Anne* was in Sainsbury’s when she found out that her daughter was getting married that day. Two years later, she can still visualise exactly where she was standing (at the fruit aisle, debating whether to buy blueberries or blackberries) when a former neighbour tapped her on the shoulder to say her children were attending the wedding that afternoon, and asked whether she wanted to know any of the details.
“I actually felt faint at first, and then sick,” says Anne, whose voice breaks at the memory. “My daughter and I hadn’t spoken for a while, but I never thought she would do something like get married without telling me first.” She left the supermarket and walked to her car, where she discovered she was shaking too much to drive.
Family estrangements appear to be on the rise in many Western countries. In a 2025 YouGov survey of 4,395 Americans, 38 per cent of respondents said they were estranged from at least one immediate family member, grandparent or grandchild, while a German analysis of survey data found that 20 per cent of the 10,000 participants had had periods of estrangement from their father and 9 per cent from their mother during the 10 years ending in 2019.
Like many parents, Anne believes the estrangement was driven by her daughter’s therapist. Following a landmark independent review, there are now calls for statutory regulation of counsellors and psychotherapists – something Anne wholeheartedly supports. The British Psychological Society states that “psychological professionals don’t direct clients to a particular outcome”. But while psychologists are regulated healthcare professionals, counsellors and psychotherapists are not, leaving patients even more vulnerable to unprofessional treatment.
Research by Richard L Blake, the author of Cut Off – an upcoming book that explores how therapy culture might be fuelling parental estrangement – finds that estrangements are rising. He notes that the Student Loans Company publishes official statistics on students awarded finance because they are estranged from their parents. In England, the number rose to 11,322 in 2024-25 from 7,384 in 2017-18, an increase of 53 per cent.
In the celebrity sphere, estrangements are spilling out into the open. Brooklyn Beckham publicly cut contact with his parents, David and Victoria, accusing them of prioritising branding and content over family connection, while Olympic swimmer Adam Peaty has acknowledged disagreements with his parents that arose during the planning of his wedding to Holly Ramsay. Meanwhile, both Suri Noelle – the daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes – and some of Brad Pitt’s children with Angelina Jolie were reported this year to have dropped their fathers’ surnames.
Anne’s relationship with her daughter had always been reasonably complicated. Over the years, the daughter accused Anne of being critical of her appearance and unsupportive of her career choices, but their arguments usually resolved quickly, and the two women regularly spent time together.
Therapy changed all that. Her daughter started seeing a therapist after her father died, and Anne noticed that she soon began dwelling on upsetting memories from her childhood – the time her mother suggested she didn’t have the legs for a particular skirt, for example. Then, out of the blue, Anne received a long email, filled with criticisms, which ended with the claim that her therapist believed Anne was toxic and a request that they cut contact. Despite many entreaties on Anne’s part, they haven’t seen each other since.
Anne and her daughter are far from rare. Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who has dedicated his career to researching this unhappy trend, argues that for most of our history, humans have held the belief that being part of a family involves duty, tolerance and the acceptance of difficult personalities – but that this has now been replaced by a newer idea that all relationships should be emotionally safe. Therapy is a major part of that shift, but TikTok psychologists and declining religious obligation are all strands of the same story.
“I think in the past half century our models and ideals of family have radically changed,” says Coleman. “‘Honour thy mother and father’ has given way to something much more individualistic, and relationships are constituted around whether they are in line with one person’s idea of happiness.”
The result is that many adult children now believe that cutting contact with a parent is not a desperate last resort but the brave choice. “Estrangement becomes a show of power and strength,” he says. “But the truth is that it can also be a big form of conflict avoidance.”
Every expert I speak with – including practising therapists – agrees that a good practitioner should never suggest a client do something so drastic as cut ties with their parents. A spokesman for the British Psychological Society explains that psychologists are expected not to instruct patients what to do but to “support them in considering their circumstances”, adding: “In cases of this nature, we would expect psychological professionals to use their professionally informed judgment, taking into account the code of ethics and conduct and any safeguarding concerns which may arise, while ensuring that care is person-centred.”
Coleman, however, believes it happens all the time, with devastating consequences not only for the parents and children involved but also for other family members such as siblings and grandchildren.
“Therapists have replaced religious leaders as the high priests of who to keep in and out of our lives. They have enormous power, and it isn’t always deserved,” he says. “They need to become much more oriented towards reconciliation, not estrangement, because the truth is that conflict is a normal part of being in a family – there is no family without it – and we have become very confused about what is unforgivable.”
The result of all this is that many older adults are baffled that what they once considered to be perfectly normal forms of discipline are now viewed as abuse by certain practitioners. Over the course of researching this article, I have been put in touch with people whose children no longer speak to them for past misdeeds that include shouting, smacking, criticisms of their friends or outfits, a lack of attention, a lack of pocket money and diet restrictions. In all these cases, the parents believe their adult children were led astray by wayward therapists who convinced them they had been deeply traumatised.
“We used to know what abuse was: beating, starvation or sexual abuse,” says Blake. “Now it can be buying clothes for your daughter that are too small – I know a mother who was cut off for this. The therapist told the daughter that the only possible explanation was that the mother was wicked and wanted her to lose weight, while the mother said she must have muddled the sizes up because she worked a lot and bought gifts to make herself feel better about it.”
