Therapy Is Not Destroying Families: The Truth About Therapy and Parental Estrangement

An overview of the factors that have contributed to family estrangement over the past decade, and how therapy did not contribute to the phenomenon, but rather exposed what was holding it together.

Posted July 30, 2026

Written by Stephanie Underwood, MSW, RSW

Therapy Did Not Destroy the Relationship. It Exposed What Was Holding It Together.

The growing narrative that therapists are convincing adult children to cut off their parents misidentifies the cause of estrangement. This narrative frames the therapeutic process as the origin of a relational rupture, when in clinical practice, estrangement is almost always the final visible event in a pattern that has existed for years. It’s also the complete opposite of what the therapist actually does - which is to encourage authentic relational connections.

What therapy actually does is change what people can see. Not because therapists implant ideas, but because sustained psychological work reorganizes how people interpret their experiences. When someone begins to recognize patterns that were previously normalized, invisible, or misattributed to their own deficiencies, the relationships that depended on those patterns remaining unrecognized begin to destabilize. The therapy did not damage the relationship. It revealed the conditions under which the relationship was allowed to exist.

There is a growing narrative that therapists are convincing adult children to cut off their parents. The framing is consistent across social media, popular psychology, and an increasing number of books and podcasts, and, of course, Oprah Winfrey. Vulnerable adults are apparently entering therapy with perfectly healthy families, sitting through a few sessions, learning the word "trauma," and emerging prepared to discard their loving parents because their therapist told them to. This would be, if accurate, an extraordinary demonstration of therapeutic effectiveness. Most therapists cannot convince a client to drink water, complete a worksheet, or go to bed before 2:00 a.m.

But, let’s entertain the idea for a moment. The idea that the same profession can dismantle decades-long family relationships within a few appointments requires a model of therapeutic influence that doesn’t quite exist in a legitimate clinical framework. Influence of that magnitude requires repetition, trust, dependency, social reinforcement, and the gradual restructuring of someone's perception of reality over a sustained period. It doesn’t happen because a therapist said "boundaries" three times and an otherwise securely attached adult abandoned their entire family.

That’s not a serious psychological explanation. It’s a convenient one, and one worth examining what it is designed to protect.

The Missing Variable Is Relational Safety

The conversation about estrangement repeatedly skips over the most clinically important question: was the relationship emotionally safe?

Relational safety is not the absence of conflict. It is the presence of conditions under which conflict can occur without threatening the person's dignity, autonomy, belonging, or psychological stability.

In a relationally safe environment, you can express hurt without being mocked.

You can disagree without being punished.

You can establish a boundary without being accused of betrayal.

You can describe your experience without being told that it never happened.

You can make a mistake without having your entire character placed on trial.

You can feel heard, respected, valued, and recognized as a separate human being. The other person is not perfect, but they demonstrate the capacity to reflect, take responsibility, make repairs, and change their behavior.

When people have relationships like this, they generally make them work. They repair misunderstandings. They renegotiate expectations. They apologize. They tolerate discomfort. They return to difficult conversations. They make concessions because the relationship is worth preserving. A genuinely secure relationship is psychologically valuable, and people do not ordinarily receive a mutually respectful, emotionally responsive relationship and casually discard it.

Secure relationships are not infinitely indestructible. Catastrophic betrayal, severe mental illness, coercion, addiction, violence, or other serious circumstances can still fracture them. But under ordinary conditions, people do not sever safe, loving, repairable relationships simply because a therapist introduced them to the concept of boundaries. The idea fails to account for how attachment actually works.

People Protect Relationships That Feel Safe

Attachment, as I have written about extensively in previous posts, is a lot more than the topic of intimacy and the ability to show emotions. It’s an organized prediction, encoded in the brain, about whether another person will be emotionally available, responsive, and safe when they are needed. When a relationship is secure, both people have accumulated enough evidence that conflict does not automatically lead to rejection, humiliation, retaliation, or abandonment. They trust that ruptures can be repaired. That trust creates flexibility. A securely connected adult can tolerate a parent making a mistake because they expect accountability and repair. A parent can tolerate their adult child expressing anger because disagreement does not threaten the parent's entire identity. Neither person needs to dominate the interpretation of reality for the relationship to survive.

