Are Therapists Contributing to Family Estrangement? Looking Beyond the Headlines
Part One of a series exploring family estrangement, adult children and parents, therapy, boundaries, trauma, no contact, and what it actually takes to repair relationships.
I knew I was going to click on the article before I even finished reading the headline.
In July 2026, the New York Post published an article titled, “One third of parents with estranged children blame therapy as society becomes obsessed with ‘trauma.’”
Of course I clicked.
I am a trauma therapist whose family therapy work focuses heavily on relationships between adult children and their parents, siblings, and other family of origin relationships. I work with families hoping to prevent estrangement, as well as families trying to find their way back from it.
This headline was practically designed for someone like me.
And I think that is worth acknowledging before we talk about anything else.
It Is a Sexy Headline
Not that kind of sexy.
It is emotionally sexy.
It gives us conflict. It gives us trauma. It gives us parents and children. Perhaps most importantly, it gives us someone to blame:
Therapists.
Family estrangement is extraordinarily painful. Adult children may carry years of hurt, anger, disappointment, guilt, and grief. Parents may experience confusion, devastation, rejection, shame, and grief of their own.
When a relationship reaches the point where one person no longer wants contact with the other, both sides are often left trying to answer an incredibly difficult question:
How did we get here?
A headline suggesting that therapy did it offers an appealingly simple answer to an extraordinarily complicated problem.
The problem is that family estrangement rarely lends itself to simple answers.
What Does “One Third of Parents Blame Therapy” Actually Mean?
The New York Post article followed reporting from The Wall Street Journal examining whether therapists may be contributing to adults cutting off their parents.
The reporting referenced a survey of estranged parents, with approximately one third reportedly believing their adult child's therapist had influenced or recommended ending the relationship.
That is an attention grabbing statistic.
It is also one we need to handle carefully.
It does not mean therapists caused one third of family estrangements.
It does not establish that therapists recommended estrangement in one third of these cases.
It tells us that a portion of the estranged parents surveyed believed therapy played a role in their adult child's decision.
Those are very different statements.
There are also important questions about the survey itself.
A subsequent analysis attempting to trace the statistic raised questions about how the reported sample corresponds with the publicly available survey materials, as well as concerns about recruitment, self selection, and what conclusions can reasonably be drawn from parent reports alone. Most importantly, this type of survey cannot establish that therapy caused estrangement.
That does not mean we should dismiss what estranged parents are saying.
If a significant number of parents believe therapy played a role in losing their relationship with their adult child, I think that is worth being curious about.
But curiosity is different from causation.
Perhaps that is exactly the approach therapists should be taking toward estrangement, too.
I Don't Think Therapists Are Causing Family Estrangement
I do think we may sometimes be contributing to it.
Those are not contradictory positions.
Therapy exists within a much larger cultural ecosystem. Social media, pop psychology, changing ideas about trauma, changing expectations of family relationships, an increased emphasis on individual wellbeing, and even dramatic changes in how connected and accessible we are to one another may all influence how we think about family relationships.
I plan to explore many of those factors throughout this series.
At the same time, pointing toward broader cultural changes should not prevent therapists from examining our own role.
There are places where I believe our profession gets this wrong.
One of the biggest is when we start making assumptions about people who are not in the room.
Your Client's Mother Isn't Your Client
Suppose a client spends months telling me about painful interactions with her mother.
I can believe her.
I can validate the impact those experiences had on her.
I can help her identify patterns she recognizes within the relationship.
I can help her explore how those experiences may continue to affect her today.
What I cannot responsibly do is decide:
“Your mother is a narcissist.”
I have never met her.
I have never assessed her.
I do not have collateral information.
I do not know what she believes happened.
There may absolutely be a mental health component influencing the mother's behavior. There may not be.
I don't know.
“I don't know” is an important sentence for therapists to remain comfortable saying.
When we diagnose or pathologize people we have never assessed, we are doing more than validating our client's experience. We may begin shaping the lens through which our client understands that person.
Once someone has been assigned a label like “narcissist,” “borderline,” “toxic,” or “abusive,” future interactions may begin being interpreted through that framework.
