Estrangement Isn't a New Feeling. It's a Newly Affordable One.

A family therapist's both-sides look at the estrangement wave: why parents and adult children pay for love in two different currencies, and why most therapy is making the gap worse instead of bridging

Estrangement is everywhere right now.

Before you cut them off, or before you write your kid off as ungrateful, I want you to understand the one thing neither of you was ever taught.

It might save the whole thing.

Photo by Megan Watson on Unsplash

She’s 34, sitting in her car in her parents’ driveway, and she hasn’t gone in yet.

Inside that house is a father who spent the morning fixing the brake light on her Honda, because he noticed it was out the last time she visited. He’s been checking the window. He’s proud of the brake light. He can’t wait to tell her.

And she’s out in the driveway rehearsing, one more time, how she’s going to tell him that she’s been in therapy for a year and that she needs him to actually hear her about what growing up in that house was like. She has a whole speech. She’s practiced it in the shower.

In about four minutes, he’s going to lead with the brake light, and she’s going to hear “he’d rather talk about the car than talk to me.” Then she’s going to lead with the therapy, and he’s going to hear “everything I did wasn’t good enough.”

Two people, both about to hand over something that costs them a fortune, and both about to watch the other person treat it like pocket change.

I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist, and right now estrangement between adult children and their parents is the fastest growing thing walking into my virtual office. Sometimes it’s the parents, blindsided and gutted, holding a text message that reads like a legal notice. Sometimes it’s the adult children, exhausted and guilty and absolutely certain they’ve tried everything.

And more often than not, when I get both generations in the room, I watch the same thing happen. It isn’t cruelty. It isn’t narcissism. Quite honestly, most of the time it isn’t even “toxic,” whatever we’ve decided that word means this week.

What I watch is two people who love each other paying for the relationship in completely different currencies, and nobody ever taught them the exchange rate. Not their families, not their culture, and quite honestly not most of my own profession either.

So that’s what this piece is.

I’m going to make the case for your parents that you’ve never heard, and then I’m going to make the case for your adult kids that you’ve never heard. Then I’m going to say something about the therapy industry that will probably get me some angry emails from colleagues, and I’m going to say it anyway, because it’s true and it’s a real part of the problem.

Deal? Deal. Let’s go.

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Two currencies, no bank

Here’s the metaphor I want to use to try and shift your perspective.

In your family, love got paid in a currency. And your parents’ currency and your currency are not the same.

For the older generation, and I’m painting broadly here so give me some grace, love was paid in acts. Supplies. Sacrifice. Showing up. Working the overtime, fixing the brake light, keeping a roof over your head that they sometimes couldn’t keep over their own childhood heads. When my older clients want to show me how much they love their kids, you know what they show me? Receipts. Literally, sometimes. The tuition, the wedding, the help with the down payment, the years.

For the younger generation, love is priced in presence. Attunement. Validation. Being known. Do you actually see me, do you get what my life feels like from the inside, and can you sit with my feelings without fixing them, judging them, or running from them. When my adult child clients describe what was missing, they almost never say “we were poor.” They say “They struggled to get to know me for who I was, rather than what they thought of me.”

And neither currency is counterfeit.

And here’s one of the many tragedies that keeps my calendar full. Each side keeps handing over what costs them everything, and then watches the other side count it as spare change. Dad hands over forty years of acts, and his daughter appraises it in presence and finds it nearly worthless. She hands over the terrifying vulnerability of “here’s what I actually felt,” and he appraises it in acts and hears an invoice for services already rendered.

Nobody’s lying or withholding. Sometimes there’s some manipulation mixed in, and more often than not it’s unconscious. They’re both overpaying, in currencies the other was never taught to count.

So the question isn’t “who’s right.” The question is where each currency got minted, because I promise you, nobody chose theirs off a menu.

Where their currency was minted (the case for your parents)

If you’re an adult child who’s cut off contact or is circling the idea, I know what you might be bracing for here. The lecture. “They did their best.” “You only get one mother.” Honor thy father, blah blah blah blah blah.

