When Therapists Become the Scapegoat

There is a growing social media trend where estranged parents and parent advocates blame the adult child’s therapist for family estrangement and the adult child going no contact. Increasingly, therapists are positioned as the problem, accused of planting ideas, assigning diagnoses, and encouraging distance from parents.

This framing is not new. It is, in fact, deeply repetitive of the very dynamics that often contributed to the rupture in the first place. Namely, an inability or unwillingness to take responsibility for relational harm, and a tendency to locate the problem outside oneself.

This blog is written in response to a recent post promoting a workshop titled Is Your Child’s Therapist the Problem? The premise of that question alone is telling.

What This Narrative Gets Wrong About Therapy

In my twenty-five plus years’ experience, therapists are not in the business of encouraging estrangement. Quite the opposite. Most therapists work very hard to help clients move towards relationship because they know that the therapy will end at some stage, and their work is to help clients to build a healthy relationship with themselves first, and then safe and secure others where possible.

Therapy is oriented towards relationship, understanding, differentiation, accountability, and repair. It is slow, reflective work. Clients are not encouraged to cut people off as a rite of passage into adulthood, as noted in Dr Joshua Coleman’s post on 1st January 2026. They are supported to understand their attachment history, the roles they were asked to play, and the ways they learned to survive emotionally.

Sometimes that process leads to greater closeness. Sometimes it leads to clearer boundaries. And sometimes, despite sustained effort, relationship is not possible without ongoing harm.

That is not ideology. That is reality.

The Myth of the Sudden Label

A common claim in these posts is that adult children suddenly begin describing their mother or father as toxic, narcissistic, or abusive due to therapist influence, often after marriage, children, or separation from the family system.

This framing ignores several important truths.

Closeness does not equal emotional safety.
Gratitude can coexist with harm.
Bonding does not negate trauma.

Many adult children spend years, often decades, accommodating, appeasing, and desperately trying to maintain connection before they ever consider creating distance. They are far more likely to struggle with guilt and self doubt than with aggression or entitlement.

Therapy does not create these realisations. It helps people name what they have already been living with.

What Ethical Therapists Actually Do

Ethical therapists do not diagnose parents to legitimise separation. They do not recruit clients into blame narratives. They do not encourage estrangement as empowerment.

What they do is help clients make sense of their emotional reality. They explore attachment patterns, unmet developmental needs, loyalty binds, and the cost of chronic self-abandonment.

When distance occurs, it is rarely impulsive or celebratory. It is usually grief laden, conflicted, and painful. Most therapists explore communication, boundaries, accountability, and repair long before reduced contact is even considered.

And sometimes, despite genuine effort, repair is not possible.

When Parent Advocacy Becomes Harmful

It needs to be said clearly that parent advocates who attack an adult child’s therapist are not helping.

Blaming the therapist once again places the adult child in the middle of a conflict they did not create. It reinforces the idea that their inner experience is invalid, externally manufactured, or disloyal. This deepens shame, fractures identity, and recreates the very dynamics that brought them to therapy in the first place.

For many adult children, the therapist is the only consistent, attuned relationship they have while they are trying to separate psychologically without losing themselves. Undermining that relationship can cause significant harm to the adult child.

Separation Is Not the Enemy

Individuation is not rejection. Boundaries are not punishment. And understanding one’s parents more clearly does not always lead to closeness.

Good therapy does not say, cut off your parents.
Good therapy says, let’s understand what happened, what you feel, what you need, what is possible, and what is not.

If parents want to understand estrangement, the question is not whether the therapist is the problem. The more courageous question is whether there is room to reflect on how responsibility, repair, and accountability have been handled over time.

Because scapegoating the therapist may protect the parent’s narrative, but it does nothing to heal the relationship with their estranged adult child.