I recently listened to an episode of The Oprah podcast that explored what it described as the “rising trend” of family estrangement. 

It included personal stories from adult children who had cut contact with their parents, from parents who had repaired their relationships with estranged children and from parents who had not.

Oprah also invited a panel of three experts – all therapists – to offer their perspectives. 

Overall, I thought they did a great job looking at the issue from multiple angles. But one of the experts, therapist and author Dr Joshua Coleman, presented his point of view in words that left me feeling dizzy, nauseous and cold.

According to Coleman, “the old days of ‘honour thy mother and thy father,’ of ‘respect your elders,’ have given way”. He blames the shift partially on social media content about “toxic families” which he says encourages “inflammatory reactions” to parents’ behaviour. 

He also says that therapists are partially to blame, for pathologising parents with language like “narcissist”, “gaslighting” or “boundary-crosser”.

But throughout the podcast, he uses similar words to describe the children who decide to cut off their parents: “conflict-avoidant”, “depressive”, “overreactive.” 

While he accedes that some parents are abusive, he goes on to claim that the majority who have been cut off are loving and caring. Making the choice to go no contact, he says, “is positioned as a sort of virtuous act of protecting our mental health. I think that’s a problem”.

Coleman’s personal experience of being cut off from his adult daughter for several years, and working as a therapist with other estranged parents who are baffled and angry, led him to write a book entitled, Rules Of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties And How To Heal The Conflict. He uses the book – as well as his platform at The Washington Post, and now Oprah’s podcast – to counsel parents whose children have cut contact. 

But his message is, in my opinion, focused on the wrong culprit, treating estrangement as the problem, rather than a solution – as a last resort – to a real and intractable problem. 

I decided to go no-contact with my mother after 50 years of confusion and suffering. All of my attempts to talk to her had failed. When I tried to tell her how I felt, she would attack me about something else entirely, or she would say I was “too sensitive,” making “a mountain out of a........

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