One retired lawyer, who lives in Yorkshire and has two adult children, feels that her own estrangement came out of the blue. She was on a train north from London when she was accused of betrayal after discussing a problem their adult daughter was having with her husband – a problem their daughter believed she had spoken about in confidence.
“I apologised to her over text and explained I hadn’t known it was supposed to be a secret from her dad,” the retired lawyer says, “but the next thing I knew she left a voice message ranting and swearing at me. I thought she was just angry, but a few days later I received a very long email that clearly had input from a therapist, as it wasn’t her language or her writing style, and in multiple places it described me as toxic and said her best recourse was to never see us again.”
Freudian and Jungian therapy is, in its essence, about uncovering what happened in your past and using those events to understand why you exhibit certain behaviours in your present. For millions of people around the world, it has been a lifeline that has allowed them to understand why they keep repeating difficult patterns – but with the explosion of therapy has come a growing instinct to blame problems in adulthood on the parents. A good therapist should try to ensure that clients remain open-minded, including when it comes to the all-too-human reasons their parents might have acted the way they did.
“You have to be so careful,” says Coleman, who acknowledges that many of the older adults he works with made serious mistakes when their children were young but also says they were rarely unforgivable. “These parents are not perfect, but if you say to a client that they were emotionally immature or that they were always crossing boundaries, then you have already dehumanised that parent, and that person may then feel even more discouraged about their ability to work on the relationship.”
Coleman has also seen first-hand the inherent bias many practitioners have towards their clients’ perspectives. When he was working as a couples therapist, other professionals would regularly refer warring spouses to him – and would often say that their client was largely blameless but that the husband or wife was extremely difficult. Once he had both parties in the room, he could see that this simply wasn’t true.
Similarly, since he has started working with estranged parents, he often gets in contact with the adult children (with the permission of all parties) to hear their side of the story. They invariably tell him that their therapist has diagnosed the mother or father in question as a narcissist or someone with borderline personality disorder – and more often than not, Coleman thinks: “No, they absolutely are not.”
One mother of seven in Essex has experience of this. Midway through her daughter’s second year at university, the daughter announced that she had received a diagnosis of ADHD from the campus psychologist, whom she had started seeing regularly. In the months after that she stopped communicating with her parents and declined to come home for the summer holidays or for Christmas. Finally, after many strained messages, she explained that she was cutting contact with her mother because she was “a toxic narcissist”.
Her mother was devastated. She acknowledges making mistakes – she has a son with Down’s syndrome and two other daughters who had eating disorders during their teenage years, and sees that in retrospect she didn’t give the child in question as much attention as she could have – but doesn’t believe she deserves to be cut off.
“It has been absolutely awful,” she says. “I was suicidal, but am now on antidepressants and am doing a little better. But it has really knocked my confidence, and I’ll never be the same person I was. My daughter talked about abuse and narcissism and gaslighting, and said she couldn’t feel safe in the same place as me. I questioned everything I thought I knew about myself and about our relationship going back years into the past.”
Devastatingly, she says she sometimes feels it would have been easier if her daughter had died, as at least then she would have a framework of how to deal with the loss she is enduring.
Still, not everyone is as convinced that parents are quite as blameless as they would like people to believe. Ayo Adesioye, a therapist in London, has worked for years with adult children struggling with complex parental relationships, and she believes that nearly all of them are desperate to keep the family together.
“Clients do try to repair relationships, and while I would never encourage them to cut contact with their parents, in most cases they would only do so after many, many different approaches have failed,” she says. “We will have tried boundaries, tough love and endless explanations as to what is upsetting them, and every time it will have fallen on deaf ears with the parent in question. If you are dealing with someone who assigns blame or will minimise every emotion you have, then at some point you can’t keep going.”
Adesioye also points out that estranged parents are not necessarily reliable narrators of what went wrong. What one generation remembers as an occasional smack, a thoughtless remark or a perfectly ordinary moment of discipline may have been experienced very differently by the child on the receiving end.
The more difficult question is what happens in the vast grey area between a happy family and an abusive one. Families are, by their nature, places in which people hurt, disappoint and misunderstand one another – often repeatedly – but they can also provide a form of belonging that is difficult to replace.
This worries Blake. He believes that in embracing a therapeutic language of “boundaries”, “toxicity” and “trauma”, we have become much better at identifying the ways in which families can harm us but less good at recognising what they give us.
“Family is ultimately one of the most protective things we have against mental illness,” he says. “We seem to have forgotten that in our rush to blame our parents for everything.”
For people such as Anne, however, the argument is no longer theoretical. Two years after her daughter’s wedding, she still doesn’t know whether she will see her again or, whether indeed, she now has a grandchild. What she finds hardest is not that she was told she was an imperfect mother – she knows she made mistakes – but that she was not given the opportunity to become a better one.
“I would listen to anything she wanted to tell me,” she says. “I would apologise for things I got wrong. I just wish her therapist had told her that families can hurt each other and still love each other – and that the most damaging thing you can do is to just walk away.”
*Surname withheld
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