Part 3: Is Therapy Colluding With or Causing Mother-Daughter Estrangement?

This is part three of a four-part blog series on “Why are so many mothers and daughters estranged today?”. In this blog series, I shine a spotlight on a worrying spike in mother-daughter estrangement that my graduates and I have observed. In this third blog I unpack my second observation about this trend — that daughters in their twenties and thirties are seeking therapeutic help for their mother-daughter troubles, and too often, this help is leading them to choose estrangement.

Over the last ten years I have repeatedly heard the same story — that a therapist is advising a daughter to cut off contact from her mother, and mothers are feeling confused, deeply hurt, and angry at their daughter’s individual therapist. Mothers are saying that they do not trust their daughter’s individual therapist’s judgement about their mothering and their connection with their daughter, and many have not had a session with their daughter’s individual therapist, which is leaving them feeling blamed and powerless.

When I first started hearing multiple stories of twenty and thirty-year-old daughters being told by a therapist that her mother is ‘toxic’, ‘wounding’, ‘narcissistic’, ‘controlling’, and ‘the cause of the daughter’s attachment disorder’ and that she should cut off contact, I attributed these stories as…