A growing number of American families are splitting apart, and some researchers and parents say therapy itself may be contributing to the break.
A 2025 YouGov poll of 4,395 U.S. adults found that nearly four in 10 Americans are currently estranged from at least one close family member. Among those surveyed, 24% reported estrangement from a sibling, 16% from a parent and 10% from a child.
Two recent large-scale surveys of more than 5,200 U.S. parents who said they were estranged from adult children found that 1,014 of them reported their child had started therapy within the year before the estrangement. Another 515 said their adult children indicated therapy had influenced their decision about the relationship, and 1,254 said their child had received a mental health diagnosis. The surveys were not peer-reviewed or nationally representative and relied on parents’ accounts rather than direct reports from the adult children, which limits what can be concluded about therapy’s actual role.
Richard Blake, a Texas-based psychology researcher who focuses on anxiety and family estrangement and who worked on those surveys, calls the trend an “overcorrection.”
“There is a lot of debate online about whether it’s happening or not. I hear it from both sides. I hear from parents who say, ‘My child said my therapist should cut you off,’ and people who’ve told me, ‘My therapist told me I should cut my parents off.’ How much it’s happening and when it’s appropriate and inappropriate is where the nuance comes in.”
Laura Wellington, a Connecticut mother who has been estranged from her adult daughter since 2024 and is known on social media as “Doormat Mom,” is more blunt about where she thinks blame lies.
“Do therapists, in my opinion, play a role in the estrangement epidemic? 100%. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some really good therapists out there.”
Wellington said she believes some therapists focus too narrowly on one person’s account of a conflict that actually involves multiple people. She said therapists have reached out to her directly to ask about their own approach.
“I’ve had them come to me and ask me, ‘What did we miss?'”
She said she supports parents apologizing when they’ve genuinely done something wrong, but believes therapists should weigh the full circumstances of a family conflict rather than just one side.
Where the lines get blurry
Richard Blake said differences in values, not just severe harm, are increasingly driving estrangements. “People are cutting people off because of divergence in values,” he said, citing an online comment he’d seen: “I cut my parents off because they didn’t condemn ICE enough.”
He stressed that some reasons for cutting off a parent are clearly legitimate, including physical or sexual abuse. But he said the category of “emotional abuse” has expanded in therapy and online discussion to cover disagreements over politics, religion or even specific language choices.
“Emotional abuse can be [about] differing political values, a little difference in religious beliefs. It can be about the words people use.”
He argued that therapy culture has raised expectations of what counts as good parenting. “There’s just a massive sort of overselling in therapy of how much your parents affected you,” he said. Blake said he sometimes hears from parents who received a letter demanding no further contact without ever learning what specifically triggered it.
Still, Blake said parents share responsibility when they fail to listen to their adult children’s complaints. “A frequent complaint that most adult children make is, ‘My parents just don’t listen. I cannot get through to them. It’s like talking to a brick wall,’ and that is a genuine frustration,” he said. “If you don’t listen to your child, then don’t be surprised if you have conflict with them.” He recommends active listening — letting the other person finish speaking, repeating their concerns back, and asking if they have more to say before responding.
Blake said his criticism applies only to a “small subset” of therapists who may treat cutting off family as an appropriate response to ordinary conflict. In cases that don’t involve abuse, he warned that estrangement can bring short-term relief but serious longer-term consequences. He also pushed back on the idea that cutting off a parent automatically resolves mental health struggles, calling it a myth that assumes the parent was the sole cause of those issues.
A more measured view
Not every expert sees therapy as a driver of estrangement. Lucy Blake, a developmental psychologist in the U.K. who studies family estrangement, told the American Psychological Association that therapy can be “very helpful” when a therapist understands that estrangement rarely affects just one relationship, and when they grasp the underlying factors — such as abuse or mental health conditions — that can be involved.
She said she has also heard from people who found therapy “very unhelpful,” especially when a therapist lacked warmth or failed to appreciate the grief and loss that often accompany estrangement. She described the overall usefulness of therapy as varying case by case, noting researchers are “still really learning” what helps and what doesn’t.
Both researchers pointed to mediation as a potential path forward when family members are still willing to engage with one another. “Communication with a mediator, whether it’s a therapist or a professional mediator, can be really productive,” Richard Blake said, though he acknowledged that option disappears once a family member has cut off contact entirely. “I certainly think it’s worth a try,” he added. “I know a lot of very good mediators out there who can help people.”
Wellington agreed joint therapy could help families reconcile, provided both sides are willing, and said disagreement alone shouldn’t end a relationship. “You can have a different opinion,” she said. “You can also have a relationship with your parent who has the other opinion, and that’s OK.”