Trust me I keep hearing this and roll my eyes and call bullshit too.

That’s not this. I’m not going to tell you your pain isn’t real. What I am going to do is show you the factory where your parents’ currency got minted, because you genuinely cannot negotiate with someone whose money you don’t understand.

Understanding is the beginning of shifting the emotional impact they had on you.

Start here. For your parents’ generation, emotional expression wasn’t a skill they declined to learn. It was a liability they were punished for having. Crying got you mocked, or it got you hit. Anger got you the belt. Sadness got you “I’ll give you something to cry about.” Love in a lot of those houses ran on compliance, where you earned warmth by obeying and you lost it by having needs. Nobody sat with little seven-year-old Frank and said “that sounds really hard, buddy.” Frank got sent to his room until he could “act right.” And then Frank grew up, and had you, and handed you the only currency he’d ever been paid in.

Sounds shitty, doesn’t it!

And by the way, how did Frank build closeness with his own father? He entered his father’s world. Dad liked fishing, so Frank learned to fish. Dad watched the game, so Frank learned the roster. The idea that a parent would orbit around a child’s inner world, where you ask about the kid’s interests and validate the kid’s feelings and restructure the family weekend around the kid’s soccer schedule? That wasn’t parenting to them. That was Neptune. It didn’t exist. So when your dad “never took an interest in your life,” understand that in the manual he was raised with, that was your move to make. It wasn’t personal. It was the entire architecture of how connection worked.

Now add the part nobody talks about, because it’s economic, not emotional.

Your grandparents’ generation couldn’t afford estrangement. Literally.

They lived alongside their families of origin because they had to. Grandma was the childcare. The family was the loan officer, the job network, and the social insurance policy all rolled into one. And the community was watching. The church, the neighborhood, the school, the whole town. Which meant the family’s reputation was a shared asset, and you didn’t get to torch it on your way out.

So when your mother tolerated her mother’s behavior, behavior that today would get a whole TikTok diagnosis, she wasn’t weak and she wasn’t in denial. Tolerating was the price of the infrastructure. You put up with Grandpa’s temper because Grandma watched the kids while you worked. You minimized, you looked past, you “didn’t bring it up,” because bringing it up could cost you the childcare, the Sunday dinners, the sibling relationships, and your standing at St. Michael’s, all in one conversation.

Was that healthy? No.

Did it bury pain that came out sideways, in the drinking and the rages and the silence at the dinner table and the hands that were too quick? Absolutely, and I sit with the wreckage of it every week. And it was also adaptive. They radically accepted what they could not afford to change.

Now layer the history on top. A world war, a cold war, immigration, two cultures grinding against each other in one kitchen, an economy that collapsed and rebuilt itself more than once. What you get is a generation whose entire survival strategy was feel less, endure more, stay in the group. Their patience wasn’t a virtue and their silence wasn’t peace.

It was protection that felt like a way to connection!

And here’s the thing about protection you’ve carried for years. Nobody hands you a manual for dropping it, and by the time your kid asks you to, you see it as “how it just was”.

So let me put all of that history in one sentence:

Your parent isn’t refusing to give you emotional attunement. More often than not, they are emotionally illiterate in a language nobody ever taught them, judging themselves in a currency where they’re rich while going bankrupt in yours.

That doesn’t minimize your pain. It reframes their behavior from malice to history. And that reframe matters, because you can’t heal with a villain. You can heal with a limited, wounded human. I’ve actually leveraged this exact same process in my family therapy sessions.

Where your currency was minted (the case for your adult kids)

Okay, parents. Your turn in the chair.

And I want you to extend your kids the same grace I just asked of them, because their currency has a mint too, and you’re not going to like all of it, because you built part of the building.

First, the confusing part, and quite honestly this is where I have the most compassion for your side. You gave your kids more than you got. Massively more. More time, more resources, more emotional consideration than your parents could have fathomed.

You drove to the travel games.

You asked about their day.

You did the thing your father never did.

And your kid still says it wasn’t enough, and it makes you want to flip a table. I get it. From where you sit, you upgraded the package enormously and the customer is still disappointed!

