When Did Estrangement Become the Answer?

Therapy, Social Media, Family Erasure—and the Voices Missing From the Conversation

By Lisa Franco Alexander

There was a time when having a difficult relationship with someone did not automatically mean the relationship itself had to end.

Families argued.

Parents disappointed children. Children disappointed parents. Generations disagreed about values, choices, relationships, parenting, money, religion, politics, and all the other things human beings have managed to disagree about for centuries.

People said things badly.

They misunderstood one another.

They became angry.

Pride lasted too long.

Apologies were imperfect.

Sometimes families carried wounds for years.

None of that is new.

Something else, however, feels very new.

We now live in a culture saturated with psychological language.

Toxic.

Narcissist.

Trauma.

Gaslighting.

Unsafe.

Triggered.

Boundaries.

No contact.

Some of these words have given people desperately needed language for experiences they previously could not name. Abuse is real. Coercive control is real. Violence is real. There are relationships in which distance is necessary for someone's physical or psychological safety.

I am not questioning that.

I am questioning something else.

When did ending the relationship become such a readily available answer to the problems within the relationship?

And perhaps more importantly:

Who is helping families arrive at that answer?

Because increasingly, when I listen to estranged parents and alienated grandparents, I hear another story beneath the estrangement itself.

They are not only asking:

Why won't my child speak to me?

They are asking:

Who told my child who I am?

When Helpful Language Becomes a Verdict

Psychological language can illuminate behavior.

That is precisely why it carries so much power.

There is value in recognizing manipulation.

There is value in understanding trauma.

There is value in learning that loving someone does not require accepting every behavior.

But something changes when language intended to describe behavior begins defining an entire human being.

There is a profound difference between:

“Something you did hurt me.”

and

“You are toxic.”

Between:

“I felt manipulated during that conversation.”

and

“You are a narcissist.”

Between:

“I need some time before we talk again.”

and

“You no longer deserve access to me.”

One describes an experience.

The other can become a verdict.

And once the verdict has been delivered, almost everything the other person does may be interpreted through it.

An explanation becomes defensiveness.

An apology becomes manipulation.

A disagreement becomes proof.

An attempt to reconnect becomes a boundary violation.

A poorly worded message becomes further evidence.

Eventually, the person may find themselves trapped inside a definition they had no part in creating.

There may be no response available to them that will be interpreted generously.

And that is when something essential disappears:

curiosity.

What actually happened between us?

What did you experience?

What did I experience?

What did I misunderstand?

What did you misunderstand?

What belongs to me?

What belongs to you?

Is there something we could still repair?

Those are difficult questions.

Labels are much easier.

Who Is in the Room—and Who Isn't?

There is an uncomfortable question I believe the mental-health profession needs to confront more openly.

What happens when therapy about a relationship takes place with only one member of that relationship in the room?

Of course individual therapy works that way.

A therapist's responsibility is to the client sitting before them. Therapy is not a courtroom, and therapists are not supposed to investigate every statement their clients make.

But that creates an important limitation.

A therapist may hear hours of information about a mother they have never met.

A father they have never spoken with.

A grandparent whose voice they have never heard.

They may hear childhood stories, text messages, memories, interpretations, arguments and grievances—all through one person's recollection and perspective.

That perspective matters.

But perspective and objective fact are not always the same thing.

The concern is no longer confined to private support groups. Recent reporting has brought an increasingly public disagreement among mental-health professionals into view. In July 2026, The Wall Street Journal examined criticism from family therapists and researchers who worry that some practitioners may too readily validate estrangement without sufficiently challenging a client's interpretation of family events. The article also reported on a survey of approximately 7,000 estranged parents in which roughly one-third said they believed their adult child's therapist had influenced or recommended the cutoff.

That finding does not prove that therapists caused one-third of those estrangements.

Parents outside the therapy room cannot know everything that occurred inside it.

Neither can I.

But neither should we dismiss what those parents are reporting simply because it is uncomfortable.

When a concern is being voiced repeatedly, perhaps the appropriate response is not immediate denial.

Perhaps it is investigation.

I Cannot Share Their Stories. But I Cannot Pretend I Haven't Heard Them.

Over time, I have encountered an overwhelming number of estranged parents and alienated grandparents in private support communities who believe a therapist played a significant role in their family's estrangement.

