“Trump is my mother and Vance is a roommate I had once.” The scribblers of the Reddit board “Raised by narcissists” were watching the Ukrainian President receive a tongue-lashing in the Oval Office on Friday. Another concurred: “Every single one of us who has a narcissist in our life just shuddered, gagged a bit, and scheduled our next therapy session.”
For these commiserators, the spectacle of the diminutive President Zelensky being mocked, interrupted and chastised by the saffron-skinned patriarch and his henchman was less a portent of war than a scene from their own childhoods, a cruel jab in the ribs reminding them of their fate as victim. I get it — this presidential shitshow was remarkable. But must they make it about themselves?
Therapy culture’s answer will always be a resounding yes. And its solution to the fraught dynamics of family life is, increasingly, to go “no contact” — a proposal which licensed therapists deny encouraging, but which would-be patients feel empowered to do by the slow bleed of therapyspeak into civilian life. Stories of “breaking up” with abusive family members are juicy gems in American magazines, and the no-contact vogue is everywhere on TikTok, with minor influencers staging extended “storytimes” about how they one day stopped speaking to their sibling. Perhaps relatedly, estrangement is on the rise, with one study in Canada and Australia reporting a “silent epidemic” of broken families.
Cutting people out is also the supreme theme of “Raised by Narcissists”, that doom-laden Reddit board. To read these forums is to dive into the chaotic family lives of strangers, who introduce themselves not with names and jobs but detailed delineations of neuroses. For most, the dreaded narcissist — the supreme enemy of these boards — is within the family itself, and there are plenty of references to “nmother” or “nbrother”. The users speak in the cultish language of someone who spends more on shrink sessions than groceries — the hated “GC” is the golden child; “flying monkeys” are a narcissist’s minions and enablers; “hoovering” is when a narcissist tries to suck you back into their life; and “WOES” means walking on eggshells. The mind boggles.
These posters are paranoid; in the normal, awkward, hurtful, strained dynamics of daily life they see shadows of abuse, diagnosing colleagues and friends and bus drivers with personality disorders. One poster, for whom I feel genuine pity, reports that they “constantly feel like everyone doesn’t like me” or “is talking behind my back”. Another, a 17-year-old girl, reports that her mother “threatened to kill my mental support animal” (she joked, it transpires, about “unaliving” her rabbit). She pleads “am I right to feel hurt?” Once again, the answer is yes, always and forever.
We have all known people who have just had too much therapy. The signs are immediate and alarming: scrutinising the behaviour of others to root around for explanatory trauma; using the language of self-help to excuse bizarre overreactions (“I am just protecting my boundaries,” they say, severing ties with their oldest and dearest companions for not liking their Instagram stories). Constantly referring to the sainted pronouncements of “my therapist”, who becomes an anonymous Eye of Sauron in the lives of entire friendship groups, casting judgements and conjuring diagnoses from on high — usually in favour of the person who pays them.
The therapy often begins for an understandable reason — bereavements, eating disorders, unabating teenage gloom; it then holds the victim’s hand into the following years and decades, it cannot be done without. It provides weekly lessons on the most fascinating subject of all time: yourself. It arms bad daters with good verbiage: “I am struggling with emotional connections,” they say, right after shagging you and right before getting with your friend. And it gives terrible housemates excuses for hogging the drying rack: “I am at capacity right now. Your communication style is overwhelming.” Therapy so often leads us to an inevitable conclusion: that the only way to “protect your peace”, to avoid the natural and normal human experiences of heartbreak, embarrassment and regret, is to go “no contact”.
A fantastic recent episode of This American Life featured a family rocked by their father’s disappearance down an evangelical, pro-Trump conspiracy-theory rabbit hole; after coming out, his daughter quite reasonably cuts him out for telling her that he simply doesn’t believe she is a lesbian, and God would not want that for her. Here, as in countless other stories in the news, on social media and among friends, enforcing “no contact” becomes a major plot point, the terminal stage of a toxic familial relationship. It carries a sense of sacrilege which does not come with the collapse of friendships: blood is thicker than water, we are told. The premium put on family ties probably comes down to this: to reject someone who has known you your entire life is the greatest possible expression of identity, of the triumph of individualism over the tribe.
In America in particular, the family tableau has re-entered political life: close-knit clans like the Trumps and Vances recall the Kennedys’ dreams of Camelot. Meanwhile normal families are increasingly divided along red and blue lines: Marmite MAGA politics drives a wedge between parents and their children, brothers and their sisters. For horrified Harris voters, nixing Republican relatives is a form of resistance.
Often, “no contact” makes complete sense. Nearly every family has an estrangement story — about 25% of people will be estranged from a sibling in their lifetime; about 20% will be estranged from a father, and 9% from a mother. Most children grow up remembering blurred faces of relatives “we don’t speak to”; most absorb the clan lore, most have hazy recollections of shouting in the kitchen, of frosty encounters in the dried goods aisle at M&S. It is nothing new; legendary and irreparable fallings-out are a depressing fact of life. What is new is the prevalence and the intrusion of therapyspeak, which has so completely saturated everyday language that it rolls off the tongues of those who have never seen the inside of a shrink’s office. It started with Boundaries, John Townsend and Henry Cloud’s guide (“Boundaries define us. They define what is me and what is not me,” goes the 1992 bestseller). It ends with baffled septuagenarian parents being iced out by their children for careless comments made 50 years before.
Therapy terms have bled into the general lexicon because they are useful — not because they are particularly understood or relevant or critically considered, but because they confer a sense of saintliness on the doer, giving them the whiff of officialdom. Telling someone to bog off and never darken your door again seems petulant; telling someone that you are “enforcing no contact to protect your boundaries” sounds teacherly, sober and worthy. One only has to think of the ultimate Millennial therapy bro, Prince Harry, who executed the most newsworthy no-contact policy of all time with Megxit: this was described, in the Sussexes’ statement, not as a “sod off” but a “transition” which required “support”.
So often in these narratives, the elderly are shunned for simply being part of a generation which thought differently. For those who grew up in wartime to be asked to understand grandchildren who define themselves principally through psychological labels and neo-identities is absurd. But on a grander scale, the obsessive reinforcement of our individual boundaries, bespoke needs superseding family, friendships and community, is frightening. Therapyspeak’s tendency to favour the patient is a barrier to compassion, and to resilience, which I’m sure qualified therapists resent. Confrontation, and coping with difference and difficulty, is part of life; as families become more polarised, and both the elderly and the young become lonelier, we should surely look to dissolve boundaries, not pile them higher.
Living in the age of “no contact” is confusing. The normalisation of therapy was meant to equip us with a shared framework for understanding the world; it was intended to encourage empathy and self-knowledge. The problem is that the therapy subject is so rarely at fault; to spend any time around someone with BetterHelp brain is to pass the hours with a perennial victim, who is incapable of having a normal argument without needing to use the scaffolding of pop psychology to taxonomise their hurt. We should be wary of any philosophy which tells us always to be on the lookout for emotional abuse, which teaches vigilance instead of resilience. And most of all, we should resist the biggest draw of therapy culture: the delicious appeal of only thinking about ourselves. It makes us bad friends, bad lovers and boring bastards.
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