As she struggled through her second year in college, Zhenzhen spent hours in therapy, but it hadn’t addressed the central strain in her life – her parents.
They called her again and again, badgering her to fulfil their expectations – to study business, and to return to China, marry a wealthy man and raise children near them, she says. When she pushed back, her father screamed, she says, and her mother wept.
The pressure made it hard to function, and Zhenzhen fended off thoughts of suicide. But when she brought this dynamic up with her therapists, she says, “they would always stand by reconciliation, and ‘family is everything’. They would always look at the problem from the parent’s lens.”
That’s when she discovered Patrick Teahan, a social worker from Massachusetts with tousled hair and a large YouTube following. Teahan’s videos introduced her to a new idea – that to heal from childhood trauma, it may be necessary to “go no contact” with abusive parents. About half of Teahan’s clients restrict or sever ties with their families, which he describes as “brutally hard” but, when it is appropriate, deeply rewarding.
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
On Teahan’s website, you can fill out a “Toxic Family Test” which measures your family on a 100-point toxicity scale. You can access a webinar explaining how to write a “no-contact letter”. (He suggests: “I’m doing a family cut-off to get space to recover from this toxic and dysfunctional family.”) You can join his “Monthly Healing Community” where clients support each other in the lonely endeavour of disconnecting from family.
Zhenzhen took action as soon as she graduated and began to earn. The relief was almost immediate, she says. It was lonely at first, but not for long. She found others – her “chosen family” she calls them – who supported her decision.
There is so little quantitative data about estrangement that it is difficult to say whether it is increasing. Karl Pillemer, a Cornell University sociologist who conducted the first large-scale survey on the subject, found that 27 per cent of respondents reported being estranged from a relative. Research suggests it is relatively common for people in their 20s to estrange themselves from a parent, more often a father, and that usually the rift is not permanent.
[ ‘We will be going through divorce very soon and have not told our children’Opens in new window ]
But promotion of estrangement as a therapeutic step is clearly on the rise, thanks mainly to social media. TikTok is coursing with first-person accounts from users who say cutoffs vastly improved their wellbeing. There is an expanding canon of self-help books on the subject, from A Christian’s Guide to No Contact, to Set Boundaries, Find Peace.
Whether or not mental health clinicians should encourage this practice is hotly debated. There is no scientific evidence that separating from family is beneficial for the client, critics say. On the contrary, estranged children are likely to lose access to financial and emotional resources. And such cutoffs can also harm family members left behind, such as siblings, grandchildren and ageing parents.
As they begin to organise online, some parents are scrutinising those therapists who endorse cutoffs, arguing that they are violating foundational ethical principles. Therapists are trained to avoid imposing their own views when clients contemplate big decisions, and to uphold the principle of non-maleficence, or doing no harm. And for the most part, they are taught to regard family relationships, even flawed ones, as an important part of a flourishing life.
Teahan, who is 47 years old, is not shy about challenging these ideas. He first cut off from his own family nearly 30 years ago, when the idea percolated on the fringe of the mental health field. That’s changed. Coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, interest in going “no-contact” or “low-contact” to heal childhood trauma had grown so swiftly that Teahan has restructured his practice to address a mass audience.
“The movement right now is that we can break a cultural norm,” he says. “The structure is becoming undone around ‘family is everything’. I think it’s a good thing. It’s helping people see things in a different way – that regardless of the connection, abuse is abuse.”
Teahan was 19, working as a waiter, when he encountered the idea that would change his life. A co-worker spotted him on his break, smoking glumly, and passed on the name of a therapist. It was 1997 and psychiatrist Judith Herman had published Trauma and Recovery, which mapped the experiences of abused children beside those of combat veterans, while John Bradshaw workshops promised to help clients connect with their wounded, vulnerable “inner child”.
Teahan’s therapist, Amanda Curtin, used those concepts as a springboard for a 3½-year programme of group therapy. Often, she says, clients came to her convinced that they’d had a good childhood, but she saw right away that they had not – many had had absent or workaholic fathers, for instance. “That is trauma,” she says. “It is abandonment. It is neglect.”
In groups of eight, her clients revisited childhood experiences of abuse or neglect, bonding intensely with one another. Curtin says she sometimes recommended a “period of cut-off” – whether temporary or permanent – between her clients and their families during this process, as a way to protect their inner children. “Children have very fragile systems,” she says. “As a parent, we are supposed to shelter our children from something that is too much. My clients didn’t have that. They were overwhelmed with situations that were too much for them. To hang around and be in contact with the perpetrator would be emotionally unsettling.”
Teahan got it right away. His house had been a rough place, even before his older brother died, at 10, after an asthma attack, he says. His parents, immigrants to the US from Ireland, were both drinkers and Patrick had slipped into the role of his mother’s protector. One of his earliest memories is of picking shards of glass out of her foot after his father had thrown a plate at her.
Therapy set off a cascade of changes in Teahan’s life. His father had died, but on Curtin’s advice, he cut ties with his mother, a step which he later described as “the beginning for me of having a sense of self”.
