The ‘No Contact’ Movement Is Sweeping America, But Experts Warn the Therapy Trend Has Gone Too Far

Cutting out family members and going “no contact” has quietly transformed from a measure of last resort into a cultural phenomenon embraced across social media, opinion columns, and even therapeutic offices.

Op-eds with titles such as “I feel happier and healthier when not around my mother” regularly appear in mainstream publications 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 “no contact” have surged by 191% since early 2020, reflecting a broader societal shift toward severe boundaries in interpersonal relationships.

Increasingly, the prevailing narrative across digital platforms has become simple: If a family member is causing you stress, the solution is to cut them off entirely. And millions of people appear to be following that exact advice.

“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, she notes, seem increasingly less willing to accept that friction and challenges are inherent to any emotional bond, whether it is a friendship, a family tie, or a romantic partnership.

Recent data underscores how widespread this practice has become. A startling 38% of American adults say they are estranged from at least one close family member, according to a YouGov poll conducted in 2025. What is perhaps more concerning to mental health professionals is that many individuals report their therapists are the ones actively 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,” said Dr. Dee Apple, a psychologist based in Princeton, New Jersey. “Pero [no contact] has, nonetheless, taken off in therapy.”

While veteran clinicians acknowledge that severing ties can sometimes be necessary, many are raising alarms that the practice is being overprescribed. Annie Wright, a San Francisco-based therapist, views going no-contact as “often the only way to survive” in scenarios involving severe narcissistic or emotional abuse. She notes that the method serves to remind people that family ties are not unconditional.

However, Wright, despite being an outspoken proponent of the method in appropriate contexts, believes the strategy is becoming far too trendy within the broader worlds 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, Wright is most likely to pump the brakes with clients who want to go no contact after a single bad argument rather than an ongoing pattern of harmful behavior, or with those who attempt to cut ties before ever explaining to their parents what is wrong. She observes that clients who are overly eager to sever ties usually hold a romanticized, unrealistic understanding of “no contact” harvested directly from social media platforms.

“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 who specializes in estrangement, agrees that the mainstream trendiness of “no contact” has reduced deeply complicated family dynamics into an oversimplified 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 explained.

Kerr—along with every other mental health expert interviewed for this reporting—agrees that clear instances of sexual or physical abuse unquestionably justify cutting off contact. However, they emphasize that more nuanced emotional situations demand far greater care, patience, and professional deliberation.

According to the 2025 YouGov survey of American adults who had chosen to go “no contact” with a parent, 34% cited manipulative behavior, 31% pointed to chronic dishonesty, and 34% reported physical, emotional, or sexual abuse—though experts note the latter represents a notably broad category that can encompass widely varying degrees of severity.

Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development at Cornell University who has interviewed hundreds of people with estranged or once-estranged family members, points out that the single biggest challenge for modern therapists is the reality that “they can’t get both people in” to their office to fairly evaluate the root of the conflict.

Pillemer’s research estimates that roughly 27% of American adults have cut off contact with a family member, yet only a tiny minority of those individuals reported feeling unambiguously good about their choice.

“Most of the estranged folks described being highly ambivalent about it,” he explained. They frequently report that estrangement carries very real, lingering costs, even when it feels entirely necessary—such as broken attachment bonds, chronic psychological stress, profound grief, and collateral damage extending to children and other family members.

Furthermore, Pillemer’s research indicates that only a small fraction of overall estrangement stems from true trauma-based relationships. A much larger share of people go no contact for situational reasons, such as fundamental differences in personal values, lifestyle choices, or unresolved in-law disputes.

“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 major cultural shift, according to Pillemer, is the widespread adoption of clinical terminology among the general public.

“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 now have adult children utilizing clinical terms to reinterpret what everyone during their childhood considered normal behavior as trauma, boundary violations, or toxic relationships. Simultaneously, parents often find themselves bewildered, struggling to understand why they are being labeled as narcissists or accused of gaslighting and ghosting.

Dega, who completed her psychology studies in Austria, sees yet another layer driving the phenomenon: a distinctly American component rooted in a hyper-individualistic culture that centers the individual self above 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 that contemporary culture encourages a narrow, self-protective mindset.

“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,” Apple said. “I think people think that way more often now: ‘What do I need? What do I need? And to heck with everybody else.’”