Why Do Therapists Tell People to Cut Off Their Family Members?

So why might this be happening?

There are several cultural forces worth considering.

Young Adults Are Staying Close to Their Parents Longer

They are launching later in life.

This is particularly visible in high-cost cities like Vancouver, where Nightingale’s primary therapy clinic is based. Higher rates of post-secondary education, combined with extremely high costs of rent and home ownership, mean that many young adults remain financially, geographically, or practically connected to their parents for longer than previous generations.

Proximity, of course, creates opportunities for tension.

The adult child who might once have moved away at 20 is now navigating independence, relationships, work, finances, and identity while remaining substantially entangled with the family system that formed them.

We Have More Psychological Language for Relationships

The second change is harder to see.

Psychological and therapeutic language has increasingly saturated ordinary relational life. Concepts like boundaries, attachment, emotional neglect, people pleasing, trauma, narcissism, invalidation, and “intent versus impact” have moved well beyond the therapist's office.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. We have become better at identifying relational experiences that previous generations may simply have tolerated or lacked language for. Someone who feels consistently unheard, controlled, dismissed, or disrespected now has a vocabulary with which to investigate that experience.

Once you have a concept for something, you become much more likely to notice it. And when a culture supplies a growing vocabulary for relational injury, more relationships become available for psychological interpretation. This can be particularly consequential in families.

Parents Are Unusually Vulnerable to Psychological Interpretation

There is another premise sitting quietly underneath much of Western psychotherapy: our adult problems are often connected to what happened to us growing up.

There is substantial truth in this. But taken too simply, the idea creates an unusual interpretive asymmetry.

Your parents become the people with whom your current difficulties can be explained. Combine that premise with a sophisticated vocabulary for boundaries and relational harm, and parents become unusually vulnerable to retrospective interpretation.

In my experience with clients, this does not usually appear as an intellectual exercise. It appears as a deeply felt realization: My parents did not give me what they should have given me. Something important happened here. Something should be done about it.

This is a psychologically compelling story that deserves considerable examination before a major relational decision is made.

Are Therapists to Blame?

I don't think so.

Therapists are not somehow standing outside the culture they work within. We are exposed to the same ideas, assumptions, language, and changing expectations as our clients.

That means therapists can participate in cultural flywheels without consciously intending to. There is, however, one structural feature of individual therapy that deserves particular attention.

Individual Therapy Is Built Around the Person in the Room

A therapist working in individual therapy has a special responsibility to the person sitting in front of them. The therapeutic relationship is organized around that person's welfare, experience, autonomy, and goals.

This is appropriate, but it creates a blind spot when the problem itself is relational.

If I am your therapist, I know your experience of your family. I do not know your family in the same way. I hear your account, your memories, your interpretations, and your emotional experience. I can help you decide what boundaries you need. But I am necessarily seeing the family system from one position inside it.

Family therapy introduces something different.

The therapist is no longer working exclusively from one person's position. The family itself becomes part of the object of inquiry.

This can reveal things that are difficult to see from inside an individual therapeutic narrative: reciprocal patterns, inherited roles, miscommunications, competing needs, shifting identities, and the ways in which one person's attempt to protect themselves can alter the behaviour of everyone else.

That does not mean everyone's behaviour is equally acceptable. It means the system deserves to be seen.

What About Estrangement?

Estrangement is an available choice.

Sometimes it is a necessary one. There are circumstances in which distance, including substantial or permanent distance, may be the healthiest option available to someone—particularly where there is ongoing abuse, coercion, or a serious threat to safety.

But there is a meaningful difference between supporting someone's agency and directing them toward a particular relational outcome.

At Nightingale, we take a nonreactionary approach to family estrangement. We do not assume that reconciliation is always healthy, and we do not assume that cutoff is always an expression of healthy boundaries.

• We are interested in the space between those conclusions.
• What happened?
• What pattern has developed?
• What is the person protecting themselves from?
• What would contact look like with different boundaries?
• What would no contact accomplish?
• What would it cost?
• Is the current interpretation of the family system complete?

And, importantly, what happens when we introduce another person into the picture rather than considering the relationship entirely from one side?

Family relationships are among the most durable relationships most of us will ever have. That durability can make them difficult to change, but it is also what makes change potentially consequential.