That does not mean those patterns never exist.
It means clinicians should be careful about claiming certainty we do not have.
Parents and Adult Children Often Tell Different Stories About the Estrangement
Research gives us another reason to remain cautious about assuming one person's explanation represents an entire family system.
Research comparing estranged parents and adult children has found meaningful differences in how the two groups explain their estrangements. Parents and adult children often identify different causes for the rupture and understand the history leading to estrangement differently.
That does not tell us one side is right and the other is wrong.
It tells us something therapists who work with relationships already know:
Two people can participate in the same relationship and experience it very differently.
Which brings me to something I find myself explaining frequently in therapy.
Validation Is Not Agreement
We sometimes confuse validation with agreement.
We mistake feelings for facts.
And we treat accountability as though it requires an admission of guilt.
I often explain accountability using the example of a car accident.
Most people do not leave home in the morning intending to get into an accident.
But once an accident occurs, something has happened.
There may be damage. There may be injuries. The two drivers may have very different accounts of what happened.
Regardless of intent, there are things that now require attention.
You stop.
You make sure everyone is okay.
You exchange information.
You contact insurance.
You address the damage.
Relationships are not car accidents, of course, but the analogy illustrates something important:
Taking responsibility for responding to an injury is not necessarily the same as agreeing with another person's entire account of how that injury occurred.
Imagine an adult child saying:
“Growing up, I never felt like I could come to you when I was struggling.”
The parent may genuinely remember the relationship differently.
Repair does not necessarily require the parent to say:
“You are right. Your memory is correct and mine is wrong.”
It might begin with:
“I remember things differently, but I want to understand what it was like for you. I can hear that you felt very alone.”
That is validation.
It is not confession. It is not capitulation. It is not necessarily agreement.
It is understanding.
Sometimes, to the Parent, It Really Was Just Tuesday
Memory is not a video recording.
Ask several witnesses to describe the same event and you are likely to hear several different accounts.
That does not necessarily mean some of them are lying.
People notice different things. We interpret experiences through our histories, ages, emotions, expectations, and perspectives.
Families are no different.
Something can become a defining childhood memory for a child while barely registering as an unusual event to the parent.
For the child, it may have changed something.
For the parent, it may have been Tuesday.
The parent's inability to remember the event with the same intensity does not mean the adult child is being dramatic.
The adult child's emotional intensity also does not automatically tell us everything about the parent's intentions at the time.
The experience still mattered.
If we are interested in family repair, we need enough room for both realities to exist.
What Should a Therapist Do When Someone Says, “I Want to Go No Contact With My Parent”?
Get curious.
Not:
“Good. Protect your peace.”
And not:
“Absolutely not. That's your mother.”
Neither response leaves much room for the client to understand what they actually need.
Instead, I want to know:
What has happened that makes no contact feel like your best, or perhaps only, option?
What have you already tried?
Have you communicated what is not working?
What happened when you did?
What are you hoping no contact will give you?
Safety? Peace? Space? Relief from repeated conflict? Time to heal?
Do you imagine this distance being temporary or permanent?
Would less contact accomplish what you need?
Would clearer boundaries?
Would a temporary period of distance?
Would writing a letter help you communicate something that has been difficult to say?
Would family therapy be appropriate?
Is the other person willing or capable of participating in repair?
And there is another question that deserves exploration:
What might no contact cost you?
Not because the answer should prevent someone from choosing it.
Because consequential decisions deserve thoughtful exploration.
No Contact Isn't the Same Thing as Healing
You can stop speaking to your father and still grieve the father you wish you had.
You can block your mother's phone number and still feel her absence at Christmas.
You can experience tremendous relief after ending contact while simultaneously experiencing sadness, guilt, anger, or longing.
You can end a relationship externally and continue carrying it internally.
That does not mean no contact was the wrong decision.
It means distance itself is not necessarily the healing.
Sometimes distance creates the safety or emotional space necessary for healing to begin.
The underlying work may still involve grief, trauma, attachment, anger, acceptance, identity, and understanding what you needed from the relationship that you did not receive.
