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Recent media portrayals of family estrangement have sometimes trivialized the phenomenon, framing it as a generational fad or a product of social media–driven “boundary culture.” Britt Frank’s post, “The Dangers of Calling Family Estrangement a ‘Trend,’” rightly challenges that caricature. Estrangement is typically not impulsive, and it often follows years of unresolved conflict or emotional pain.
Yet in correcting one distortion, the post may introduce another—one that replaces oversimplification with moral certainty, and inquiry with a largely one-sided account of harm.
Estrangement Is Contextual, but the Context Is Varied
Research does support the claim that estrangement often follows long-term relational strain rather than momentary disagreement. However, the literature does not support the implication that estrangement usually or primarily results from abuse, psychological harm, or chronic boundary violations.
Studies of estranged families consistently find marked divergence in how parents and adult children interpret the same rupture (Carr et al., 2015). Adult children are more likely to describe emotional injury or lack of empathy; parents are more likely to describe misunderstanding, value conflict, or external influences. These differences are real—but they do not establish which account is accurate. They demonstrate the limits of perspective within emotionally charged family systems.
Gilligan, Suitor, and Pillemer (2015) similarly found that estrangement between adult children and parents often reflects value clashes, unmet expectations, and gradual relational erosion, not necessarily abuse or danger. Later work by Pillemer and colleagues has emphasized the heterogeneity of estrangement pathways, including cases marked by mutual escalation, mental illness, personality differences, or loyalty conflicts rather than clear-cut victimization (Pillemer et al., 2020). Pillemer’s more recent findings mirror what I commonly see in my practice.
To collapse this diversity into a near-universal trauma narrative is not contextualization; it is reduction.
The Problem of Moral Asymmetry
When adult children’s accounts are treated as accurate reflections of harm, and parents’ accounts are framed as defensive, externalizing, or blind, this asymmetry is not an empirical conclusion but a moral stance.
In clinical practice, estrangement rarely presents as a simple story of harm versus denial. Across decades of work with estranged families, I have encountered:
- Parents who minimize or rationalize genuine injuries
- Adult children whose grievances are serious and justified
- Adult children whose interpretations harden over time into moral certainty
- Parents who are self-reflective, remorseful, and still excluded
- Adult children who are encouraged by inexperienced therapists to misdiagnose and estrange parents whom they’ve never met
- Estrangement due to the malign influence of a troubled spouse
Family systems research has long shown that ruptures emerge from reciprocal processes, not isolated acts (Minuchin, 1974; Bowen, 1978). When estrangement is framed primarily as survival, curiosity about these dynamics often disappears—along with opportunities for psychological integration on either side.
A Misleading Analogy
The post in question compares scrutiny of estrangement decisions to victim-blaming in domestic violence cases. While rhetorically powerful, this analogy is clinically misleading. Domestic violence involves coercive control and physical danger. Many estrangement cases involve bidirectional conflict, emotional misattunement, or developmental rupture, not ongoing threat.
Equating estrangement with escape from violence risks transforming a complex relational decision into a moral absolute. In that frame, questioning estrangement becomes suspect, and ambivalence becomes a sign of false consciousness rather than a normal psychological state. Yet ambivalence—holding love and anger, gratitude and grievance—is often the very terrain in which growth occurs.
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When Therapeutic Language Closes Rather Than Opens
Ttherapeutic language can sometimes harden narratives rather than clarify them. Labels intended to protect—trauma, abuse, toxicity—can also simplify, especially when applied without sustained exploration.
Research on narrative identity suggests that once people organize their experiences into morally coherent stories, those stories become resistant to disconfirming information (McAdams, 2001). In estrangement contexts, this can mean that therapy stabilizes distress in the short term while increasing rigidity over time.
Indeed, qualitative studies of estranged adults show that while many experience relief after cutting contact, they also report grief, identity strain, and unresolved attachment long after the rupture (Nica, 2025). Psychological relief does not equal psychological resolution.
Toward a More Responsible Frame
Rejecting the idea of estrangement as a “trend” should not require endorsing a single explanatory model. A clinically responsible framework would:
- Acknowledge the wide variation in estrangement pathways
- Distinguish protection from permanence
- Recognize that harm can occur without villains
- Preserve space for ambivalence, accountability, and revision
Estrangement is neither a fad nor a moral endpoint. It is a relational outcome—sometimes necessary, sometimes tragic, and often far more complex than any single narrative allows. If the goal is healing rather than vindication, the task is not to replace cultural dismissal with moral certainty, but to restore curiosity where certainty has taken hold.
