Therapists are to blame for the rise in family estrangement.

Wall Street Journal (gift link):

Shoshana Rubli was shocked by her therapist’s advice, given in her second session. But the counselor was recommended by someone she knew and had impressive credentials, so she did as she was told. 

She cut off all ties with her mother.

“It was an argument made from authority, so I followed it,” says the 42-year-old freelance marketer.

Is it really good therapy to break your mother’s heart? […]

Most therapists agree that sometimes people are justified in breaking ties with their parents or a close relative, especially if they were physically or emotionally abusive. 

What’s changing now is the bar for what is deemed abusive enough for a cutoff. “We are in a culture where we emphasize fragility, everything becomes trauma, and the solution increasingly is to split and leave,” says William Doherty, a therapist and professor emeritus of family social science at the University of Minnesota who has researched the ways that therapy may be harmful. “But it should be the tragic exception that you cut off a parent or loved one, not business as usual in therapy.”

About 25% of the U.S. population is estranged from, or has cut ties with, a close relative at any given time—and 10% is estranged from a parent or child—according to research by Karl Pillemer, a family sociologist and professor of human development at Cornell. He believes that more rifts are likely, as tensions over politics and social issues continue to rise.

Only in the second session, a therapist was able to make such an insane recommendation. Now imagine public schools that start giving your children therapy?

A worthy read with a happy ending, but how many people end up not reconciling and in tragic loneliness?

I came across this article after giving my khutbah this past Friday, where I stated:

And to compound the distancing between children and parents, schools now offer therapy, right? Because you give them the problem, the social media, and now you also got to give them, and now you have to sell them the solution too, which is therapy.

And do you think this therapy is gonna be based on Islamic principles? No. What happens is, and a lot of the times in these therapy sessions, in schools, without your knowledge even, they have patient confidentiality, right?

They can't even tell you what they discuss, because it's their right, as a child or whatever, that they don't have to tell you about these things. And even in some cases, believe this or not, if you are, and this is considered therapy, right? If you're an immigrant, child, and you go to school and you learn English pretty good, right?

And then your parents, they came from another country to provide you with a better life. They might need help with some paperwork or going to the doctor and translating something. That, believe it or not, is considered trauma.

Your parents have traumatized you, and they have wronged you because you have to help them and do all these extra things, and actually maybe struggle a little bit, and, but in reality, you're doing khayr for your family. You're learning skills, you're learning life, but that's trauma. So now, all of this is going into our kids.

You can read more about this phenomenon in children in Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. (Affiliate link)