Oprah Wanted To Talk About Adult Kids Cutting Off Their Parents. What I Heard Made My Blood Run Cold.

I recently listened to an episode of The Oprah podcast that explored what it described as the “rising trend” of family estrangement, and included personal stories from adult children who had cut contact with their parents, from parents who had repaired their relationships with estranged children and from parents who had not. Oprah also invited a panel of three experts ― all therapists ― to offer their perspectives. 

Overall, I thought they did a great job looking at the issue from multiple angles. But one of the experts, therapist and author Dr. Joshua Coleman, presented his point of view in words that left me feeling dizzy, nauseous and cold.

According to Coleman, “The old days of ‘honor thy mother and thy father,’ of ‘respect your elders,’ have given way.” He blames the shift partially on social media content about “toxic families” which he says encourages “inflammatory reactions” to parents’ behavior. He also says that therapists are partially to blame, for pathologizing parents with language like “narcissist,” “gaslighting” or “boundary-crosser.” But throughout the podcast, he uses similar words to describe the children who decide to cut off their parents: “confict-avoidant,” “depressive,” “overreactive.” 

While he accedes that some parents are abusive, he goes on to claim that the majority who have been cut off are loving and caring. Making the choice to go no contact, he says, “is positioned as a sort of virtuous act of protecting our mental health. I think that’s a problem.” 

Coleman’s personal experience of being cut off from his adult daughter for several years, and working as a therapist with other estranged parents who are baffled and angry, led him to write a book entitled, “Rules Of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties And How To Heal The Conflict.” He uses the book ― as well as his platform at The Washington Post, and now Oprah’s podcast ― to counsel parents whose children have cut contact. 

But his message is, in my opinion, focused on the wrong culprit, treating estrangement as the problem, rather than a solution ― as a last resort ― to a real and intractable problem. 

I decided to go no-contact with my mother after 50 years of confusion and suffering. All of my attempts to talk to her had failed. When I tried to tell her how I felt, she would attack me about something else entirely, or she would say I was “too sensitive,” making “a mountain out of a molehill.”

I had never seen any of the social media accounts that Coleman refers to, and I didn’t have a name or label for my troubles with my mother, but I did know that it took me weeks to recover every time we spoke. Something needed to change, and it did: I figured out that I didn’t deserve to be treated that way. The “us” problem had a “me” solution, one that required space and breathing room.

Colman said that parents and adult children need to figure out how to talk to each other, but he would not concede that going no-contact might be part of that process. Before cutting him off, Coleman says his daughter tried to communicate about the abandonment she felt after he remarried and had more children, and he responded to her, in his own words: “defensively and angrily.” He acknowledged that a shift happened only when he realized that he was making it all about himself, and he needed, instead, to listen to her and find the truth in what she was saying. This only happened after a period of estrangement.