Estrangement becomes much more likely when that relational safety is absent. The adult child attempts to speak and is dismissed. They attempt to establish a limit and are punished. They ask for change and receive defensiveness. They describe harm and are given explanations instead of accountability. They reduce contact and are subjected to guilt, pressure, recruitment of other relatives, or campaigns portraying them as unstable, selfish, manipulated, or ungrateful. The cutoff is then presented as the beginning of the problem, when in clinical reality, it is usually the final visible event in a relational pattern that has existed for years, sometimes decades.

Therapy Changes What People Can See

Meaningful therapy does not implant ideas. It changes perception. Not because therapists insert conclusions into passive minds, but because sustained psychological work reorganizes how people interpret their experiences.

A person may enter therapy believing that chronic criticism is normal. They may believe that maintaining peace is their responsibility. They may interpret emotional neglect as independence. They may view self-abandonment as loyalty. They may believe that love requires unlimited tolerance. They may have spent years explaining another person's behavior while minimizing the effect that behavior had on them. When people do sustained psychological work, they begin noticing patterns that were previously invisible, normalized, or misattributed to personal defectiveness. They learn to differentiate guilt from responsibility. They recognize that understanding why someone behaves destructively does not require continuing to accept the behavior. They begin to understand that love and safety are not interchangeable.

They may also realize that the relationship they were desperately trying to preserve was being maintained almost entirely through their own accommodation. That realization changes relationships, because it changes what the person is willing to tolerate. Healing raises the threshold for what someone is prepared to accept. It creates self-respect where there was once self-doubt. It creates language where there was once confusion. It allows the person to recognize that they are not obligated to remain accessible to someone who repeatedly harms them.

And once a person sees a relational pattern clearly, they cannot simply return to not knowing it. They cannot unknow that every boundary is punished. They cannot unknow that every disagreement becomes a character attack. They cannot unknow that apologies are routinely replaced with explanations. They cannot unknow that the relationship remains peaceful only when they are silent.

Therapy may not have damaged the relationship. Therapy may have revealed the conditions under which the relationship was allowed to exist.

Some Relationships Depend on One Person Remaining Unhealed

This is the part of the conversation that makes people most uncomfortable, and it is the part that most needs to be said.

Some relationships function because one person has learned not to have needs. They function because one person assumes excessive responsibility, tolerates mistreatment, suppresses anger, doubts their own perception, and repairs every rupture regardless of who caused it. From the outside, the relationship may appear stable. But stability is not the same as safety. A system that requires the suppression of one person's needs in order to maintain equilibrium is not a safe system. It is a system that has found a sustainable way to operate, and the sustainability depends on someone remaining disconnected from their own internal experience.

When the accommodating person begins healing, the system changes. They communicate more directly. They stop absorbing everyone else's emotions. They say no. They expect reciprocity. They ask the other person to participate in repair. Emotionally safe people can adjust to this. They may initially feel uncomfortable or defensive, because they are human, but they remain curious. They listen. They ask questions. They consider their contribution. Their primary goal is preserving the relationship, not preserving their position within it.

Unsafe people often respond differently. They experience the boundary as disrespect. They interpret autonomy as rejection. They treat accountability as an accusation. They respond to the loss of control by escalating guilt, blame, intimidation, victimhood, or withdrawal. The relationship begins deteriorating, not because the healing person suddenly stopped valuing it, but because the relationship depended upon a version of them that no longer exists. The nervous system that learned to suppress its own needs in order to maintain the connection is beginning to update its predictions, and the system that was built around that suppression cannot survive the update.

Boundaries Usually Come Before Estrangement

The public conversation often depicts estrangement as an impulsive first response, a dramatic decision made under the influence of therapy or social media. In clinical reality, distance is frequently preceded by repeated, sustained attempts at communication.