Their conversations are confidential.

I will honor that confidentiality.

I will not quote them.

I will not identify them.

I will not reproduce their posts.

And I will not turn another person's private grief into public evidence simply to strengthen an argument.

But I cannot pretend I haven't heard them.

Again and again, people who do not know one another describe variations of a remarkably similar experience.

A family member begins therapy.

The language surrounding the family begins changing.

Words such as toxic, narcissistic, trauma, unsafe, boundaries, and no contact enter conversations where they had never existed before.

Past experiences begin being interpreted through a different lens.

Contact becomes restricted.

Then perhaps more restricted.

And sometimes it disappears altogether.

These accounts do not prove causation.

They do something else.

They raise a question.

And perhaps the question is no longer whether some estranged families believe therapeutic influence contributed to their rupture.

Clearly, some do.

The harder question is:

Is the mental-health profession sufficiently curious about why so many families are saying it?

Validation Is Not Verification

If someone tells a therapist:

“My mother's behavior hurt me,”

that pain deserves to be heard.

If someone says:

“I felt frightened, controlled, dismissed or unseen,”

those feelings deserve serious attention.

But there is a distinction I believe we desperately need to recover:

Validating someone's emotional experience is not the same as verifying every conclusion they have reached about another person's intentions.

“I believe that you were hurt” is not the same as:

“Therefore, your interpretation of why your father did this must be correct.”

“I understand why that interaction felt terrible” is not the same as:

“Therefore, your mother is a narcissist.”

And:

“You have the right to decide what relationships you participate in” is not the same as:

“Ending this relationship is necessarily the healthiest choice.”

A helping professional should be able to hold those distinctions.

Because therapists are human.

Counselors are human.

Clergy are human.

Coaches are human.

Influencers are human.

They have personal histories.

Generational perspectives.

Cultural assumptions.

Biases.

Blind spots.

A professional credential does not provide supernatural access to the intentions of an absent family member.

And a social-media following certainly doesn't.

Hearsay Can Become Family History

I know how easily this can happen because I experienced a version of it myself.

Years ago, before my family estrangement, I flew from Ohio to California to spend Super Bowl weekend with my sister.

I arrived on Thursday. The game was Sunday.

When my sister learned that I had booked an early flight home Monday morning, she couldn't understand why I would leave so early after a weekend celebration.

My answer was simple.

Monday was Valentine's Day.

I wanted to get home because I had Valentine's gifts for my grandchildren and something special from California for my son.

And there was another possibility that made me happy.

If my son wanted to take his wife out for Valentine's Day, perhaps I could spend that time with my grandchildren.

I didn't view caring for them as something I had to do.

Quite the opposite.

Being with my grandchildren was the privilege of my life.

That conversation should have ended there.

It didn't.

My sister later spoke with her daughter—my niece—who had studied psychology and worked therapeutically with young people experiencing serious family difficulties.

Somewhere in the retelling, my meaning changed.

What eventually reached my daughter-in-law was not that I was excited to return home for Valentine's Day and would love an opportunity to be with my grandchildren.

The story became that I was supposedly complaining because I couldn't enjoy Super Bowl weekend because I “had to” rush home to babysit.

And attached to that version was a psychological characterization:

I was “playing victim.”

I knew nothing about the conversation.

I had no opportunity to correct it.

What I did know was that suddenly I was being shut out of my family. Weeks passed. Then months. I did not know why. I was experiencing the consequences of a story I didn't even know was being told about me.

Eventually, unable to bear the silence any longer, I went to see my son. During that conversation, he asked me why I had said something I had never said.

I was stunned.

For the first time, I understood what I had supposedly done.

Think about that.

I had been excluded first.

The explanation came later.

A loving intention had traveled through other people and returned to me transformed into evidence of a character flaw. And before I even knew that altered version existed, it had already affected my relationship with my family.

That experience has stayed with me because it raises a much larger question:

How many estranged parents and grandparents are living with the consequences of accusations, interpretations, or conversations they don't even know occurred?

Someone says something.

Someone else interprets it.

Another person retells it.

Someone assigns motive.

Another person validates that motive.

The story travels.

With every repetition, interpretation becomes increasingly indistinguishable from fact.

And eventually, nobody remembers to ask the most basic question:

Did anyone ask the person who supposedly said it?