Research also suggests that family estrangement is not always a single, permanent event. Longitudinal research has documented movement into and out of estrangement over time.
That complexity matters.
Sometimes a Healthier Relationship Requires Accepting Someone's Limitations
There is an enormous amount of territory between:
“My parent needs to become the parent I've always needed.”
and
“I cannot have any relationship with my parent.”
Sometimes part of individual healing involves grieving someone's limitations before deciding what kind of relationship with them is realistically possible.
Perhaps your mother is not capable of being the person you call when you are emotionally devastated.
Maybe she is capable of having dinner with you twice a month.
Perhaps your father struggles with emotionally vulnerable conversations.
Maybe there are other ways he knows how to connect.
Acceptance does not mean pretending harmful behavior is not harmful.
It does not mean tolerating abuse.
And it certainly does not mean everyone should remain connected to their family.
It means evaluating the person who actually exists rather than repeatedly injuring ourselves against the expectation of who we need them to become.
When Is No Contact Appropriate?
There are circumstances where safety changes the equation.
When there is ongoing abuse, credible threat, violence, stalking, coercion, or an immediate safety concern involving the client or their dependents, creating distance may be necessary.
Safety comes first.
Outside of circumstances requiring immediate protection, however, I believe therapists should be cautious about positioning estrangement as the therapeutic solution.
Our job is not to preserve every family relationship.
Our job is not to end them either.
Our job is to help clients understand their experiences, identify patterns, clarify what they need, recognize what they can and cannot control, and make thoughtful decisions consistent with their values, wellbeing, and circumstances.
Sometimes that process leads to no contact.
Sometimes it leads somewhere else.
Boundaries Aren't About Controlling Other People
This distinction becomes especially important in conversations about family estrangement.
A boundary is not:
“You are not allowed to talk about politics around me.”
That is a direction about someone else's behavior.
A boundary might sound like:
“Political conversations between us consistently turn into arguments, and I don't want to spend our time together fighting. I'm not going to discuss politics anymore. If it comes up, I'm going to end the conversation, and we can try again another time.”
The other person still gets to decide what they do.
The boundary tells them what I will do in response.
Sometimes consistently enforcing a boundary changes a relationship.
Sometimes the other person continues violating it.
Sometimes the amount of distance necessary to maintain that boundary eventually becomes significant.
That is very different from treating estrangement itself as the boundary.
Accountability Cannot Become Punishment
There is another side of family repair that deserves attention.
Sometimes an adult child has spent years wanting a parent to finally take accountability.
That desire can be completely understandable.
But when we are carrying significant unresolved hurt, accountability can begin to resemble punishment.
The underlying feeling can become:
I need you to hurt enough that I finally believe you understand how much you hurt me.
This is not unique to adult children.
Parents can do it.
Partners can do it.
Siblings can do it.
Human beings do it.
Families cannot repair indefinitely inside a courtroom where one person remains the prosecutor and the other remains the defendant.
Repair requires accountability.
It requires ownership.
It requires behavioral change.
It often requires individual healing.
Eventually, if reconciliation is the desired goal, it also requires enough room for another person to become different.
If a parent says, “I apologized already. Get over it,” while continuing the same behavior, meaningful repair has not occurred.
But if a parent takes responsibility, changes their behavior, does their own work, and the adult child remains able to see only the parent who caused the original injury, the relationship may remain frozen too.
Reconciliation cannot be demanded.
When reconciliation is desired, though, change eventually has to be both possible and recognizable.
This idea is also consistent with psychologist Dr. Joshua Coleman's approach to parent and adult child estrangement, which emphasizes listening to the adult child's experience, taking responsibility where appropriate, and understanding that parents and adult children may hold very different narratives about the same family history.
So, Are Therapists Contributing to Family Estrangement?
Sometimes, I think we are.
Not because therapy is secretly destroying families.
And certainly not because a survey proves therapists are responsible for one third of family estrangements.
It does not.
But therapists have influence.
Having influence means we have a responsibility to examine how we use it.
We should be cautious about diagnosing people who are not our patients.
We should validate experiences without pretending we possess facts we do not have.
