A recent Wall Street Journal piece by Elizabeth Bernstein asked a question that’s been quietly simmering in living rooms and therapy offices alike: are therapists partly responsible for the growing number of adults cutting off their parents? The article struck a nerve — and the debate it kicked off says a lot about where mental health care needs to go next.
The numbers behind the headline
Estrangement isn’t a fringe issue anymore. A 2025 YouGov survey of roughly 4,400 adults found that 38% reported being estranged from a close relative, up from 27% in a 2020 Cornell study led by sociologist Karl Pillemer — a study that also found 10% of respondents were estranged specifically from a parent or child. Separately, a survey of about 7,000 estranged parents found that roughly one in three believed a therapist had directly recommended, or at least influenced, their adult child’s decision to cut off contact.
Two real critiques worth taking seriously
The WSJ piece — and the wave of commentary that followed — surfaced a legitimate tension in the field:
The case against current practice. Family therapist William Doherty argues that therapy culture has drifted toward treating ordinary family friction as trauma, making cutoff feel like the default answer rather than a last resort. Therapist Peter Anderson raised a related concern: clinicians are often working from one person’s account of a relationship and drawing conclusions without ever hearing the other side.
The case for taking clients at their word. Therapist Whitney Goodman pushed back hard on the idea that parents deserve automatic deference, asking why adult children’s accounts of their own experiences should be treated as less credible just because older generations wouldn’t have called it abuse. Her point lands too: plenty of estrangements are the end result of real, sustained harm, and reflexively nudging clients back toward reconciliation can just as easily retraumatize someone who left for good reason.
Neither side is wrong across the board. The honest answer is probably that both dynamics are happening — some clinicians are too quick to validate a cutoff after hearing only one side, and some critics are too quick to dismiss estrangement as a fad rather than a sometimes-necessary response to genuine harm. The nuance gets lost precisely because it’s a story about blame, and blame doesn’t leave much room for “it depends.”
Where this leaves families
For anyone living inside this — whether you’re the adult child weighing distance from a parent, or the parent trying to understand where the relationship went — the WSJ conversation points to something practical: the quality of support matters enormously. A good process helps someone tell the difference between “this relationship is genuinely unsafe” and “this relationship is uncomfortable and unresolved.” A rushed one can flatten that distinction entirely.
How Felicity Mental Health approaches this differently
This is exactly the gap Felicity Mental Health is built to close. A few principles guide how our clinicians handle situations involving family conflict and estrangement:
- We slow down before we validate a cutoff. Big, permanent decisions deserve more than one session’s worth of context. Our clinicians are trained to explore a client’s full relational history — not just the most recent conflict — before any conversation about limiting or ending contact.
- We don’t treat “trauma” as a catch-all label. Distinguishing genuine harm from ordinary relational friction is a clinical skill, not a vibe. Our team uses structured assessment rather than defaulting to whichever framing feels most validating in the moment.
- We offer family and multi-generational sessions, not just individual ones, so decisions about a relationship aren’t made with only one voice in the room — when that’s safe and appropriate to do.
- We take case consultation seriously. Clinicians debrief complex family cases with colleagues and supervisors, specifically to catch the one-sided-narrative problem the WSJ article raised.
- We hold space for both outcomes. Sometimes distance genuinely is the healthiest path. Sometimes repair is possible and worth the harder work. Our job isn’t to steer clients toward either one — it’s to help them get clear enough on their own situation to choose with confidence, not urgency.
If you’re navigating a strained family relationship — as the adult child, the parent, or somewhere in between — Felicity Mental Health can help you get a clearer, more complete picture before any major decision gets made. Reach out to schedule a consultation with one of our clinicians.
