers as instability in the ground itself. And one asymmetry outranks the others: control. The parent’s anger was something the parent was doing and could end at will. The child’s fear was something happening to them, with no exit and no vote. Decades of research on controllable versus uncontrollable stress, much of it in animals, suggests that lack of control is what makes stress most damaging (Maier and Seligman, 2016). Applying that to ordinary family conflict is a translational step, and I take it cautiously. At the level of appraisal, though, the asymmetry is plain. When a parent tells me the whole family lived through the same hard years, I gently disagree. You lived through years you could steer. Your child lived through them as a passenger, and passengers remember the crash differently than drivers.
A child cannot fully regulate their way out. Children’s regulatory capacities, and the circuitry between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala that supports them, are still developing through adolescence and into early adulthood (Gee et al., 2013). Children have regulatory capacities of their own, but caregivers are a powerful additional source of regulation: a trusted adult’s presence measurably dampens a child’s stress response and shifts amygdala reactivity toward a more regulated pattern (Hostinar, Sullivan, and Gunnar, 2014; Gee et al., 2014). That buffering assumes the caregiver is a safe harbor. When the caregiver is also the source of threat or unpredictability, an important source of social buffering is compromised, and the child is left to manage an activation that is, for them, far harder to resolve. This is part of why “it wasn’t that bad” lands so poorly. On the child’s side of the room, the dial did not stop at uncomfortable. It went to what felt unresolvable.
Memory is retold, not replayed. Remembering is reconstruction, rebuilt from fragments and filled in with present knowledge, present feeling, and the present relationship (Bartlett, 1932; Schacter, 1999), and the state you are in selects which memories surface (Bower, 1981). Vividness is not accuracy: emotional memories can feel extraordinarily precise while getting details wrong (Kensinger, 2009), and that applies to both sides of the family. Estrangement should supercharge all of this, and in my experience it does. During years of silence there are no shared retrievals. Each side rehearses its account in rooms the other never enters, and every retelling consolidates the teller’s version a little further. Most people who meet research definitions of estrangement eventually stop meeting them, as the data below shows. But the families who reach me after years apart rarely arrive with softer stories, even when they arrive willing, and the memory research says that is what we should expect. The sibling literature is consistent with the same picture: children raised in the same family measurably experience different families (Plomin and Daniels, 1987; Turkheimer and Waldron, 2000), which is why “your brother doesn’t remember it that way”
is not the rebuttal it feels like. Picture a brother who was fourteen during the worst of it, with a driver’s license and an exit, and a sister who was seven.
The loop. The chain runs both ways. State writes the story, and then the story sets the state each person brings to the next contact, which shapes what they perceive, which confirms the story. The model predicts that litigating the past will fail, and that matches what I see: the argument about 2003 reactivates the states that wrote the 2003 stories. The working rule I give families is that you cannot argue someone out of a story their nervous system wrote. You can only create new experiences, in a regulated enough state, that give the old story a reason to loosen. New state, then new story. Never the reverse.
What this does not mean. A framework like this gets misused in two directions, so let me close both doors. To the parent tempted to read it as proof that the child’s memory is distorted: you have it backwards. The child’s tight shot is not evidence of a corrupted memory. It may preserve aspects of threat and subjective impact that the parent never encoded at all, while remaining reconstructive and fallible like every autobiographical memory. It likely holds information about the one thing the parent could not perceive from inside their own state, which is what those events cost a child with no context, no control, and no exit. To the adult child tempted to read it as absolution: mechanism is not absolution. Understanding why your parent’s recording lacks your tight shot does not oblige you to adopt their wide shot, and nothing here requires reconciliation. What the framework removes is a single accusation, the charge that the other side must be lying. Neither memory is the transcript. Both are testimony.
Now go back to the concept creep argument with that in hand. Younger adults regard repeated criticism and strong disagreement as harm. Their parents regard the same years as ordinary family conflict. Where this model fits, and in my practice it usually does, both are reporting honestly from the nervous system they had at the time, and both reports are reconstructions. Nobody has to be lying, nobody has to have been scripted, and nobody in that Chicago ballroom has to be wrong about what they remember. They only have to accept that what they remember is not the whole film.
Cutoff as a Differentiation Strategy
There is a second lens the article walks right past, and it is one of the oldest ideas in family systems work. The article describes this generation as the most surveilled in history, raised by intensive parents with cellphones, and notes that it struggles to achieve independence. A few paragraphs later it describes cutoff as immaturity, quoting an expert who calls estrangement, for some, a “first chance at adolescent rebellion.” It never connects the two observations. A family systems reading asks whether they are the same observation.
