Are Therapists Causing a Rise in Parental Estrangements?

Exploring the Role of Modern Therapy in Family Breakdowns

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There is good therapy and bad therapy. Good therapists and bad therapists. I have been both—sometimes on the same day; sometimes in the same hour. While decades of experience and consultation have made me a better therapist, I still cringe at the mistakes I made in my earlier years. I cringe at my arrogance in challenging the parents of teens well before I had teenagers in my home; at my encouraging couples to split who might have worked out their differences with someone more skilled.

I hadn’t lived enough, suffered enough, learned enough to do what I was hired to do.

My own mistakes highlight the ways that clients enter treatment at the mercy of the therapist. Our opinions of how memory works, what constitutes trauma, and how identity is formed will determine what we believe should be investigated and what should be discarded. Which loved ones should a client hold close and who should be let go? Our beliefs and interventions may forever shape their lives and—as important—the lives of those who care about them.

I love my field and I worry for my field.

I love the dedication, the humanity, and the care that so many therapists bring to their clients. And countless studies show the power of therapy to change lives when applied by conscientious and well-trained practitioners.

But I worry that therapists are increasingly handmaidens to an individualistic culture that emphasizes the pursuit of happiness at any cost.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way some therapists recommend “going no contact” as a solution to difficult family relations. As a practicing psychologist who researches estrangement and trains other therapists, I witness how commonly therapists diagnose parents they’ve never met, encouraging estrangement as an expression of authority, autonomy, and identity on the part of their clients.

Almost daily, I read letters from estranged adult children citing the authority of their therapists to corroborate questionable claims of emotional abuse at the parents’ hands. I hear from therapists who label common experiences of disappointment as life-altering trauma. I see kind and loving parents labeled as narcissists, borderlines, and sociopaths. While some estrangements occur because parents were truly abusive, my practice and those of my colleagues are becoming filled with mothers and fathers who would have been considered reasonable and dedicated in any decade prior.

This was the case for a single mother who contacted me after receiving a “no contact” letter from her 26-year-old daughter. My client described years of a close and confiding relationship, where only the year before, her daughter wrote to express gratitude to her as a mother for her positive influence in her life.

More recently the daughter sent an email saying that she started therapy and learned that her lifelong anxiety stems from the mother’s narcissistic personality disorder, how she can’t have her in her life because it’s too triggering, and to please respect her boundaries. Her sisters don’t agree with her about any of it, but it doesn’t seem to matter. She cut them off too.

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As a single mother of three children, her parenting had its challenges, but narcissism was not part of her psychology. She was willing to be reflective (bordering on excessively self-critical), open to hearing her daughter’s complaints, and prepared to address the ways that her parenting had been hurtful, even if she was confused by the characterization. However, her daughter refused to consider family therapy, citing the therapist’s observation that “narcissists can’t change.”

With the guidance of her therapist, my client’s daughter came to believe that her anxiety was a result of traumatic childhood experiences, a conclusion that seems increasingly common. As sociologist Eva Illouz writes in Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. “Today our lives are emplotted backwards. What is a dysfunctional family? A family where one’s needs are not met. And how does one know that one’s needs were not met in childhood? Simply by looking at one’s present situation.”

No observation better captures the present moment where hidden traumas and family dysfunction are presumed as the root cause of unhappiness; where recommendations of ending relationships with parents is considered the best path to achieve mental health and personal growth.

These are anxious times. While religion once provided a way to make the chaos of human suffering ordered and comprehensible, therapy serves that function today. In an increasingly secularized society, our role is fueled by a form of storytelling where flawed or pathogenic narratives are exchanged for happier or truer ones.

As therapists, we are like script doctors, hired to fix a plot that isn’t working, one that weighs down the narrator and causes others to lose interest. In our efforts to fix or re-write these storylines, we emphasize the words and actions of some players, while redefining or diminishing the role of others.

In helping our clients change their stories, allies can be recast as enemies, enemies as friends, self-blame as innocence. Enormous value and freedom can be gained in that endeavor, at least for the individual. For their spouse or other family members, not always as much.

The notion of individual rights figure centrally in most discussions about estrangement, typically read from the adult child’s perspective. The right to mental health, freedom to choose, boundary setting, and protection from abuse.

Yet rights as the sole determinant of contact only make sense in a society that has given up on prioritizing other aspects of family. Are parents’ rights to gratitude, affection, time with their grandchildren suddenly made passe’ by our rush to identity, autonomy, and personal happiness?

Therapists are often called upon to answer these questions but in so doing, have become what sociologist Alison Pugh calls “detachment brokers,” lending our social authority to soothe any feelings of guilt or obligation that arise from earlier ideals of family obligation and responsibility.

Yet, parents aren’t the only casualties of misguided practitioners. Many therapists fail to help parents empathize with the adult child’s legitimate complaints, address their requests for better boundaries, and repair the ways that the parent hurt or traumatized the now-adult child.

Indeed, some parents continue to be so hurtful, so unrepentant, so disrespectful of the adult child’s needs that they leave no other option for that adult child than to walk. And some were so destructive when the child was young that there is little left to build a foundation upon, even if the parent is able and willing to make amends, as I encourage parents to do.

But let’s not turn that into some kind of retributive justice. Let’s not say that doing a bad job as a parent, in that increasingly difficult-to-quantify way, grants the adult child the right to forever immiserate the life of a mother or father. Let’s not claim that the estrangement, however understandable, is the same as saying that the parent got what they deserved.

Whether our client is the parent or adult child, we need to see that our obligations are not just to the person in the room, but also to their families, friends, and communities. In using our social authority to label, to support boundaries, let alone cut-offs, we need to think several generations down the line.

Not only how our advice will affect our clients—but those who will forever live with its consequences.

To learn more, read my most recent book: Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict or sign up for my weekly webinars at https://www.drjoshuacoleman.com/webinars