He quit drinking. He went to college and then began running a handful of groups based on Curtin’s model, the Relationship Recovery Process. And that is probably where he would still be if the pandemic hadn’t forced him to turn more of his attention to online audiences. Then his videos blew up. Teahan can be raw and emotional; he can also be breezy and caustic, lampooning parents whose children have cut them off. “It’s better to become an orphan than remain a hostage” is among his catchphrases.
When answering questions from his followers he frequently encourages them to take a hard line: What if you find out your mother is getting evicted? “So what?” he says. “I know that that sounds brutal, but we have to let the house of cards fall where they may.”
By the middle of 2020, he says, enrolment in his online groups “kind of skyrocketed to where I couldn’t meet the demand”. He has gradually stopped treating clients so he can focus on scaling up his business, training a wave of therapists in Curtin’s method and addressing larger groups online.
Zhenzhen had signed up for the free counselling services her college offered, seeking help managing her anxiety, suicidal thoughts and abusive relationships with men. The more she investigated, the more she came to see these symptoms as a result of childhood trauma.
“I really thought they loved me,” she says of her parents. But as she reached adulthood, she says, her parents had expected her to structure her life around their needs, controlling her through shame and guilt. Her father, she says, was sometimes explosively angry, episodes that had revisited her in nightmares.
Teahan, who treated her individually and as part of a group, was the first of her therapists to suggest that the problem was not with her, but with how she had been treated, she says. “He’s the first one I’ve seen that says, ‘no, you don’t have to reconcile with abusers’,”.
She sent a letter to her parents, explaining that she was cutting off communication because of abuse in the family. They replied with their own letter – she threw it away without opening it. She expects to remain in therapy for years – “there is so much healing that needs to be done” – but has no second thoughts about the cut-off. “It restored my faith in my own life, in my agency,” she says.
In the summer of 2022, Brian Briscoe, a therapist, went to his postbox and found a no-contact letter from his 18-year-old daughter. He read it once and has never been able to bring himself to read it again. “I was blindsided,” he says. “I fell to pieces.”
The 55-year-old considers himself a “sensitive and involved father”. He has been sober for decades, he says. He never missed a choir performance and belongs to a Buddhist meditation group. But in the letter, his daughter said Briscoe had favoured her brother and that she had always struggled to get his attention.
Some of the things she wrote were just bewildering: “At some point, she says, ‘it’s just like that Vincent Van Gogh thing’,” he adds. “I don’t know what she’s talking about.”
But there is no way to convey any of this to his daughter, he says. “You’re sort of behind a glass wall.”
Briscoe marks this rejection as the most painful experience of his adult life, worse than his divorce or the death of his father. At a low point, he reached out to other parents on social media and was so deluged with responses that he founded a support group, Parents Living After Child Estrangement, or Place. “We have desperate people. We have people who say, ‘I don’t know how I will get through today’.”
In an emailed response to questions, Briscoe’s daughter, Rose, says she cut her father off because he showed “a lack of interest in my life as I got older”. She says the step had been “extremely beneficial to my life” and adds: “My therapist and psychiatrist both affirm that my mental health is the best it has been since I was a child.”
She says she recommended the step to others, “although it is an extreme method. It is not a child’s responsibility to maintain a relationship with their parent(s).”
Teahan knows what parents say about him, because they sometimes contact him directly, accusing him of ripping families apart. “You aren’t for the healing of relationships, just the destruction of them,” one of them wrote. “Have you ever considered that you might cause many innocent people and families tremendous damage?” A distraught mother wrote: “Our daughter won’t talk to me because of ‘therapists’ like you.”
This scolding did not have the intended effect on Teahan, who turned it into content on TikTok and Facebook, giggling helplessly as he gasped: “Your mom’s in my DMs.”
In an interview, he offered a more sober response. Generally, the child has tried to raise their issues for years before taking the extreme step of cutting off contact. When it happens, parents reflexively blame the child’s therapist, as his own mother did, decades ago, because it is another way of discounting the child’s experience, he says.
He has bad news for these parents: In most cases, their children are not coming back. “Unfortunately, due to the toxicity of the family, it kind of always ends up like my case – in a perpetual state of no contact,” he says.
He last saw his mother nine years ago, when, worried about her effect on his young child, he cut her off for the second time. He says he expects to hear, in the coming years, that his mother is “on her deathbed from alcoholism” and he thinks that he will probably go see her one last time. “As a small boy, she was really my world,” he says.
Memories of his mother surface all the time in his videos; indeed, she is one of his main subjects. Patrick at four, vacuuming the house while a police officer tried to persuade his mother to press domestic violence charges against his father. Patrick at six or seven, as night is falling outside, waiting by the window for his mother to come home from a bar.
He has no idea if she has ever seen any of his YouTube videos. But one mark of his progress with therapy, he says, is that he no longer cares much about what she thinks or says.
“This sounds a little dark,” he adds, but “that relationship with the parent – it’s a good thing if that connection kind of dies. That connection in our mind dies or passes away.” – This article originally appeared in the New York Times
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