Should You Cut Off Contact With Your Parents?
When Estrangement Is Necessary, And When It's Not
Right before the holidays, Oprah released a podcast episode on family estrangement that got a big reaction in social media. The psychotherapists interviewed had different takes. The guests, adult children estranged from parents, and parents estranged from their adult children, told vastly different stories about who was to blame.And everyone, estranged or not, seemed to have an opinion. Some people saw estrangement as self-care, while others saw it as a generational failing. Oprah framed it as "one of the fastest-growing cultural shifts of our time" and a "silent epidemic." But after twenty years of working with clients on these exact questions, here's what I know: most adult children don't need to cut contact with their parents, but some absolutely do. And even when estrangement is clearly the right choice, it remains one of the most difficult decisions a person can make.
Here are some key statistics:
One-third of Americans are actively estranged from a family member (Cornell University study)
Over the course of young adulthood, at least 1 in 4 Americans will break off contact with a parent at some point
Many rifts heal: 81% of estrangements with mothers and 69% with fathers eventually reconcile
“If you’re asking yourself ‘should I cut off my parents’ or ‘is it okay to go no contact with toxic family,’ you’re not alone, and the answer is more nuanced than social media suggests.”
What struck me as I listened to these interviews, and as I've discussed this phenomenon with other clinicians, is how differently estrangement plays out in our experience with clients. The conversation tends to polarize: either all estrangement is justified (protecting your mental health), or all estrangement is an overreaction (kids are too sensitive these days). The reality is far more nuanced.
The Truth About Estrangement: Most Don't Need to Cut Contact
Most adult children do not need to "cut off contact" with their parents. In most circumstances, the work is about creating a separate self, which includes developing boundaries that support that self. This is the developmental task of young adulthood, differentiation.
In Gestalt therapy, we talk about introjections: the concepts, beliefs, and expectations we unconsciously internalize from our parents without discerningly deciding whether they're actually ours. The work of therapy involves sifting through these introjections, what was helpful, what was hurtful, what was harmful, and differentiating from our parents' view of who we should be in order to live our most authentic lives.
This process can be uncomfortable. It might involve setting boundaries your parents don't like. It might mean disappointing them. It might require having difficult conversations about how their actions affected you. But it doesn't require cutting them off entirely.
For example, you might realize your mother's constant criticism about your weight was her own anxiety projected onto you. You can work through that, set boundaries around body commentary, and maintain a relationship. Or you might recognize your father's emotional unavailability shaped your relationship patterns, you can grieve that loss, do your own healing work, and still show up for holidays.
The goal isn't estrangement. The goal is differentiation: knowing where you end and your parents begin, understanding which parts of your internal world are genuinely yours versus inherited, and building enough self-support that you can be in relationship with your family without losing yourself.
When Estrangement Is Necessary
There is a much smaller group of adult children who would absolutely benefit from going no contact for a period of time or severing ties completely. These cases generally involve:
Childhood abuse (physical, sexual, emotional, psychological) without any accountability or repair
Ongoing abusive behavior in the present relationship
Parents whose actions actively undermine the adult child's healing or safety
For the clients I've seen in my practice, arriving at the decision to estrange is extraordinarily difficult. It's not a decision people make lightly or impulsively, despite what some narratives suggest. Most of the time, it's a last resort after years, sometimes decades, of attempting repair.
Why It's So Hard to Protect Ourselves from Our Parents
Here's what many people miss about parent-child relationships: children protect their parents because those relationships are our blueprints for all relationships, including the one we have with ourselves.
As I discussed in a recent post about attachment theory, for those of us who grew up with misattuned, neglectful, or abusive parents, we struggle to reality-test the gravity of their actions. We often disconnect or dissociate our pain from our parents' behavior because that protected the relationship. Our early relationships are vital, we cannot survive childhood without adult care.
Therefore, our unconscious strategy becomes: protect the parent's "goodness" at all costs, even if it means making ourselves the problem. This defensive mechanism (Bowlby, 1980; Fonagy et al., 2002) persists even as we age and gain insight, because holding parents accountable contradicts our basic survival instincts.
It is far more likely for an adult child, even one who is being abused in the present, to rely on coping strategies of denial, dismissal, or dissociation than it is for them to acknowledge the harm being caused. In trauma literature, this is often referred to as the "fawn response" (Walker, 2013), a survival strategy where we appease, please, and prioritize the abuser's needs over our own safety in an attempt to minimize harm.
The fawn response develops when fight, flight, or freeze aren't viable options. For children, you can't fight a parent who's bigger and more powerful. You can't flee when you're dependent on them for survival. And freezing only works for so long. So you learn to fawn: to be compliant, to anticipate their needs, to make yourself small and pleasing in hopes of avoiding their anger or rejection.
This pattern becomes deeply embedded in the nervous system. Even as adults, when we're no longer dependent on these parents, the fawn response persists. We find ourselves:
Apologizing for things that aren't our fault
Over-explaining our decisions to justify ourselves
Feeling responsible for our parents' emotional states
Unable to say no or set boundaries
Minimizing abuse ("it wasn't that bad")
Making excuses for harmful behavior ("they did their best")
This work, recognizing the harm, trusting your own experience, developing enough self-support to protect yourself, takes years of good therapy. You have to build an internal foundation strong enough that acknowledging your parents' failures doesn't feel like it will destroy you. You have to develop the capacity to hold two truths at once: they may have loved you, AND they harmed you.
As van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score, "As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself...The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage" (2014, p. 243).
Rupture and Repair: What Should Be Possible
In healthy or "good enough" family dynamics, rupture and repair should be possible. Parents make mistakes, all parents do. The question isn't whether harm occurred, but whether repair is possible.
Repair looks like:
Acknowledging the impact of their actions
Taking responsibility without defensiveness
Showing genuine curiosity about your experience
Making changes in their behavior going forward
Demonstrating over time that they can be trusted with your vulnerability
If your parents are capable of this kind of repair work, estrangement probably isn't necessary. The relationship can be rebuilt, even if it looks different than it did before. Even if you need significant boundaries. Even if you're no longer as close as you once were.
But if you find yourself in a relationship where:
Your reality is consistently denied or dismissed
You're blamed for bringing up past harm
Your boundaries are violated repeatedly
You're experiencing ongoing emotional, verbal, physical, or financial abuse
Your mental or physical health is declining as a direct result of the relationship
You have to dissociate to be around them
...then estrangement may be the healthiest choice. Not because you're "too sensitive" or "haven't done enough work," but because you deserve relationships (even with family) where you're seen, valued, and treated with basic respect.
The decision to estrange isn't about punishment. It's about protection. It's about recognizing that you cannot heal in the same environment that wounded you, and that sometimes the most loving thing you can do for yourself is to create distance from people who continue to cause harm.
If you're grappling with whether to estrange from a parent, this isn't a decision you have to make alone. Working with a relational, trauma-informed therapist can help you sort through what's yours (your patterns, your defenses, your fears) and what's theirs (their limitations, their harm, their unwillingness to change). The goal isn't to convince you one way or the other, but to help you arrive at a decision that honors your reality, your safety, and your right to a life that feels livable.
The therapists at Creative Arts Psychotherapy NYC specialize in trauma-informed, relational work with clients navigating complex family dynamics. Book a free consultation here.
References:
Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and loss: Vol. 3. Loss. Basic Books.
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. L., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. Other Press.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving. Azure Coyote.