Murray Bowen called it emotional cutoff (Bowen, 1978; Kerr and Bowen, 1988). In Bowen theory, cutoff is not the absence of attachment. It is unresolved attachment intensity handled by distance, the crude differentiation move available to someone who was never permitted to differentiate inside the relationship. Bowen’s ideas come from decades of clinical observation rather than population studies, and I hold them that way, as a lens rather than a law. But the lens fits the article’s own facts unusually well, and in my work the pattern shows up most often in families where closeness and control were never separated. The article even notes that parents are more anxious now because the world feels less certain. Bowen would say that anxiety does not stay in the parent. It circulates through the system, tightening the grip, and the child who cannot find room inside the grip eventually leaves it altogether.
That reframes the rebellion line from a put down into a hypothesis, and a hopeful one. If cutoff is a differentiation attempt, the repair is not submission and it is not silence. It is differentiation with contact: two adults learning to hold a self while staying in the room. That is the work, and in my experience it is learnable.
What the Divorce Analogy Actually Teaches
The article compares estrangement to the divorce wave of the 1970s, and the comparison is better than the article realizes. Whatever no fault divorce did to the divorce rate, and economists still argue about that, it revealed how many marriages had been quietly unbearable. And society did not respond to the divorce wave by spending a decade debating whether marriages should be allowed to end. It built mediation, custody frameworks, and coparenting practice, because once the norm shifted, the useful question became how to end and repair relationships without destroying the people in them.
Estrangement is at that moment now, and almost none of the coverage is asking the useful question. The real work does not live at the poles of full contact and total cutoff. It lives in between: structured and limited contact, mediated conversation, incremental trust. The data supports at least this much: estrangement is often not permanent. In a nationally representative longitudinal study, 81 percent of respondents who met the study’s criteria for estrangement from a mother, and 69 percent who met its criteria for estrangement from a father, later no longer met those criteria (Reczek, Stacey, and Thomeer, 2023). That does not necessarily mean full reconciliation: the study’s definition covered both no contact and very low contact relationships, and a meaningful minority stayed estranged. It is still a striking finding, it comes from the same sociologist the article quotes on democratized kinship, and the article does not mention it. Estrangement is a condition, not a verdict. Whether structured repair work shortens it, or improves what families find on the other side of it, is a question nobody has studied well yet. My experience says it does. That is a clinical claim, and I am labeling it as one.
What a Parent Can Do With This
I ended my August piece by pointing out that the coverage was diagnostic of a culture and useless to a household. This article is better, and it is still nearly useless to a household, with one exception it does not seem to notice. Reczek’s four conditions for staying in a family relationship are a map. Here is how I read them from the clinical chair. Accountability and growth. Not a confession and not a defense. A specific, honestly located account of moments your child actually lived through, owned without explanation, and evidence that something about you has changed since. In my experience, parents who arrive with a map they drew themselves are met, and parents who arrive with the article are not.
Intentional connection. Contact that is chosen, contained, and consistent rather than ambient and assumed. One conversation, then another. The families I work with do not go from silence to Sunday dinner.
Mutual respect. The Times essay is the model: two people who still disagree about nearly everything essential and who stopped requiring agreement as the price of the relationship. Respect for an adult child means treating their account of their own childhood as data rather than as an attack.
Emotional safety. In my experience this is the one parents most often misread, because it sounds like a demand to walk on eggshells. It is not. It is regulation: the capacity to hear something painful and stay in the chair. Everything above depends on it, because, as the model above argues, stories do not revise in the state that wrote them. Safety first, history second.
And then the structural piece, because one sided work is a real failure mode and the answer is not less clinical involvement but 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 I structure this work, and it is the practical response to everything legitimate in this coverage.
Nobody in the Ballroom Has to Be Wrong
Back to Chicago. Two hundred grieving parents traveled across the world to ask what makes their children do this. I understand the question, and I would gently offer them a different one, because it is the only one I have ever seen lead anywhere: what did my child experience that I could not see from where I stood?
That question does not require a parent to accept the labels. It does not require them to agree that they were abusive, or narcissists, or unsafe. It requires them to accept that a child and an adult lived through the same years with different brains, different stakes, and different exits, and that each of them kept the kind of record a nervous system in that position keeps: partial, vivid, and reconstructed many times since. Parents who can hold that stop needing their child’s memory to be false in order for their own to be real. In my experience, that is the moment an estrangement begins to move.
