'No Contact' as Self-Care? (Part 1)

The Dangerous Logic of Cut-Off Culture

Jorm Sangsorn

“She texted to say she couldn’t speak with us anymore. Her therapist said it was for her healing. We were told not to argue back or defend ourselves. Our daughter was accusing us of abuse that never happened. She now believes we have always been toxic and selfish parents and has gone ‘no contact.’”

If this sounds familiar, you may be recalling the repressed memories movement of the 80s and 90s. This was a cultural and pseudo-therapeutic movement where thousands of women came to believe—often with the guidance of therapists, popular books, or group therapy—that they’d been sexually abused as children, despite having no prior memories of any such abuse. This movement devastated families. The pain was real. And the women’s beliefs that they’d been abused were real. Their memories often were not. I spoke about it here and here.

But this heartbreaking disclosure from the parent is not from the 80s. It’s something I’ve heard more than a handful of times in the last few years while working with parents of gender-questioning children.

In today’s cultural moment, related and unrelated to gender identity, we’re witnessing new iterations of the same pattern resulting in family alienation and estrangement.

Adult children—many of whom were previously close to their parents—are now cutting off contact. They come to believe they’d been abused, neglected or traumatized. Not because of overt cruelty, but because of misattunements, missteps, or generational misunderstandings. The rupture is often sudden, shattering, and non-negotiable.

And it’s driven by a narrative that treats cutting-off your family as necessary self-care.

I didn’t realize there was an entire cultural framework built up around estrangement until several unrelated experiences started to reveal a larger pattern. Years ago, for personal reasons unrelated to my professional work, I picked up a book called Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. I wanted to better understand some of the dynamics from my own childhood. But within just a few pages, I realized the author was prepared to place 100% of the blame for complex family dynamics on the parents—while ignoring broader cultural, relational, and contextual factors. I never finished the book. It felt reductive and emotionally coercive.

Later, I began hearing from clients who were spending time in online spaces about dealing with “narcissistic parents.” And yes, of course some people truly do have malignantly narcissistic or abusive parents—but the tone in these groups was dogmatic and overly simplistic. Nuance was gone. Everything became evidence of harm with a clear villain and clear victim. In the early 2020s, as political tensions and polarization rose, cutting off relatives for political disagreement also reached a fever pitch. Then, I stumbled across cases in my gender consulting work with parents in which their teens explicitly admitted to exaggerating or completely fabricating childhood trauma and abuse in online forums. The more I looked into it the more I realized: these young people were participating in a social dynamic where trauma served as a kind of shared currency, an escape from scrutiny by demonstrating the virtuous victim effect, or a means to bond or gain sympathy.

From there, it became impossible to ignore. I started noticing the YouTube rabbit holes: “How to know if your parent is a narcissist,” “Signs you should go no contact,” “Why cutting off toxic family is self-care.” We spoke with estrangement expert, Josh Coleman on our podcast and I invited him to discuss the culture of estrangement in my parent group. It all started to come together—this estrangement trend wasn’t simply due to “greater awareness” or “destigmatization.” It involved a belief system. A worldview. An ideology with its own vocabulary, moral logic, and built-in imperatives.

I now think of this as cut-off culture: a pseudo-therapeutic and social framework that moralizes family rupture and recasts disconnection as healing. It relies on redefined therapy terms and a reframing of ordinary family conflict as irreparable harm. Perhaps most importantly, it involves a great deal of co-rumination between distressed individuals relying on their subjective emotional experiences to determine if their parents are “toxic.” Cut-off culture exists in therapy offices, reddit forums, chat groups, online support groups and books.

In an excellent Substack essay on this topic, one author points out the way therapy terms and jargon are misused in such circles:

• Boundaries become unilateral cut-offs.

• Abuse expands to include emotional discomfort.

• Accountability means one party does all the work.

• Self-care becomes synonymous with total separation.

These shifts in language feel eerily similar to the manipulations we saw during the repressed memories movement. Back then, journaling and group therapy encouraged young women to reinterpret vague discomforts or forgotten parts of their childhood as proof of sexual abuse. In today’s estrangement movement, similar tools—journaling, trauma language, online groups—are used to reinterpret past relational friction as abuse and parental pathology.

It’s crucial to make an important distinction here: when a person has actually experienced childhood abuse, they may indeed exhibit symptoms such as anxiety, low self-esteem, depression, or relational struggles. However, it is a serious and damaging mistake to retroactively assume that the presence of these symptoms proves that abuse occurred. This same error underpinned the recovered memory movement—and it has surfaced again in cut-off culture. When every symptom is interpreted as evidence of past trauma, families are treated as guilty by default, and attempts to heal or repair wounded relationships are replaced by suspicion and distance.

And some individuals are more vulnerable to misinterpreting ordinary interactions as toxic or hurtful. Young people who are highly sensitive, conflict-averse, or eager to please are especially prone to this. So too are those who struggle with emotional regulation or who have traits consistent with borderline personality disorder. These individuals may experience normal emotional ruptures or everyday conflict as deeply distressing, even traumatizing. In families with multiple children, it’s not uncommon for a parent to notice how differently siblings respond to the same interaction. A request to unload the dishwasher, shouted from another room, might barely register for one child—while the more sensitive sibling may interpret this as verbal aggression. In the online echo chambers that promote estrangement, these memories—ranging from ordinary miscommunications to moments when a parent did lose their temper—are tallied up, story by story, and added to a ledger of harms. Everyday parenting becomes rebranded as chronic emotional abuse.

In both the recovered memory movement and cut-off culture, belief becomes proof. Doubt is reframed as denial. And families are the collateral damage.

In our book When Kids Say They’re Trans, we wrote: "The child’s sudden estrangement often follows a rigid emotional script: accusations of harm, a demand to be believed, and a threat of permanent severance if the parent resists the new narrative."

This is the same script that played out in the repressed memory era. And it’s playing out again now.

The deeper we dig into these movements, the clearer the parallels become:

• Each offers a ready-made explanation for suffering: "You were abused," "You’re trans," "Your parents are toxic."

• Each incentivizes rupture with traditional support systems and replaces them with a new in-group of believers.

• Each pathologizes those who ask questions.

• Each vehemently opposes introducing complexity or nuance into the discussion.

• Each movement casts the parent as the villain and the therapist as the liberator.

This is not to deny that real abuse happens. It does. And as a therapist, I’m well aware that in rare cases, estrangement may be necessary. In fact, the devestating truth is that genuinely abusive and selfish parents would certainly use my arguments here to further cast themselves as the true victims.

But this piece was written to encourage clarity, understanding and discernment for any parent who has been cut off despite being an ordinary, loving, imperfect, and good-enough parent. This new cut-off culture doesn’t allow for discernment. It casts much of normal family conflict as trauma, it relies on emotional subjectivity (which varies person to person), and clearly reflects elements of social influence, hyper-individualism, and a lack of respect for the difficult but rewarding work of remaining in relationship with the people we love.

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This is Part 1 in a two-part series. In Part 2, we explore why our cultural obsession with trauma might be steering us wrong, what we can learn from the science of resilience, and how our beliefs about stress shape our responses and outcomes. And of course, how all of that relates to gender identity, transition and families caught up in the chaos.

If this resonates, please share this article, subscribe, become a paying supporter, or join my parent membership group for in-depth support for parents of trans-identified children. For a truly personalized and intimate experience, consider attending Anchored, our November in-person retreat for parents near Austin, Texas.