“You have to be kidding me, right?”

Here’s what’s actually happening. You paid them in presence often enough that they learned to price love in it, and you did it without full clarity, because you were learning how to do better as an adult while running a household. Of course you had challenges and missteps. Of course you dropped back into the currency you were raised in when things got stressful. And a kid who’s been paid in presence sometimes feels its absence in a way that a kid who was never paid in it at all simply can’t. You didn’t fail. You showed them what the currency was worth, and you couldn’t always keep it in supply. That’s just what happens when a family upgrades its emotional standard of living in a single generation.

Now the economics, because this is where I need you to actually update your picture of your kid’s life.

You keep hearing that their generation is broke, and then you see the DoorDash and the Disney+ and you roll your eyes. Don’t forget the avocado toast! (And look, some of them could cancel a subscription or six. I said what I said. It’s my generation, so I’m allowed.) So let me be more precise, because the real story isn’t that they have less. The real story is that their security has a completely different architecture than yours did.

When you entered the workforce, a pension was the deal at most big companies. You worked, and retirement was handled. Perks were wild and the way companies took care of their workers was incredible! That deal is functionally gone now. Retirement became one more project they have to design, fund, and manage themselves, forever, with no guarantee at the end. Houses cost roughly double your kids’ income compared to what they cost against yours. And no, your 13% mortgage rate doesn’t balance it out, because you got to refinance the rate and they never get to refinance the price. And childcare, which is the thing your mother did for free, now costs more than a year at a public university in most states. In a lot of towns it’s a second mortgage with diaper changes. I can personally say it costs more than my mortgage, taxes, and insurance combined.

So here’s your kid’s actual life. Every guarantee that quietly held your world up, meaning the pension and the affordable starter home and the free family childcare and the built-in community, has been swapped for a subscription they personally pay for, monthly, forever. Your security came standard, like the seatbelts. Theirs is aftermarket, and they’re installing every piece of it themselves off a YouTube tutorial while the car is moving. And a person driving that car all day, every day, has less left over. Less patience, less tolerance, less capacity to absorb a difficult Sunday dinner “for the family,” because there’s no surplus in the tank. It’s not that your kid is softer than you were, right? Even though that may be true to some degree. It’s that very little in their life is holding anything up for them.

And this is the part that explains the entire estrangement wave better than any think piece you’ve read:

Estrangement isn’t a new feeling. It’s a newly affordable one.

Your parents’ generation felt everything your kids feel. The resentment, the hurt, the “I can’t be around this person.” They just couldn’t act on it, because the family was the childcare, the bank, and the safety net. Your kids replaced all of that with daycare invoices, dual incomes, and a friend group chat, which means tolerance stopped being mandatory. And here’s the part that should actually give you hope. Your kids are the first generation whose presence in your life is entirely voluntary. When they show up now, it’s not for the infrastructure. It’s for you. That’s terrifying, and it’s also the most honest offer a parent has ever been made.

One caution while we’re here, parents, because I watch this one weekly, and it’s one of the most painful things I have to remind the parents I work with.

Everything you gave, you chose to give. Out of love, and out of a desire to hand your kids what you never got. Nobody made you drive to those travel games. In the moment, it was a gift, and you knew it. You felt like the parent you wanted and wanted to be.

And here’s where it sours. When the response you hoped for doesn’t come, meaning the gratitude, the closeness, the deference you would have been expected to show your own parents, the gift quietly starts converting into a debt. “After everything we did for you” starts showing up.

Access to the grandkids starts feeling owed. Your feedback starts arriving with an expectation of compliance attached, because you know better and you mean well.

This is the dual challenge, and it’s brutal to hold. You gave in a new currency, and you’re still doing the accounting under your family of origin’s old contract, where giving bought obedience because that was the deal you grew up inside. Your kids never signed that contract. And hearing the bill converts forty years of gifts into a loan they never agreed to, because nothing devalues acts faster than presenting the invoice.

One more thing, kids, before you get too comfortable, because this section is about your mint and your mint has a defect too.