We should remain curious about family systems, even when only one member of the system is sitting in front of us.
We should help clients distinguish boundaries from attempts to control another person's behavior.
We should recognize that stopping contact does not eliminate the grief or healing work associated with a relationship.
When safety allows, we should also be willing to explore alternatives before treating permanent relational cutoff as the inevitable solution.
Sometimes that exploration will still end in estrangement.
Sometimes it will lead to less contact.
Sometimes better boundaries.
Sometimes acceptance.
Sometimes family therapy.
And sometimes, remarkably, repair.
None of those outcomes should be the therapist's agenda.
But There Is a Bigger Question Underneath This Headline
The conversation surrounding the New York Post article rests on an assumption we hear constantly:
Family estrangement is increasing.
But is it?
We know family estrangement is not rare. Research has documented estrangement between parents and adult children, as well as movement into and out of estrangement over time. Reviews of the literature also demonstrate how complicated estrangement can be to define and measure.
Prevalence today does not automatically prove an increase from yesterday.
Our world has also changed dramatically.
Thirty or forty years ago, an adult child could move across the country, call home occasionally, visit infrequently, and simply develop a separate life.
Today, we carry devices that make us reachable almost everywhere.
We text. We FaceTime. We have family group chats. Some families share their locations. We can fly across the country in hours.
We have reached a point where many of us practically announce when we are going somewhere without cell service.
That makes me wonder whether we need to ask a different question before assuming estrangement itself has exploded:
Have families actually become more estranged, or have our expectations for connection changed too?
That is where we are going next.
Is Family Estrangement Really Increasing, or Are We Just Talking About It More?
About This Series: Breaking the Silence: Understanding Modern Family Estrangement
This series explores the increasingly visible conversation surrounding adult children and parents, family estrangement, boundaries, no contact, trauma, therapy, accountability, and reconciliation.
The goal is not to convince families to reconcile at all costs.
It is not to convince anyone that estrangement is inherently healthy or unhealthy.
And it is not to decide who is right.
It is to make room for something that can be surprisingly difficult to find in conversations about family estrangement:
Nuance.
About the Author
Sarah Benitez-Zandi, MSW, LCSW is a trauma and relationship therapist and owner of Trauma Wise Healing LLC. Her Cycle Breaker approach integrates trauma informed, attachment focused, and relational work with individuals, couples, and adult families.
Her family therapy work includes supporting adult children, parents, siblings, and family of origin relationships navigating relational injuries, boundaries, disconnection, estrangement, reconciliation, and intergenerational patterns.
Sarah provides virtual psychotherapy to clients in Wisconsin, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Minnesota, North Carolina, Indiana, Colorado, and Virginia.
This article is educational and is not intended to provide individual mental health treatment, diagnosis, or medical advice.
Sources & Further Reading
New York Post, July 21, 2026. “One third of parents with estranged children blame therapy as society becomes obsessed with ‘trauma.’” This is the article that prompted this series.
Read the original New York Post article
The Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2026. “Are Therapists to Blame for the Rise of Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?” This is the original reporting behind much of the subsequent discussion about therapists and estrangement.
Read the Wall Street Journal article
Carr, K., Holman, A., Abetz, J., & Vagnoni, E. “Giving Voice to the Silence of Family Estrangement.” Research comparing how estranged parents and adult children explain family estrangement.
Blake, L. “Parents and Children Who Are Estranged in Adulthood: A Review and Discussion of the Literature.” A scholarly review examining definitions, prevalence, contributing factors, and consequences of parent and adult child estrangement.
Gilligan, M., Suitor, J. J., & Pillemer, K. Research on intergenerational estrangement across time. This work helps illustrate that estrangement may change over time rather than always functioning as one permanent cutoff.
Dr. Joshua Coleman. Coleman's work on estrangement and reconciliation between parents and adult children informs some of the relational framework discussed in this article.
Chad Topaz. “The Number the Journal Doesn't Substantiate.” A methodological critique of the widely circulated survey statistic used in reporting about therapists and family estrangement. This is commentary and data analysis rather than peer reviewed estrangement research, but it raises important questions about how the statistic has been interpreted.