The ‘No-Contact’ Epidemic: How Cutting Off Family Members Became a Trendy Solution to Stress

In contemporary culture, cutting out family members and going “no contact” has quietly transitioned from a severe, last-resort measure to something resembling a lifestyle choice.

The phenomenon is increasingly visible across media and daily life. Opinion pieces bearing titles like “I feel happier and healthier when not around my mother” regularly populate mainstream outlets like The Guardian, while the hashtag #nocontact has amassed an astonishing 1.9 billion views on TikTok. According to Google Trends, online searches for the phrase have surged by 191% since early 2020.

The prevailing narrative has calcified into a simplistic formula: If a family member is causing you stress, the solution is to cut them off entirely. And across the country, people are putting that advice into practice.

“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 reporters. She noted that people seem increasingly unwilling to accept that challenges inherently exist in any emotional bond, whether it involves friendships, family, or romantic partnerships.

The statistical reality underscores this cultural shift. A striking 38% of American adults report that they are estranged from at least one close family member, according to a YouGov poll. Behind many of these decisions are therapists who, intentionally or not, are encouraging clients to take drastic measures.

“You carry all the turmoil, all the conflict, all the pain with you when you leave, and sometimes it intensifies,” said Dr. Dee Apple, a psychologist based in Princeton, New Jersey. “But [no contact] has, nonetheless, taken off in therapy.”

For some mental health professionals, the practice is viewed as a vital shield. Annie Wright, a therapist in San Francisco, considers going no-contact “often the only way to survive” in cases of severe narcissistic or emotional abuse. She explains that the measure serves to remind people that family ties are not unconditional and do come with boundaries.

However, Wright, despite being an outspoken proponent of the method in appropriate contexts, worries that the strategy has become too trendy within the broader landscape of therapy and self-help culture.

“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 said. “Recommending no contact casually? Yes, I think that’s a problem.”

In her own practice, Wright is most likely to pump the brakes with clients who express a desire to go no contact immediately following a volatile argument rather than an established, ongoing pattern of behavior. She also hesitates when clients want to sever ties before they have even clearly communicated their grievances to their parents. Those who are overly eager to pull the trigger, she notes, often hold a romanticized or overly simplistic understanding of the process gleaned 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,” Wright 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 therapist in British Columbia who specializes in estrangement, shares similar concerns, noting that the mainstream trendiness of the practice has stripped away its nuance.

“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 observed.

While Kerr and every other expert interviewed for this discussion agree that sexual or physical abuse unquestionably justifies cutting contact, they emphasize that more complex emotional situations demand a far higher level of care and deliberation.

Data reflects the wide spectrum of reasons behind these fractures. In the YouGov survey of American adults, 34% of respondents who had gone no contact with a parent cited manipulative behavior, 31% pointed to habitual lying, and another 34% referenced physical, emotional, or sexual abuse—a notably broad category that encompasses vastly different degrees of severity.

Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development at Cornell University who has interviewed hundreds of people with estranged or formerly estranged family members, points out that a major obstacle for practitioners is that they only ever hear one side of the story. A therapist sitting in an office cannot bring both parties in to truly get to the bottom of the conflict.

Pillemer’s research estimates that 27% of American adults have cut off contact with a family member, yet only a “tiny minority” of those individuals feel unambiguously positive about their 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.”

Furthermore, his findings indicate that only a small fraction of overall estrangement stems from severe, trauma-based relationships. A much larger share of people go no contact for situational reasons, such as underlying differences in personal values or conflicts involving in-laws.

“I’ll go out on a limb,” Pillemer 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 significant driver of the trend is the widespread adoption of clinical terminology in everyday discourse. The mainstreaming of psychological concepts surrounding trauma, personal boundaries, and toxic relationships represents an entirely new cultural phenomenon. Adult children are increasingly utilizing clinical terminology to reinterpret behaviors that previous generations might have considered normal childhood friction, recasting them as boundary violations or toxic dynamics. Meanwhile, parents often struggle to comprehend modern shorthand like gaslighting, ghosting, or being labeled a narcissist.

For Dega, who studied psychology in Austria, the trend also reveals a distinctly American dimension rooted in a hyper-individualistic culture that prioritizes the self over the collective family unit.

“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 echoed this observation, noting a societal shift toward prioritizing personal comfort above all else.

“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,” Apple said. “‘What do I need? What do I need? And to heck with everybody else.’”