By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2026-10-18 14:01:37 | Updated at 2026-10-18 18:43:48
4 hours ago
Cutting out family members and going “no contact” has become chic in some corners.
Op-eds with titles such as “I feel happier and healthier when not around my mother” litter outlets like The Guardian, #nocontact has garnered 1.9 billion views on TikTok, and searches for “no contact” on Google are up 191% since early 2020, per Google Trends.
Increasingly, the narrative has become: Is your family member stressing you out? Well, then simply cut them off entirely. And apparently people are doing just that.
“I have noticed a larger rush to terminate contact and relationships,” Driola Dega, a New York City-based therapist specializing in couples and families, told The Post. “[People seem less willing to accept] that challenges exist in any emotional bond, be it friendship or family or romantic partnerships.”
A shocking 38% of American adults say they are estranged from at least one close family member, according to a 2025 YouGov poll. Many report that their therapists are the ones suggesting they take such drastic measures.
“You carry all the turmoil, all the conflict, all the pain with you when you leave, and sometimes it intensifies,” Dr. Dee Apple, a psychologist based in Princeton, New Jersey, said. “But [no contact] has, nonetheless, taken off off in therapy.”
Annie Wright, a San Francisco therapist, considers going no-contact “often the only way to survive” in cases of “severe narcissistic or emotional abuse.” She told The Post that going no contact “reminds people that family ties come with conditions.”
But Wright, an outspoken proponent of the method, tells The Post that thinks it’s becoming too trendy in the world of therapy and self-help.
“What I do hear about and occasionally see is clients who say… a former therapist or social media account encouraged them to cut someone off very quickly,” she told The Post. “Recommending no contact casually? Yes, I think that’s a problem.”
In her own practice, the clients she’s most likely to pump the brakes with are those wanting to go no contact after a bad fight rather than an ongoing pattern, or before they explained to their parents what’s wrong. The clients who are too eager, she says, usually have a rosy understanding of “no contact” from social media.
“A 60-second video can make no contact sound like the obvious answer… People can go in and make that decision really unprepared for how hard the aftermath is,” she said. “Not every parent is a narcissist, and not every hurtful moment is trauma. If we use those words for everything, they stop meaning anything to people who really actually do need them.”
James Kerr, a British Columbia-based therapist with a specialization in estrangement agrees that the trendiness of “no contact” has made it feel too simple a solution.
“Unwittingly, many therapists only hear one side of the story, and they are saying, ‘Wow, if your mother is all that, I don’t think you should have them in your life.'”
Kerr — and all other experts interviewed for this article — agrees that sexual or physical abuse clearly justify “no contact,” but that more complex emotional situations should be handled with greater care.
According to a 2025 YouGov survey of American adults, 34% of those who had gone “no contact” with a parent had done so due to manipulative behavior, 31% for lies, and 34% for physical, emotional, or sexual abuse — a notably broad category.
Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development at Cornell University, has interviewed hundreds of people with estranged or once-estranged family members. He says the biggest challenge for therapists is the fact that “they can’t get both people in” their office to get to the bottom of the conflict.
His research estimates that 27% of American adults have cut off contact with a family member and only a “tiny minority” of them felt unambiguously good about the choice.
“Most of the estranged folks described being highly ambivalent about it,” he explained. “[They] report that estrangement carries real costs, even when it feels necessary, like broken attachment, chronic stress, grief, collateral damage to children and families.”
According to Pillemer’s research, only a small fraction of estrangement stems from trauma-based relationships. More people go no contact for “situational” reasons, like values differences or in-law issues.
“I’ll go out on a limb,” he said. “I think this no-contact craze has a lot of adult children deciding to cut off contact from parents who were reasonably good parents and with whom some kind of contact would be beneficial for them and for their parents.”
Another big change, he says, is more adult children using clinical language.
“There is an impact of the therapeutic language of trauma, boundaries, and toxic relationships, and that’s new as a mass cultural phenomenon,” he said. “You have adult children using terms and reinterpreting what everyone during their childhood thought was normal behavior as trauma, boundary violation, toxic relationships [and] you have parents not understanding what gaslighting and ghosting or being called a narcissist means.”
Dega, who studied psychology in Austria, sees another layer in the story: a distinctly American component to the no-contact trend, rooted in our hyper-individualistic culture that centers the self over family.
“Having lived in different countries, I’ve noticed that in the US, people tend to rely more on the ‘I,’ on the individual, rather than emotional connection and family systems,” she said. “That promotes actually more distance, rather than understanding.”
Apple agreed: “I think there’s more focus on individuals, what individuals need, without relationship context or family context, and it sort of fosters a narrow ‘do what you need to take care of yourself’ outlook…. I think people think that way more often now. ‘What do I need? What do I need? And to heck with everybody else.'”