The Missing Person in the Conversation

This may be one of the strangest features of estrangement.

The person receiving some of the most consequential judgments may be the only person who isn't part of the conversation.

Their parenting is analyzed.

Their childhood is reconstructed.

Their motives are interpreted.

Their texts are examined.

Their mistakes are catalogued.

Their personality may be labeled.

Their attempts at contact may themselves be interpreted as pathology.

Yet the people forming those conclusions may never have spoken to them.

That doesn't mean the absent person's version is automatically correct.

It means there is another version.

There is an enormous difference between helping someone understand:

“This is how I experienced my mother.”

and concluding:

“This is who my mother is.”

One preserves the distinction between experience and identity.

The other can erase it.

Social Media Has Entered the Therapy Room Too

Therapists are not the only outside voices influencing how we understand relationships.

We now carry thousands of amateur therapists in our pockets.

Scroll long enough and someone will tell you:

Seven signs your mother is toxic.

Five phrases narcissistic parents always use.

Why you don't owe anyone an explanation.

Why cutting off family is self-care.

Complex relationships are compressed into sixty seconds.

Algorithms then do what algorithms are designed to do.

Watch one video and another appears.

Then another.

Then another.

Soon a person may be immersed in a world in which every difficult interaction appears to confirm the same conclusion.

Social media didn't invent estrangement.

But it has created an unprecedented mechanism for repeatedly reinforcing a particular interpretation of another human being.

And certainty spreads faster than nuance.

“Your father may love you while also having behaviors that have hurt you” isn't particularly viral.

“YOUR FATHER IS TOXIC—HERE'S HOW TO KNOW” has considerably more potential.

We should be willing to ask what that environment is doing to relationships already under strain.

What About Generational Blind Spots?

There is another subject I believe deserves discussion even if it makes people uncomfortable.

Lived experience matters.

No, a therapist does not need to have personally experienced every problem they treat.

That would be impossible.

But professional education and lived experience are not interchangeable.

Someone who has never become a grandparent can study attachment, grief and family systems.

They can be compassionate.

They can be excellent clinicians.

But they have never occupied that particular place in a family.

They have never experienced the astonishing expansion of identity that can occur when your child has a child.

They have never watched another generation of their family arrive and discovered an entirely new form of love.

And therefore, when a grandparent says:

“You don't understand what losing my grandchildren has done to me,”

perhaps the response should not immediately be another technique, label or instruction.

Perhaps sometimes it should begin with:

“You're right. I haven't lived this. Help me understand.”

Generations also carry different assumptions about family, responsibility, sacrifice, autonomy, obligation and repair.

Those differences don't automatically make older people wiser.

Nor do they automatically make younger people more enlightened.

They make us different.

And if we talk about cultural competence in helping professions, perhaps we should also talk more seriously about generational humility.

What did family mean in the world in which this person was raised?

What does being a mother mean to her?

What does being Grandpa mean to him?

What relationships existed before the rupture?

What sacrifices were made?

What expectations were communicated—or never communicated?

What might the grandchildren themselves have experienced?

Those aren't questions designed to take the grandparent's side.

They are questions designed to prevent an entire generation from disappearing from the assessment.

When Someone Comes Asking for Help—and Is Told to Disappear

I experienced another moment that changed the way I think about this issue.

I went to a Catholic priest who had baptized my grandchildren.

I was broken.

I wasn't asking him to choose my side.

I wasn't asking him to condemn anyone.

I wanted help.

I wanted counseling.

I wanted people who loved one another to sit together, talk, listen and try to understand what had happened.

Instead, the message I received was essentially:

Leave them alone.

Don't call.

Don't write.

Move away.

And then he said something I have never forgotten:

“The children can call you when they're older and have their own cell phones.”

I stared at him in disbelief.

He knew how young my grandchildren were. He had baptized them. One was still a baby.

“They're five and three, and an infant,” I said. “You're talking about thirteen years!”

He responded that children get phones at a younger age these days.

I had gone to a priest asking for help preserving a family relationship, and somehow we were discussing the possibility that small children might someday become old enough to find their grandmother themselves.

That wasn't counseling.

There was no offer to bring us together. No attempt to facilitate a conversation. No suggestion that perhaps people who loved one another could sit in the same room with someone neutral and try to understand what had gone wrong.