The adult child asks the parent not to make comments about their body. The parent continues. They ask the parent not to insult their spouse. The parent continues. They explain that yelling ends the conversation. The parent yells and then complains that the child refuses to communicate. They ask for an acknowledgment of something harmful. The parent debates the wording, questions the child's memory, attacks the child's tone, or produces a catalogue of everything the parent has ever sacrificed. Eventually, the adult child stops trying to secure cooperation from someone who has demonstrated, repeatedly and clearly, that cooperation is not available.

Estrangement is then described as a refusal to communicate, even though communication has been occurring for years. The actual refusal may have come from the person who repeatedly declined to listen. The nervous system that has been trying to signal danger through increasingly direct communication eventually concludes that the signal is not being received and shifts to the only remaining strategy: withdrawal. This is the same nervous system dynamic that drives the avoidant attachment strategy. It is not abandonment of the relationship. It is the final protective response of a system that has exhausted every other option.

A Survey of Rejected Parents Does Not Establish Causation

A recent survey reportedly asked approximately 7,000 estranged parents about their adult children's therapy, and roughly one-third believed therapy contributed to the estrangement. This data tells us something about parental interpretations of estrangement. It does not establish that therapists advised cutoff, that the advice caused the estrangement, or that the relationship was healthy before therapy began.

A survey of rejected parents is not neutral evidence about why their children left. It is one party's explanation for a relational rupture. That perspective matters. Estranged parents experience real grief, confusion, shame, and loss, and their emotional suffering should not be dismissed. But emotional pain does not make someone's causal explanation accurate. People naturally construct interpretations that protect their sense of identity and reduce the cognitive dissonance of being rejected by someone they raised. A parent may sincerely believe that the therapist, the spouse, social media, trauma culture, or some mysterious outside force changed their child. That explanation may feel considerably safer than considering the possibility that the child's decision emerged from years of accumulated relational evidence.

This is precisely why rigorous research would require multiple perspectives. We would need data from adult children, parents, therapists, and ideally longitudinal records documenting what occurred before and after therapy. We would need to distinguish therapist-recommended estrangement from client-led decisions. We would need to assess abuse, coercion, boundary violations, repair attempts, mental illness, family structure, and the quality of the relationship before treatment began. Without that, the conclusion remains an attribution, and the size of the sample does not change the nature of the data. Seven thousand parents providing their interpretation of why their child left is still seven thousand interpretations, not seven thousand verified accounts of what happened inside the therapy room or inside the family.

Joshua Coleman and the Parent-Centred Estrangement Narrative

Joshua Coleman deserves credit for bringing attention to the profound grief experienced by estranged parents and for encouraging some parents to approach reconciliation with humility rather than entitlement. His work recognizes that parents and adult children can hold genuinely different interpretations of the same family history, and that recognition is clinically valuable.

That contribution would be more persuasive if his framework did not so frequently position contemporary therapy, changing definitions of harm, and adult children's expectations as primary suspects in the collapse of family relationships. Coleman has suggested that "clumsy therapists" may identify trauma where it does not exist, and his work consistently emphasizes cultural changes that allow adult children to prioritize psychological well-being over unconditional family obligation. The concern with this framing is that it treats the adult child's interpretation as a cultural artifact requiring suspicion while giving remarkably generous consideration to the accounts of parents who may have no direct knowledge of what occurred in therapy.

The fact that people now possess language for emotional neglect, coercive control, enmeshment, parentification, and chronic invalidation does not mean therapists manufactured those experiences. Naming a pattern does not create the pattern. A clinician identifying relational trauma is not causing the trauma any more than a radiologist causes a fracture by identifying it on an X-ray. The framework that asks whether therapists are too willing to believe their clients while extending generous benefit of the doubt to the parents who are being described is not a balanced standard of evidence. It is an asymmetrical one, and the asymmetry matters because it shapes public understanding of what estrangement actually is and what produces it.

Jordan Peterson and the Romance of Unquestioned Family Obligation

Jordan Peterson is an accomplished speaker with a genuine ability to frame traditional hierarchy as something that sounds both biologically inevitable and morally courageous. That talent becomes less useful when applied to relationships that require mutual accountability.

