Parental estrangement is receiving increasing attention from the mainstream media. The BBC, Cosmopolitan magazine, the LA Times and Newsweek are just a handful of household names reporting on the rising prevalence of adult children cutting out one or both parents.
Almost all of the growing body of media coverage is reported in the frame of adult children choosing to go no contact (or NC) with toxic parents. On Reddit sub-forums dedicated to estrangement, tens of thousands of members report experiencing narcissism, gaslighting and abuse from their parents before choosing to cut them out of their lives.
At the same time, more people than ever are seeking therapy. The number of adults in the United States who received treatment or counseling for mental health issues has almost doubled over the last 20 years. Adults aged between 18 and 44 are more likely to seek out counseling or therapy than older adults, who prefer to take medication for mental health issues.
And according to Dr Joshua Coleman, a practicing clinician who also researches parental estrangement, this correlation is no coincidence.
Writing in The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Coleman explains how therapy, coaching, self-help and the permanently available validation from online communities – whom he terms the “high priests” of therapy – are contributing to the unprecedented rise in parental estrangement.
From parental duty to finger pointing
Changing societal expectations of what family is, or should be, have re-shaped the relationships between parents and their adult children. Family structures based on a hierarchical model of obligation and responsibility are no longer the norm, and adults are increasingly motivated to view relationships on merit.
Rather than maintaining contact out of a blind sense of duty, adult children are questioning how their parents make (or made) them feel. There’s no doubt that when suffering has been caused by abuse or neglect, the freedom to emancipate from family ties with society’s approval and support is a positive development. However, as Coleman notes, there are many paths to parental estrangement that involve neither neglect nor abuse.
As adults seek to eliminate negative thoughts and experiences from their lives, aided and abetted by therapists online and offline, they begin to view parental relationships through an increasingly personalized lens of self-reflection: “How does my parent make me feel? Has my potential been limited by their actions or inactions? Are they the cause of my anxieties, doubts, fears and failures?”
Shifting the focus
The record rise in the number of young people seeking therapy has been matched by the number of therapists, both qualified and self-proclaimed, readily available to provide answers. And by encouraging their clients or online followers to “do the work”, therapists offer a new perspective of the family structure.
Within this reframed narrative, the problems of the individual are traced back to the impact of their formative experiences and those who caused or enabled them – more often than not, their parents.
Aided by the diagnostic criteria of the DSM-5 (Google search results for the term ‘narcissist’ have increased exponentially over the last 20 years, as have those for the non-clinical pop-culture reference ‘gaslighting’), therapists and self-help influencers have shifted the focus from self-improvement and a willingness to pursue meaningful psychological change, to labeling parents as the causes of trauma through their shortcomings or by armchair diagnoses.
And, when the cause of the problem can be identified and isolated, the cure can be swiftly administered – simply cut it out.
The trauma narrative
Trauma is, by its nature, subjective. An experience one person may find perfectly tolerable could trigger a trauma response in another. And as a practicing clinician, Coleman hears messages with a common theme from adult children who have become estranged from their parents after retrospectively labeling their childhoods as traumatic:
“I used to think I had a pretty good childhood, but since I’ve been in therapy I’m learning that it was really all about you, not me.”
“I was depressed when I was little and you didn’t see it or get me help. As a result, I suffered needlessly. Because of this, I don’t owe you a relationship. Don’t contact me again.”
By reframing childhood emotions and experiences as trauma with cause and effect, they can be attributed to an aggressor. It follows that this creates a victim of aggression. As this is based exclusively on one person’s recollection of the experience, when the situation results in estrangement it can’t be discussed or resolved.
Instead, the subjectivity of trauma and its impact become the trigger for blame, with no way to prove that the “aggressor” acted with good intentions and not out of malice.
The parent trap
This retrospective pathologizing of childhood experiences, the moving line between societal definitions of good or bad parenting, the parents’ own past experiences of family life, and the encouragement from therapists to diagnose the past behavior of parents against current standards will rarely result in clarity or resolution for either side.
It also fails to account for the societal factors surrounding a person’s propensity to success, failure and other issues they seek answers to in therapy. Social class, race, religion, the level of external support, the amount of money available, inherited traits and temperaments all play a significant role in the development of every child into adulthood – and all are beyond the control of the parent.
By encouraging estrangement without paying heed to the unique set of circumstances at play in individual relationships, many therapists are legitimizing a self-serving society in which compassion and responsibility are becoming increasingly absent.
In doing so, Coleman concludes, the “high priests” of therapy aren’t just negatively impacting the lives of today’s parents – they are creating problems for many generations to come.
Dr Joshua Coleman is a psychologist in private practice in the San Francisco Bay area. He is the author of “Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties & How to Heal the Conflict.”
He is Senior Fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families, a non-partisan organization of leading sociologists, historians, psychologists and demographers dedicated to providing the press and public with the latest research and best practice findings about American families.