Sources
The coverage discussed:
Bernstein, E. (2026). Why are so many adults cutting off their parents? The Wall Street Journal, September 26.
Bernstein, E. (2026). Are therapists to blame for the rise of adults cutting off their parents? The Wall Street Journal, July 21.
Marcus, C. (2026). Cutting your parents off isn’t the answer. The New York Times, August 16. Concept creep, attribution, and estrangement research:
Haslam, N. (2016). Concept creep: Psychology’s expanding concepts of harm and pathology. Psychological Inquiry, 27(1).
Carr, K., Holman, A., Abetz, J., Koenig Kellas, J., & Vagnoni, E. (2015). Giving voice to the silence of family estrangement: Comparing reasons of estranged parents and adult children in a nonmatched sample. Journal of Family Communication, 15(2).
Pillemer, K. (2020). Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them. Avery.
Reczek, R. (2026). Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement. New York University Press.
Reczek, R., Stacey, L., & Thomeer, M. B. (2023). Parent-adult child estrangement in the United States by gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality. Journal of Marriage and Family, 85(2).
Baumeister, R. F., Stillwell, A., & Wotman, S. R. (1990). Victim and perpetrator accounts of interpersonal conflict: Autobiographical narratives about anger. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(5).
Bengtson, V. L., & Kuypers, J. A. (1971). Generational difference and the developmental stake. Aging and Human Development, 2(4).
Stinson, F. S., Dawson, D. A., Goldstein, R. B., Chou, S. P., Huang, B., Smith, S. M., Ruan, W. J., Pulay, A. J., Saha, T. D., Pickering, R. P., & Grant, B. F. (2008). Prevalence, correlates, disability, and comorbidity of DSM-IV narcissistic personality disorder: Results from the Wave 2 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 69(7).
Family systems:
Bowen, M. (1978). Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. Jason Aronson.
Kerr, M. E., & Bowen, M. (1988). Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory. W. W. Norton.
Emotional arousal and memory encoding:
McGaugh, J. L. (2004). The amygdala modulates the consolidation of memories of emotionally arousing experiences. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27.
Easterbrook, J. A. (1959). The effect of emotion on cue utilization and the organization of behavior. Psychological Review, 66(3).
Kensinger, E. A. (2009). Remembering the details: Effects of emotion. Emotion Review, 1(2).
Mather, M., & Sutherland, M. R. (2011). Arousal-biased competition in perception and memory. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(2).
Appraisal, children’s emotional security, and controllability:
Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. Springer.
Davies, P. T., & Cummings, E. M. (1994). Marital conflict and child adjustment: An emotional security hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 116(3).
Cummings, E. M., & Davies, P. T. (2010). Marital Conflict and Children: An Emotional Security Perspective. Guilford Press.
Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2016). Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychological Review, 123(4).
Development and social buffering:
Gee, D. G., Humphreys, K. L., Flannery, J., Goff, B., Telzer, E. H., Shapiro, M., Hare, T. A., Bookheimer, S. Y., & Tottenham, N. (2013). A developmental shift from positive to negative connectivity in human amygdala-prefrontal circuitry. Journal of Neuroscience, 33(10).
Gee, D. G., Gabard-Durnam, L., Telzer, E. H., Humphreys, K. L., Goff, B., Shapiro, M., Flannery, J., Lumian, D. S., Fareri, D. S., Caldera, C., & Tottenham, N. (2014). Maternal buffering of human amygdala-prefrontal circuitry during childhood. Psychological Science, 25(1
Hostinar, C. E., Sullivan, R. M., & Gunnar, M. R. (2014). Psychobiological mechanisms underlying the social buffering of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis: A review of animal models and human studies across development. Psychological Bulletin, 140(1).
Reconstructive memory and siblings
Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge University Press.
Schacter, D. L. (1999). The seven sins of memory: Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. American Psychologist, 54(3).
Bower, G. H. (1981). Mood and memory. American Psychologist, 36(2).
Plomin, R., & Daniels, D. (1987). Why are children in the same family so different from one another? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10(1).
Turkheimer, E., & Waldron, M. (2000). Nonshared environment: A theoretical, methodological, and quantitative review. Psychological Bulletin, 126(1).
On simplified brain models:
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Cesario, J., Johnson, D. J., & Eisthen, H. L. (2020). Your brain is not an onion with a tiny reptile inside. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(3).