The community your parents had, with the church and the neighborhood and the twelve adults who knew you by name, gave them something along with all that surveillance and conformity pressure. It gave them friction. Multiple perspectives. People who’d say “eh, your father’s a pain, but he loves you, bring the kids Sunday.” Perspective was ambient.

It came free with the casserole when you went over, even though it was probably gross!

Your generation replaced that with an algorithm.

And I need you to hear what that algorithm actually is. It is not a community. It is a slot machine that pays out validation, and it is owned by people who make money on your engagement, not your healing. It has learned that “you don’t owe anyone anything, even your mother” keeps you scrolling, so that’s what it feeds you. Every complicated fifty-year relationship gets flattened into a diagnosis and a hashtag, and cutting people off gets rebranded from a last resort into self-care.

My profession gave names to real things. Boundaries, gaslighting, trauma, emotional immaturity. Those names have genuinely freed people. And those same names, once they get stripped of their clinical meaning and run through an outrage algorithm, become a vocabulary where every hurt is abuse and every limited parent is a narcissist. Validation is intoxicating. Trust me, I’m not above it. I’m in this generation, and I feel the pull of a video telling me I’m right about everything just like you do.

And a steady diet of pure validation does to a relationship exactly what a steady diet of pure sugar does to your teeth.

It tastes like care and it works like decay. Brutal, but true.

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Why the same conversation keeps dying in the same ditch

Now let me show you the crash itself, because every estranged family I’ve ever worked with has THE conversation. They’ve had it eleven times. It dies in the same spot every time, neither of them can figure out why, and I want you to see it in slow motion.

Here’s the reframe. The parent is talking about content and details that happened. The adult child is talking about the process and how the interactions worked.

Content is the what. The events, the dates, the facts, who said what at Easter 2011. Process is the how. The pattern. The thing that kept happening between you, over and over, regardless of the details of any single day.

In currency terms, the parent is auditing transactions while the kid is describing the bank’s policy. And here’s the thing that breaks people’s brains: you can win every single audit and the bank can still be broken.

Watch:

Adult son: “Growing up, I never felt like my feelings mattered to you.”

Mom: “Never? What about when I drove four hours to your dorm when you had mono? What about the birthday parties? I have PHOTOS with you smiling! What are you talking about!”

And here’s the brutal part. Mom might be right about the mono trip. Her facts might be flawless. The kid’s memory of that specific weekend might genuinely be wrong.

It doesn’t matter, because he isn’t talking about a weekend.

He’s talking about a pattern, and you can’t disprove a pattern by winning an argument about one event. She’s defending individual moments while he’s describing what kept happening across all of them, which means they aren’t even having the same argument.

So why can’t the parent just go up a level and talk about the pattern? This is the part that deserves compassion instead of a diagnosis. Content can be defended one receipt at a time. Process indicts. Admitting a single bad day costs a bad day, and admitting a pattern means “I did this to my child, repeatedly, for years, without seeing it.” For a parent whose entire identity was built on the sacrifices, that’s not feedback. That’s emotionally crushing. So their nervous system picks the fight it can survive, and the fight it can survive is the mono trip.

And then comes the flood. The guilt hits, and the parent’s emotions take over the whole room. The tears, the anger, the “well, I guess I was just a terrible mother then.” And watch what just happened, because this is the recursion that makes these families feel crazy.

The kid came in to say “my feelings never got to be the subject in this house, because yours always took over.” Within four minutes, the kid is managing the parent’s feelings.

Again. The defense is a live demonstration of the pattern, and of the exact pain the kid is trying to get their parent to understand.

Every attempt to talk about the pattern becomes a fresh installment of the pattern. The kid walks away having to comprehend and caretake the parent’s entire emotional experience, with roughly none of that consideration flowing back. Ask any estranged adult child why they actually left, and more often than not, that’s the sentence underneath all the other sentences.

Not the original wound. The sealed exit.

