I Blame The Parents

Let's start with the story that anchored this piece, because it's worth knowing before we get into the argument around it.

Reported in the Wall Street Journal, A woman named Shoshana Rubli went to a new therapist. In her second session, she said that the therapist told her to cut off all contact with her mother — advice she followed partly because the therapist came recommended and had impressive credentials. The estrangement lasted ten years, during which Rubli fell in love, got married, lost two grandparents, and was cut off in turn by other family members angry about the rift. She eventually had children of her own, realised that all parents have flaws, and called her mother. She now describes deep regret about having taken the advice — though notably, she puts the responsibility on herself rather than the therapist: "you can't hold them accountable, because you told them what you told them, and you listened to what they said."

That last sentence is doing more work than the headline gives it credit for, and we'll come back to it.

The broader trend the article describes is real: some therapists, after decades of the profession generally encouraging families to work through their differences together, are now more willing to frame estrangement from a difficult relative as an act of legitimate self-care. Critics of the trend — largely researchers who've studied family relationships for years — argue this encourages self-centredness and a certain amount of self-delusion, and that it's quietly wrecking families that might otherwise have found their way back to each other. Even the trend's critics generally accept that estrangement is sometimes the right call — nobody serious is arguing a child should stay in contact with a genuinely abusive parent. What seems to be shifting is the bar for what counts as bad enough to justify the cutoff.

I want to take this seriously rather than simply having an opinion about it, because it's more interesting than a hot take deserves, and because — as we'll get to — it lands rather differently depending on which side of the estrangement you happen to be standing on.

The other half of the story

Before going further, it's worth putting the counter-argument on the table properly, because it's a good one and dismissing it would be intellectually lazy.

Many psychologists have pushed back hard on the idea that therapists are the cause of rising estrangement, arguing that ethical therapists don't instruct clients what to do or impose their own values — they help clients work out what's genuinely best for them, which occasionally leads to estrangement as an outcome rather than a prescription. The argument goes further: blaming the therapist can function as a convenient way for an estranged parent to avoid examining their own contribution to the rupture.

And the research on this specific point is fairly clear: cutting ties with family is not, for most people, a hasty decision. It tends to be the last resort, arrived at after years of attempted repair, not the first move suggested in a second session. Good therapy, on this account, doesn't say "cut off your parents" — it says "let's understand what happened, what you feel, what you need, what's possible, and what isn't."

Both of these things can be true simultaneously, and I think they are. Some therapists genuinely do push clients toward premature or poorly-considered cutoffs — the second-session advice in the Rubli story is a fairly clear example of poor practice, regardless of which side of the broader debate you land on. And it is equally true that most estrangements are the product of years of accumulated, genuine difficulty rather than a bad therapy session — and that blaming the therapist is, for a hurt parent, a considerably more comfortable story than examining their own part in it.

The honest position, in other words, is not "therapists are ruining families" and it is not "therapists have nothing to do with this." It's that a genuinely useful therapeutic tool — helping someone recognise when a relationship is harming them — has, in some hands, been applied carelessly, at scale, in a culture that has become rather quick to reach for the word toxic and rather slow to ask what repair might look like first.

Why this matters more than you might expect

Here's the part of the story that the WSJ headline doesn't lead with, and that I think is the more interesting angle for the men reading this.

Roughly 10% of the US population is estranged from a parent or child at any given time, according to the Cornell family sociologist Karl Pillemer, who expects rising political and social tension to produce more of these ruptures rather than fewer. And here's the detail that ought to catch your attention if you're a father: it is considerably more common for adult children to be estranged from their fathers than from their mothers.

Mothers, when it happens, often struggle with it more acutely — even to the point of genuine existential distress — because they tend to identify more closely with the parental role than fathers typically do. Which is an interesting and slightly uncomfortable finding to sit with, because it suggests two things at once: that fathers are more often on the receiving end of this particular rupture, and that the culture — including, frankly, fathers themselves — has historically given men less permission to name how much it hurts.

If you've read the article on why kids need you to act your age or the one on the empty nest, you'll recognise the theme. A great deal of fatherhood is invisible labour — the working late, the deferred conversations, the assumption that presence could be caught up on later. Estrangement, when it happens to fathers specifically, often has less to do with a single therapy session and rather more to do with a father-child relationship that was already thin before anyone picked up the phone to a therapist at all.

What this asks of you

If you're a father reading this and any part of it has landed, here's what I'd suggest doing with it — not as therapy, just as plain sense.

If you're estranged, or worried you might become so — resist the urge to make the therapist the villain of the story, even if one was involved. It's a comfortable place to put the blame, and it will not get you a single step closer to repair. The more useful, considerably less comfortable question is the one the article's harshest critics keep pointing back to: what, specifically, would your adult child say went wrong, and have you actually heard the answer rather than argued with it?

If you're the adult child in this equation, considering distance from your own father — the research is clear that this is very rarely a decision people make lightly, and if you've genuinely tried and genuinely been unable to have a workable relationship with someone who caused you real harm, that's a legitimate outcome, not a character failing. But it's worth being honest with yourself about whether you've actually exhausted repair, or whether a difficult but survivable relationship is being reframed as an unsurvivable one because that reframing is, in the moment, easier to sit with.

If you're neither, but you're a father of adult children who are still very much in contact — this is worth reading as a caution rather than a diagnosis. The relationships this article describes rarely collapse suddenly. They thin, gradually, over years of the kind of low-grade distance and deferred conversation that the difficult conversations article covers in more depth. The father who checks in on that thinning periodically — who asks, genuinely, rather than assuming everything is fine because nobody's said otherwise — is doing the single most protective thing available to him.

Which brings us to

Are therapists to blame for the rise in adult children cutting ties with their parents? Some, in some specific instances, appear to be practising carelessly. Sadly, the term 'therapist' is still unregulated. This means some are highly qualified and excellent at their jobs. Others - less so.

But the broader trend has causes that run considerably deeper than any individual therapist's office — individualism, economic pressure, a culture more willing than previous generations to name harm and less willing to tolerate it in silence. Therapists are, in most cases, responding to material that was already there rather than inventing it from scratch.

What I'd want any father reading this to take from it isn't a verdict on the therapy professions. It's the reminder that the relationship most likely to quietly become the estrangement statistic is the one that's been allowed to thin gradually, unexamined, on the assumption that it can always be repaired later.