Hi {{ first_name | default: "Reader" }},
In April, around 800 psychoanalysts and therapists met in New York for the annual conference of APA Division 39, the American Psychological Association's psychoanalysis division. Among the speakers was Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, booked to talk about family abolition (Wright and Hartz, 2026).
Some sessions at that conference carried continuing-education credit. That means a licensed therapist could sit through it and count it toward the training their licence requires.
I want to look at that idea properly, because if you've been cut off by a child, the people sitting in that room are the people your child might be talking to every week.
So what is family abolition? Lewis's publisher sums up the book's case in one line: "Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family" (Verso, 2022). Lewis argues that families are too often places of neglect and abuse, and that we should imagine forms of care that replace them.
That line is testable, so I tested it.
The US government's crime survey asks tens of thousands of households every year who attacked them. In 2023, strangers committed violence at a rate of 11.4 per 1,000 people. Family members and partners combined came in at 4.1 per 1,000 (Tapp and Coen, 2024). Strangers accounted for about half of all violent attacks. Family and partners accounted for about one in five.
One caveat, because it's a fair one. That survey covers people aged 12 and over, so it misses abuse of young children. Family harm exists, and it can be devastating. But "nobody is more likely to harm you than your family" doesn't hold up against the government's own numbers.
We also have experiments on what happens when you take children out of families.
The first comes from Israel. For decades, many kibbutzim raised children communally, and in some, babies slept in a children's house at night instead of with their parents. Abraham Sagi and his colleagues compared 48 infants from kibbutzim. Among those who slept at home, 80% were securely attached to their mothers. Among those who slept in the communal house, 48% were (Sagi et al., 1994). The two groups didn't differ in temperament, daytime care or how their mothers played with them. The night-time arrangement made the difference.
The second comes from Romania, and it's harder to read. In the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, researchers randomly assigned 136 children from state orphanages to either stay in the institution or move to a foster family. By age four and a half, 44% of the children who stayed had an anxiety or depressive disorder. In foster care, that fell to 22% (Zeanah et al., 2009). These were ordinary foster families recruited for the study. They weren't perfect families, and they didn't need to be.
Children need a small number of adults who belong to them. A family abolitionist can call that a cultural habit, but attachment research keeps finding it.
Now think about what happens when a therapist who doubts the family meets your adult son or daughter. Your child describes a strict father or an anxious mother. A therapist trained to see the family as a site of harm hears confirmation. Nobody in that room speaks for you.
This sits inside a bigger fight. On 23 September, a federal advisory committee voted 7 to 4 to recommend suspending recognition of the APA's accrediting body for a year, over complaints that it tolerated antisemitism in training programmes. The committee went against its own staff, who had recommended a 12-month window to fix problems instead. The APA disputes the finding, and the Education Department makes the final call (Insight Into Academia, 2026). Two weeks later, APA members elected Candice Hargons as president-elect. Her campaign statement reads: "We have a common enemy, and it's not each other: It's systemic intersectional oppression" (American Psychological Association, 2026).
This is one reason I chose not to become a licensed therapist.
I spent two years training as a psychotherapist in London: a one-year foundation course, then a postgraduate certificate in integrative psychotherapy and counselling. That's two years of fees and evenings, and every month I stayed made it harder to leave. Psychologists call this the sunk cost fallacy, where the money and time you've already spent keep you going long after the future stops making sense. I could see the direction the profession was heading, and I didn't want my name on a licence issued by bodies that think like this.
So I walked away and wrote off the loss. I was lucky. I had other work and I could afford to.
Plenty of therapists can't. They carry loans that only a licence pays off. They need continuing-education credits, supervisors and professional bodies to keep working. When those bodies drift, most trainees keep their heads down, and I don't blame them.
My wife is an associate therapist, and several people in my family are therapists too. Half that conference programme would baffle most therapists I know. But the people who set the training standards for the whole profession in the US aren't the ones I know, and that's who decides what your child's therapist learns.
I wrote Cut Off for parents on the other side of that therapy room. It covers how our culture relabelled ordinary family life as harm, and what the research says about finding your way back.
One favour. If you've already read Cut Off, would you leave a review on Amazon? Every review helps the book reach another parent sitting where you might have been a year ago. It doesn't need to be long. One reader wrote four words: "Your book is gold." I'll also accept "Made me phone my mother," or even "Nice cover, haven't started it yet." Each one counts.
And if you'd rather meet in person: in two weeks, on Thursday 19 November, I'm launching Cut Off live at Solid Grounds Coffee House in Woodland Park, Colorado. I'll talk about why adult children cut off their parents and what helps families find their way back, then take questions and sign books. It runs from 6:00 to 7:30pm. Tickets are $50 and include a signed copy, and there are only 30 seats. If you're anywhere near Colorado Springs, come and say hello.
Hold steady,
Richard
P.S. Has a therapist ever told your child that the family itself was the problem? Hit reply and tell me what they said. I read every reply.
P.P.S. If you'd rather listen than read, there's a new episode of my podcast out. My friend Andy Esam turned the microphone round and grilled me on the argument behind Cut Off. We get into how complex PTSD became a diagnosis without making it into the DSM-5, and why therapy's most effective treatment is exposure while therapy culture's favourite advice is avoidance. Andy also talks about his own years in therapy, when he went from "my parents were normal" to "my parents are the reason" and back again. It's 44 minutes.
LAUGHING THROUGH THE PAIN: NAVIGATING WELLNESS
The Impossible Standard: Has Therapy Culture Turned Parents Into the Problem?
Disclosure: I wrote the book this email promotes and earn from every copy sold. There are no affiliate links in this email. The conference details above come from the Wall Street Journal's reporting, as I couldn't access the full programme myself.
References
American Psychological Association (2026) 'Meet the candidates for 2028 APA president', Monitor on Psychology, July/August. Available at: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2026/07-08/2028-presidential-candidates (Accessed: 29 October 2026).
Insight Into Academia (2026) 'Federal panel recommends suspending APA's accrediting recognition, overriding its own staff'. Available at: https://insightintoacademia.com/apa-accrditation/ (Accessed: 29 October 2026).
Lewis, S. (2022) Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. London: Verso.
Sagi, A., van IJzendoorn, M.H., Aviezer, O., Donnell, F. and Mayseless, O. (1994) 'Sleeping out of home in a kibbutz communal arrangement: it makes a difference for infant-mother attachment', Child Development, 65(4), pp. 992–1004. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1994.tb00797.x
Tapp, S.N. and Coen, E.J. (2024) Criminal Victimization, 2023. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCJ 309335. Available at: https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv23.pdf
Verso (2022) Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation [publisher's description]. London: Verso.
Wright, C. and Hartz, A. (2026) 'The inmates run the asylum at the Psychological Association', The Wall Street Journal, 20 October.
Zeanah, C.H., Egger, H.L., Smyke, A.T., Nelson, C.A., Fox, N.A., Marshall, P.J. and Guthrie, D. (2009) 'Institutional rearing and psychiatric disorders in Romanian preschool children', American Journal of Psychiatry, 166(7), pp. 777–785. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2009.08091438