Kids, your half of this trap, because you have one. When the flood hits, you read it as manipulation, or as “there she goes, making it about herself again.” Sometimes it is. And more often than not, what you’re actually watching is an untrained person taking their first full look at themselves and drowning in it. That’s not an excuse. It’s a diagnosis of skill, not of character, which is the same one I gave you about their currency. And your favorite counter move, where you show up with even more stockpiled examples? That’s you bringing more content to prove a process. You’re arguing on their level instead of yours, and you will never prove a pattern to a person who’s busy defending individual events. Come on. You already know this. You’ve run this pattern eleven times.

Nobody in that room is lying. You’re having two different arguments, about two different things, in two different currencies. Does that make sense? Because if it does, you now understand this conflict better than a lot of the licensed professionals treating it. Which brings me to the part where I get myself in trouble.

The part where I get in trouble with my own profession

Now. Let’s talk about therapy, because “my kid’s therapist told them to go no contact” is a sentence I hear from devastated parents almost weekly. The internet’s answer is that therapy is destroying families, and that’s wrong. The profession’s answer is that we would never, and that’s also wrong.

Here’s the truth! All therapists are not created equal, and almost nobody outside the field knows it.

I went to Syracuse University for marriage and family therapy. The entire program was family systems. Every class, every practicum, every supervision hour, all of it built around how families actually function as systems. How a symptom in one person can be doing a job for the whole family. How to hold multiple realities in one room without picking a winner.

Meanwhile, a huge portion of the licensed therapists in this country got somewhere between one class and a few credit hours of family systems training. Total. I’m talking about clinical social workers, mental health counselors, and professional counselors, most of them well intentioned and many of them excellent at what they’re actually trained for. Some of them got a single three-hour survey course. And in most states, every one of them can legally hang a shingle and treat your marriage and your family.

It’s absolutely wild that someone trained as a generalist can then go on to do such crucial work. It makes sense why the profession of “psychotherapy” catches so much shit. And honestly, some of it is deserved because of this one single truth.

This sounds terrible, but some of the most confident family counseling in America is being done by people whose entire family systems education fits on a cocktail napkin.

It’s the only corner of healthcare where that’s legal and nobody blinks. You wouldn’t let a dermatologist do your knee replacement because “it’s all medicine.” Come on.

And I know somebody reading this is already going, okay Matt, you’re just protecting your turf. I hear you. And if this were about turf, I’d want the undertrained folks to keep doing family work badly, because it’s fantastic for my referrals. Trust me.

I’m writing this because the wreckage lands on families first and on the whole profession second.

So why does this matter for estrangement? Because of what individual therapy is built to do. It’s built to advocate for the person in the room. Validate their experience. Support their autonomy. Process their pain. Those are beautiful tools for individual problems. And validation alone, without accountability, personal reflection, and healthy differentiation, isn’t therapy. It’s agreement with a copay.

Estrangement is not an individual problem. It’s a systems problem. And when you point individual tools at a systems problem, here’s the machine you build.

The adult child brings fifty years of family history into the room, filtered through their pain, and the pain is real, I want to be clear about that. The therapist, who was trained to validate and never trained to hold the system, validates. And then some. Session after session, the parent becomes a character in a story that only one author is writing. Nobody in that room is asking “what might your mother’s currency have been?”

Nobody is holding two realities at once. Not because the therapist is malicious, but because nobody ever taught them that holding multiple realities at the same time is the actual job.

That’s the whole difference between real family systems work and the average therapy most people get. Everybody wants understanding. Almost nobody has been trained to hand it out while they’re holding their own.

So the adult child gets what they came for, which is someone who finally and truly cares about their feelings, and it feels like water in the desert, and I do not blame a single one of them for drinking. And the family gets a clinician functioning, unknowingly, as a very expensive, very credentialed version of the algorithm they already feed themselves all day, through an outraged internet that wants blood.

Then the parents, who can’t tell an LMFT from an LPC from a hole in the ground, conclude that therapy destroyed their family, and they take that conclusion to Facebook, and now the people who most need real family therapy trust the field least. The undertrained end of my profession is generating the backlash that discredits all of it, including the systems therapists who are out here every week preventing estrangements that never needed to happen.