I walked in asking:

Can you help us communicate?

And I walked out with separation presented as the answer.

I still think about that conversation.

Because if someone comes to a therapist, counselor, clergy member, or other trusted professional saying:

“Please help us talk to each other,”

shouldn't there still be people willing to help them try—when doing so is safe?

Estrangement Rarely Stops With Two People

One of the great problems with our individualistic conversation about estrangement is that families aren't collections of isolated relationships.

They are systems.

A mother and daughter stop speaking.

But perhaps that daughter has children.

Now a grandmother disappears.

There may be siblings.

Aunts.

Uncles.

Cousins.

Family friends.

One person feels pressured to choose a side.

Another decides neutrality is too uncomfortable.

Someone stops extending invitations.

Holidays change.

Photographs change.

Traditions change.

Eventually, one rupture can reorganize an entire family.

Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer's research has described this wider impact as “collateral damage”: people who weren't part of the original conflict can nevertheless become pulled into the estrangement and lose relationships of their own. His national research also found family estrangement to be widespread and emotionally distressing for many of those experiencing it.

That matters enormously when grandchildren are involved.

Children Have Relationships Too

Children should never be weapons in adult conflict.

They should not carry messages.

They should not be asked to choose sides.

And children must be protected from genuinely harmful people.

But there is another truth that deserves equal seriousness:

A child's relationship with a grandparent is also a relationship.

It has its own memories.

Its own rituals.

Its own jokes.

Its own language.

Its own attachment.

Its own love.

When that relationship disappears because of conflict between adults, the child experiences a loss too.

Perhaps they don't understand why Sunday visits stopped.

Why Grammie doesn't come anymore.

Why Grandpa wasn't at the birthday.

Why somebody they loved suddenly became somebody nobody mentions.

Adults may have explanations.

Children experience absence.

And I believe their relationships deserve consideration too.

The Wound Beneath the Estrangement: Erasure

Eventually, for many estranged parents and grandparents, something happens that goes beyond missing another person.

You begin to feel as though you are being removed from the history of your own family.

This is not simply loneliness.

It is not simply rejection.

It is something more existential.

You remember the life before the silence.

The birthdays.

Christmas mornings.

School concerts.

Bedtime stories.

The tie-dyed Mickey Mouse pancakes.

Family dinners.

Vacations.

Scraped knees.

Inside jokes.

Phone calls.

Emergencies.

The favorite meal you knew how to make.

The song you sang together.

The thousands of completely ordinary moments nobody thought to document because nobody imagined there would someday be a need to prove that they happened.

And then you encounter a version of the family where you are absent.

A photograph.

A celebration.

A milestone.

A gathering.

A new tradition.

Life continues.

You simply aren't in it.

And somewhere inside that experience lives a terrifying question:

Did everything we shared mean something only to me?

Estrangement can erase a person twice.

First, you are removed from the relationship.

Then your voice may be removed from the explanation of why the relationship ended.

Someone else tells the story.

Someone else interprets your intentions.

Someone else assigns meaning to your behavior.

Someone else decides what your attempts to reconnect mean.

Eventually, there can be an entire narrative about you, without you.

That is a profound form of loss.

But there is something I want every estranged parent and alienated grandparent reading this to remember:

Absence today does not erase presence yesterday.

You were there.

The birthdays happened.

The laughter happened.

The traditions happened.

The bedtime stories happened.

The hugs happened.

The ordinary Tuesdays happened.

The love happened.

Whatever exists today cannot travel backward through time and make those years cease to exist.

You helped write that family story.

Even if someone has stopped reading your pages aloud.

What Are We Teaching the Generations Watching Us?

This question reaches beyond today's estrangement.

Children learn relationships by watching relationships.

They learn what adults do when someone hurts them.

They learn what happens when people disagree.

They learn whether apologies matter.

Whether forgiveness exists.

Whether conflict can be survived.

Whether people can change.

Whether someone who disappoints us becomes disposable.

Perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give younger generations isn't a family without conflict.

No such family exists.

Perhaps it is allowing them to witness repair.

An adult saying:

I hurt you.

I didn't understand.

Tell me what happened.

I disagree, but I'm listening.

I need something to change.

I'm sorry.

Can we try again?

Those are not small skills.

