Editor’s Note: we are experiencing technical difficulties with the author display, which we are working on solving as soon as possible. For clarity: this article was written by Dr. Cindy Sena-Martinez.
Therapy is supposed to restore a person to truth, freedom, and right relationship. Some of it now does the opposite: it baptizes rupture as growth, treats the family of origin as a crime scene, and recasts inherited faith as trauma to be escaped. That is not healing. It is a pastoral and professional failure with real bodies on the floor.
Not every counselor is a villain, and some parents do deserve distance. Violence, sexual abuse, and ongoing predation are real; a counselor who keeps a client in a dangerous household is negligent. The scandal lies elsewhere: in converting ordinary conflict, political disagreement, and religious difference into a diagnosis—and then into a sentence of exile.
What the Record Shows
Sociologist Karl Pillemer’s 2020 national survey found that 27 percent of American adults were estranged from a family member— roughly 67 million people— with 10 percent cut off from a parent or child.1 Culture did its work first, but therapists now sit at the choke point where pain is named and a plan is chosen.
Psychologist Joshua Coleman describes therapists who “diagnose parents they’ve never met” and “label common experiences of disappointment as life-altering trauma.”2 They need not say, “go no contact.” Once a parent is labeled abusive or narcissistic, Coleman observes, “you’ve already participated in that detachment.”3
Family therapist William Doherty names the frame bluntly: “Everything becomes trauma, and the solution increasingly is to split and leave.”4 The same Wall Street Journal report cited therapist Peter Anderson’s survey of some 7,000 estranged parents: a third believed their adult child’s therapist had influenced or recommended the break. Many clinicians, he noted, are taught to “believe whatever the client is saying at face value.”
Yet estrangement is rarely the last word. In one national longitudinal study, most estranged adult children later reconciled— 81 percent with mothers, 69 percent with fathers.5
None of this requires a secret cabal. It requires only three ordinary vices dressed as care.
First, monocular listening. Individual therapy is structurally one-sided. It becomes corrupt when the absent parent is treated as a character in the client’s novel rather than a human being who might be foolish, wounded, or, sometimes, genuinely cruel. Family systems theory has long warned that cutoff does not resolve fusion; it freezes it.6 Stay away from parents, therapist Mark Chamberlain observes, and they become “stone figures … who are larger than life.”7
Second, concept inflation. “Trauma,” “narcissist,” and “gaslighting” are now used the way earlier ages used “sin” and “honor”— as total explanations. The words become empty when they cover a fight about politics, a parent’s grief over a child leaving the faith, or the shock of discovering that Mother is not a peer.
Third, the therapeutic self replacing the given self. Natural law treats the person as a creature with a nature, including the nature of being from someone. When therapy treats piety and loyalty to a faith as symptoms of “enmeshment,” it is no longer healing the passions. It is catechizing a rival anthropology: the unencumbered individual whose highest duty is comfort.
Here the charge is earned. A counselor who drives a wedge between a child and parents because they still believe what the family has always believed is not a neutral technician. He is a moral actor with an unexamined creed, and the client is taught that the way out of suffering is to amputate the people who made him.
A Thomistic Measure of Counseling
A Thomistic approach does not begin with “my truth.” It begins with what a human being is: a body-soul unity. The passions are not enemies to be anesthetized but appetites to be ordered by reason and habituated into virtue.8
That changes the family question immediately. After God, parents are the “principles of our being and government,” and piety is the virtue by which we render them honor and due service (Aquinas, 1265–1274/1981, II-II, q. 101, a. 1), including material care when need arises (a. 2).9 It is a debt of justice, not a mood.
Two limits keep this from becoming a cult of the clan. God comes before parents: a parent who commands sin is not to be obeyed (a. 4).10 And parents themselves owe love, formation, and provision. A father who destroys a child is not owed the fiction that he is a good father. Piety is not amnesia.
Prudence before rupture. Prudence asks what is true, what is safe, what has been tried, and what lesser means exist— limited contact, mediated conversation, honest apology, time. Estrangement, if it comes, is last medicine, not first identity.
Two-sided truth. Justice forbids condemning anyone unheard. Where safety allows, a good counselor resists diagnosing the unseen.
Formation of the passions. For Aquinas, anger arises from a perceived injury joined to the hope of redress (I-II, q. 46).11 Is the injury real, the response proportionate? Sadness is healed not by erasing the object of love but by rightly ordered love and hope.
Fraternal correction. Charity includes correction (II-II, q. 33).12 Parents may need to hear that their contempt wounded; children may need to hear that they have rewritten a complicated life as a cartoon of abuse. Cutoff that aims at never being uncomfortable again is often softness dressed as boundaries.
Grace with realism. A Catholic counselor may pray, refer to a priest, and refuse to explain away real guilt, while using what modern methods get right.
Such a practice would look dull next to the influencer clinic. It would tell the truth that some homes must be left— and the further truth that most homes must be endured, reformed, forgiven, and, where possible, restored.
The villains in this story are not therapists as a class. They are those who use the white coat of care to unteach piety. Natural law does not require that every wound be hugged back into intimacy, but it does forbid calling severance health, or the breaking of the Fourth Commandment growth. A counselor who cannot tell the difference is no healer but another claimant on the soul— a surgeon who amputates when the family needed only an examination.
Sources
- Pillemer, K. (2020). Fault lines: Fractured families and how to mend them. Avery. ↩︎
- Coleman, J. (2025, April 2). Are therapists causing a rise in parental estrangements? Family Troubles. https://joshuacolemanphd.substack.com/p/are-therapists-causing-a-rise-in ↩︎
- Fox, J., & Coleman, J. (2026, June 9). The detachment brokers: A conversation with Dr. Joshua Coleman about family estrangement. PsychFox. https://psychfox.substack.com/p/the-detachment-brokers-a-conversation ↩︎
- Bernstein, E. (2026, July 21). Are therapists to blame for the rise of adults cutting off their parents? The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/are-therapists-to-blame-for-the-rise-of-adults-cutting-off-their-parents-d08f6d69 ↩︎
- Reczek, R., Stacey, L., & Thomeer, M. B. (2023). Parent–adult child estrangement in the United States by gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality. Journal of Marriage and Family, 85(2), 494–517. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12898 ↩︎
- Kerr, M. E., & Bowen, M. (1988). Family evaluation: An approach based on Bowen theory. W. W. Norton. ↩︎
- Hess, J. (2026, September 13). The backlash to the “no contact” movement has begun. Deseret News. https://www.deseret.com/family/2026/09/13/no-contact-movement-receives-backlash/ ↩︎
- Oliver, T. (2026, March 13). What is Thomistic psychology? Denver Catholic Counseling. https://denvercatholiccounseling.com/blog/thomistic-psychology/ ↩︎
- Aquinas, T. (1981). Summa theologica (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Christian Classics. (Original work published 1265–1274) ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