The emphasis on duty, resilience, gratitude, personal responsibility, and the danger of interpreting ordinary suffering as trauma is not inherently wrong. Relationships require endurance, and psychological language can absolutely be misused. But endurance without relational safety is not maturity. Sometimes it is conditioning. The nervous system that learned to tolerate mistreatment as a condition of belonging is not demonstrating resilience. It is demonstrating adaptation, and the distinction between the two is clinically significant. Responsibility does not mean remaining available for mistreatment. Gratitude does not erase harm. Family obligation cannot be invoked as a permanent exemption from accountability. A framework that repeatedly warns adult children against resentment while offering insufficient scrutiny of the conditions that produced the resentment is not defending family relationships. It is defending access, and the distinction between the two matters.

Access Is Not the Same as Relationship

Parents sometimes experience an adult child's boundary as the loss of a relationship. But what they may actually be losing is unrestricted access. A relationship includes reciprocity, accountability, consent, curiosity, and mutual adaptation. Access merely means being permitted to enter someone's life. A parent can have access to an adult child without truly knowing them. They can attend holidays, exchange messages, and see grandchildren while remaining emotionally unsafe. The adult child may preserve contact through obligation while carefully avoiding vulnerability, disagreement, or honesty. From the outside, the family appears intact. From the inside, the relationship may already be absent.

Cutting contact does not always destroy a functioning bond. Sometimes it formalizes the reality that meaningful relational connection had already become impossible, and that the contact being maintained was not producing connection. It was producing performance.

Therapists Should Not Prescribe Estrangement Casually

None of this means therapists are infallible. Therapists can be poorly trained, ideologically rigid, overly validating, insufficiently curious, or too quick to accept a client's initial interpretation. Some misuse trauma language. Some encourage confrontation before a client is prepared. Some may frame distance as empowerment without adequately exploring grief, ambivalence, alternatives, or long-term consequences. A therapist should not casually instruct a client to terminate an important relationship. Estrangement is a major decision with consequences for identity, family systems, siblings, partners, children, holidays, caregiving, illness, and bereavement, and it should be approached with the gravity it deserves.

Good therapy does not issue verdicts about people the therapist has never met. It helps the client examine patterns, test interpretations, clarify values, assess safety, communicate boundaries, and make informed decisions. But acknowledging that some therapists practice badly does not justify portraying therapy as the primary engine of parental estrangement. That would be like discovering that some surgeons make errors and concluding that surgery causes disease. The error is real. The conclusion is not.

The Better Question

The question should not be whether therapy convinced this person to cut off their parent. The better questions are clinical ones. What was happening in the relationship before therapy? How did the parent respond when concerns were raised? Were boundaries communicated? Were those boundaries respected? Was there room for disagreement? Could either person acknowledge harm? Did the relationship allow both people to remain psychologically intact? Was distance the first intervention, or the final one after every other attempt failed?

Most importantly, did the relationship provide enough safety to support repair? Because safe relationships bend. They tolerate new information. They survive boundaries. They allow both people to grow. Unsafe relationships often demand that one person remain unchanged so everyone else can remain comfortable, and when that person begins to change, the relationship fractures not because the change was unnecessary but because the relationship was never designed to accommodate a fully formed person. It was designed to accommodate a version of them that was manageable.

A Final Note

Therapy can help people recognize relational danger. It can help them stop confusing familiarity with safety. It can help them identify when guilt is being used as a method of control. It can help them understand that being related to someone does not eliminate their need for dignity, autonomy, and protection. Sometimes that awareness leads to reconciliation. Sometimes it leads to clearer boundaries. Sometimes it leads to limited contact. And yes, sometimes it leads to estrangement.

But when healing results in the end of a relationship, we should not automatically assume that healing destroyed something healthy. We should consider the more uncomfortable possibility: the relationship could survive only while one person remained disconnected from their own needs. People do not generally abandon relationships in which they feel securely attached, emotionally safe, heard, respected, and capable of repair. They fight for those relationships. They make them work. And when an adult child is willing to endure the grief, guilt, stigma, and family consequences of losing a parent, the clinically responsible question is not simply who taught them the word "trauma." It is what made losing the relationship feel safer than remaining inside it.