They are some of the most difficult things human beings ever learn to do.

And if our culture becomes much better at teaching people how to identify unhealthy relationships than teaching them how to repair damaged ones, we should at least ask ourselves what the generations following us will inherit.

Accountability Cannot Belong to Only One Generation

None of this absolves parents.

Parents can hurt their children.

Parents can be controlling.

Insensitive.

Dismissive.

Defensive.

They can fail to listen.

They can cling to roles that no longer fit once their children become adults.

They can make terrible mistakes.

They can cause harm without intending to.

And love should make us willing to examine ourselves.

But adulthood carries responsibility too.

Adult children can misunderstand.

They can communicate poorly.

They can behave unfairly.

They can assign motives incorrectly.

They can be influenced by spouses, relatives, friends, therapists, clergy, support groups and social media.

They can hurt people too.

Accountability cannot be meaningful if one generation is presumed capable of harm while another is presumed capable only of being harmed.

We're all human.

That's precisely why family relationships are so difficult.

And why repair requires more than deciding who gets to be the villain.

I Am Not Asking Anyone to Return to Abuse

This needs to be unmistakably clear.

I am not arguing that every estranged family should reunite.

I am not suggesting anyone remain in a relationship involving violence, abuse, coercion, threats or genuine danger.

I am not asking an adult child to sacrifice their wellbeing to preserve the appearance of family harmony.

And I am not asking a parent or grandparent to accept mistreatment simply because the person hurting them is family.

I am asking something much narrower—and perhaps much harder.

Before we erase a human being from a family, have we become sufficiently certain that erasure is necessary?

Have we distinguished danger from discomfort?

Behavior from identity?

Validation from verification?

Boundaries from banishment?

Firsthand experience from hearsay?

Therapeutic support from therapeutic influence?

Have we listened only to the person in the room?

Have we become curious about the person who isn't?

And where communication remains safe and possible:

Did anybody ever help them talk?

Perhaps the Helpers Need to Join This Conversation Too

This conversation cannot remain only among estranged parents and grandparents.

I hope therapists will enter it.

Family clinicians.

Psychologists.

Social workers.

Counselors.

Clergy.

Researchers.

People who work with estranged adult children.

And yes, adult children themselves.

Because there is another side to this conversation, and it deserves to be heard.

Some adult children describe years of trying to communicate before ending contact.

Some describe abuse.

Some describe parents who refused accountability.

Some say therapy finally gave them permission to protect themselves.

Those experiences matter too.

The professional disagreement itself shows why we need dialogue rather than another ideological camp. Current reporting includes clinicians who warn against casual cutoff and others who argue that blaming therapists can obscure the behavior that led adult children to leave in the first place.

So perhaps we should stop shouting:

Who is right?

And start asking:

How do we make sure we're getting this right?

Because the consequences can last for generations.

Let’s Keep This Conversation Going

If estrangement has touched your family, I would genuinely like to hear from you.

You don't need to tell your entire story.

You don't need to identify anyone.

You don't need to prove who was right.

A sentence is enough.

A thought is enough.

A question is enough.

If you are an estranged parent or alienated grandparent: Have you ever felt that a story about you developed without anyone asking for your voice?

If you are an estranged adult child: What do you wish your parent—or the people supporting your parent—understood about why you stepped away?

And I especially want to invite the helping professionals into this conversation:

If you're a therapist or family clinician, how do you distinguish validation from confirmation when you have heard only one person's account of a family relationship?

How do you guard against drawing conclusions about someone you have never met?

And when estrangement is being considered, what responsibility does a helping professional have to explore whether communication or repair remains possible—when doing so would be safe?

For all of us, perhaps there is one final question:

What could we do differently if we wanted the next generation to inherit better tools for conflict, accountability, forgiveness, boundaries and repair?

I don't believe we will answer these questions by silencing one another.

And I don't believe another generation of families can afford for us not to ask them.

Perhaps the conversation itself is where something begins to change.

Because behind every label, every cutoff, every therapy session, every social-media post and every family story is something remarkably easy to forget:

a human being.

And sometimes that human being is standing outside the story, still saying:

Please. Ask me what happened, too.

— Lisa Franco Alexander

Founder | Heart's Renewal

Life After Complicated Loss™

Rediscover Peace · Purpose · Wholeness