Ask me how I know. In my caseload right now are families who walked in with the no contact letter already drafted. Good people on both sides, real pain on both sides, and a gap made almost entirely of good intentions and missing skills. Most of those families are still families. Not because I talked anyone out of their feelings, but because someone in the room finally knew how to exchange the currencies.

What the exchange actually looks like

Let me show you, because this is more concrete than it sounds. Here’s a conversation I watch die a hundred times a year, with both people paying full price in their own currency:

Adult daughter: “I’ve been in therapy, and I’ve realized how alone I felt growing up. I need you to hear that.”

Dad: “Alone? I worked two jobs so you’d never miss a thing. You had everything.”

Daughter: “This is exactly what I mean. I can’t do this.”

Dad: “Do WHAT? What did I do?!”

Full price, both of them, at the same time, which is what makes this a complete clusterfuck instead of a simple misunderstanding. And notice Dad went straight to the receipts. She named a process and he defended content, right on schedule. She just spent the most expensive thing she owns, which is the truth about her inner life. He just spent his, which is the ledger of his sacrifice. Both payments bounced, and now each of them is standing there holding a receipt the other one can’t read. Now watch the same conversation with the exchange rate applied:

Adult daughter: “Dad, I know you worked two jobs for us. I know what that cost you, and I’m not here to say it didn’t count. It counted. AND there’s a different thing I needed that I want to tell you about. It’s not instead of what you gave. It’s in addition.”

Dad: “...Okay. I’m listening. I can’t promise I’ll get it right.”

Daughter: “You don’t have to get it right. You have to stay in the room.”

You see where I’m going with this? She converted first. She counted his currency out loud before she asked him to learn hers. And that little “I can’t promise I’ll get it right” from Dad? In his currency, that’s not hedging. That is a man walking into a foreign bank with his hat in his hand. That’s enormous. If you can’t recognize the other person’s largest possible payment when it’s sitting right on the table, you will bankrupt a relationship that was actually solvent.

Again, this is a skill. Not a personality trait, not a moral quality. A skill. Which means it can be taught, which means it can be learned, which means most of these estrangements are not verdicts. They’re translation failures and massive skill gaps that most people don’t even know they have. And you don’t tear down the house over a translation failure or a skill gap.

(And to be crystal clear, because someone will ask: there are absolutely families where estrangement is the right call. Ongoing abuse, real danger, a parent who turns every offered bridge into a weapon. Distance is a legitimate clinical outcome, and sometimes it’s the only safe one. What I’m talking about is the enormous, growing middle. The families getting sorted into “toxic” by an algorithm and an undertrained industry, when what they actually have is two currencies and no bank.)

Where we go from here

This piece was the map. The next two are the roadwork, one for each side of the bridge, because you each need different tools, and quite honestly there are some things I need to say to parents privately and some things I need to say to adult children privately.

For parents: what your adult child needs from you that nobody ever gave you. How to learn validation without feeling like you’re surrendering, why “after everything I did for you” is the most expensive sentence in your vocabulary, and how to stop demanding compliance and start earning voluntary presence. That one’s for paid subscribers, and if your kid has gone quiet, it may be the most important thing I ever write for you.

For adult children: before you send the letter. How to tell a parent who won’t understand from a parent who was never taught, what the algorithm is selling you and what it costs, and how to attempt one real exchange before you close the account. Also for paid subscribers.

If you’re standing in one of these driveways right now, either seat, either generation, take this with you:

Nobody in your family was refusing to pay. You were all overpaying, in currencies the others were never taught to count.

Here’s my question for you, and it’s a one worder, so no excuses: in the house you grew up in, what currency was love paid in? Acts, or presence?

Drop it in the comments. I’ll go first.

And if you’re reading this at 11pm and today was one of the hard ones, whether that’s the unanswered text, the driveway, or the drafted and deleted letter, I get it if you’re not up for commenting. Tap the heart so I know you’re out there. I write these for you.

— Matt

P.S. You already know exactly which person needs this article. Both of you knowing the exchange rate works a whole lot better than just one of you knowing it. Send it to them. Not as an argument. As an opening bid.