TL;DR
A new book and recent reporting ask whether therapists are causing family estrangement.
A study of 209 estranged people found that participants valued therapists who understood estrangement without steering them toward reconciliation or estrangement. They described pressure in either direction as unhelpful.
Therapy can support the person in the room. It can’t independently verify the full history of someone who was never there.
On September 8, a new book called No Contact arrives. Its publisher describes family estrangement as a widespread, politically motivated movement shaped partly by therapeutic culture. A recent Wall Street Journal article asked the question even more directly: Are therapists to blame for the rise of adults cutting off their parents?
The article opens with one woman’s account. She says a therapist told her during their second session to cut off her mother. She followed the advice and cut off all ties.
That story deserves some attention … though it doesn’t establish a trend.
I don’t think the evidence gets us to “therapists are causing estrangement.” Some likely do, and others likely don’t. It does, however, get us to a narrower question that may matter more: what can individual therapy actually know about a parent who isn’t there?
The person in the room
Individual therapy begins with one person’s experience. That’s not a flaw. It’s the arrangement.
A client needs to be able to describe fear, harm, shame or confusion without the therapist turning each session into a cross-examination. Someone disclosing abuse shouldn’t have to provide the other person’s response before receiving care. That requirement could repeat an earlier experience of not being believed and, in some cases, put the client at greater risk.
The absent parent isn’t part of that confidential relationship. Confidentiality matters. Safety matters. The therapeutic relationship depends on both.
But the limits of the room matter too.
A therapist can hear what the client remembers, how the relationship felt and how contact affects them now. The therapist can notice patterns in the account and help the client decide what level of contact they can live with. But if the therapist hasn’t interviewed the absent parent or reviewed independent records, they haven’t heard that person’s account. They also can’t know what relevant conversations, records or events are missing from the client’s account.
A therapist may have good reason to support the client. That support still doesn’t verify the full family history.
The decision still belongs to the client
The 2026 ethics code of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy clarifies who owns these decisions. It says therapists must respect each client’s right to make their own choices and help them understand the possible consequences. The code says clients themselves are responsible for decisions about separation, reconciliation, custody and parenting time.
That rule cuts both ways. A therapist shouldn’t push reconciliation because they believe family ties are sacred. They also shouldn’t decide that a relationship must end. Either way, the decision belongs to the client.
The code draws a sharper boundary when a therapist’s work enters a legal proceeding. It says therapy and formal evaluation are different jobs. When a therapist offers an opinion for a court or another legal proceeding, the code requires appropriate supporting information. A therapist performing that kind of evaluation generally can’t diagnose someone they haven’t interviewed.
Those rules apply when therapists evaluate people for courts or other legal proceedings. I wouldn’t use them to argue that ordinary therapy requires an investigation. It doesn’t. But they do show why supporting a client in therapy isn’t the same job as independently evaluating what happened in a family.
What estranged people said helped
The most useful research I found doesn’t come from parents blaming therapists. It comes from estranged people describing their own counseling.
Lucy Blake, Becca Bland and Susan Imrie analyzed written responses from 209 people who were estranged from at least one family member. The respondents had sought support through the charity Stand Alone. Of those 209 people, 133 described helpful counseling experiences and 107 described unhelpful ones. Participants could answer both questions, so some were counted in both groups.
Respondents didn’t describe being directed toward permanent distance as helpful. They valued therapists who understood estrangement, helped them understand their situation more clearly and supported their own decisions. Some wanted to maintain estrangement. Some wanted to repair the relationship.
Pressure was described as unhelpful in both directions. Respondents described feeling pushed to forgive or reconcile. Others felt pushed to accept that a relationship would never change or to begin an estrangement before they were ready. The researchers concluded that people benefited most from therapists who understood estrangement without telling them what choice to make.
The study has real limits. Participants chose whether to respond, and all of them were connected to an estrangement charity. Ninety-one percent of respondents were women and 93% were White. It tells us how these respondents described counseling. It can’t tell us how often therapists recommend no contact or whether therapy is increasing estrangement across the population.
This is what the larger debate keeps missing. People valued being believed and having their feelings taken seriously. They also valued making the final decision themselves.
When support becomes proof
Confusion often begins after the session, when someone describes the therapy to other people.
“My therapist helped me decide I need distance” reports what therapy helped the client decide. “My therapist confirmed my father is a narcissist” makes therapy sound like independent proof about someone the therapist may never have met.
The therapist may not have said it that way. The client may be compressing months of careful conversation into one sentence. A relative may repeat the sentence and drop another qualification. By the time the rest of the family hears it, the existence of therapy can sound like proof that a professional independently verified the disputed history.
I wrote about what happens next in Estrangement Doesn’t Stay Between Two People. Once therapists, lawyers and relatives enter a family rupture, the way they describe it can influence what the family does next. That doesn’t make them responsible for the original break. But other people may treat their words as proof, even when those words were only meant to guide treatment or give advice.
A therapist who works with trauma would object here. The answer can’t be to hear both sides inside individual therapy. They’re right. Turning every therapy room into family court would make therapy worse, especially for people living with real abuse.
The better boundary is outside the therapy room: don’t turn a client’s report or a therapist’s support into proof about the absent parent. A client’s account tells us what the client reported and experienced. The therapist’s response tells us how they responded to the person in front of them. Neither one, by itself, establishes the absent parent’s full history.
The missing account stays missing
I have written before that the vocabulary of healthy estrangement can also become the script of alienation. From outside the family, the same words can describe a person escaping real harm or a relationship being condemned through a story nobody else was allowed to examine.
Therapy can’t tell an outsider whether ending contact was necessary. It isn’t supposed to.
A therapist may help someone recognize danger. A therapist may help someone stop accepting behavior from a family member that they can no longer bear. A therapist may also hear an incomplete account because every human account is incomplete. None of those possibilities lets an outsider decide whether a particular estrangement was necessary.
The parent who wasn’t in the room remains unevaluated. That fact doesn’t decide whether the door needed to close. It decides how much certainty the rest of us have earned about what happened behind it.
Where do you land on this? I’d like to hear how you see it.
Author’s Note
This article discusses professional ethics, published research and public reporting. It doesn’t offer legal, psychological or clinical advice. It doesn’t claim that therapy causes family estrangement or that any particular estrangement is justified or unjustified. Individual therapy, family therapy and forensic evaluation serve different purposes. Professional duties also vary by license and jurisdiction.
Resources & Further Reading
American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, AAMFT Code of Ethics, effective January 1, 2026.
Lucy Blake, Becca Bland and Susan Imrie, “The Counseling Experiences of Individuals Who Are Estranged From a Family Member”, Family Relations, 69, 820-831.
Elizabeth Bernstein, “Are Therapists to Blame for the Rise of Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?”, The Wall Street Journal.
Noelle Mering, No Contact, publisher page and September 8, 2026 release information.
La distinction entre reconnaître l’expérience d’une personne et vérifier toute l’histoire familiale est juste. Une absence laisse souvent derrière elle des récits incomplets, des hypothèses et des silences qui se transmettent. Ce qui est intéressant : c’est la manière dont ces récits finissent par structurer l’identité de ceux qui grandissent avec eux.