Hi {{ first_name | default: "Reader" }},
About 2 years ago, I posted a reel connecting therapy culture to the rise in family cut-offs. 2.2 million people watched it, and the comments told me I'd walked into something much bigger than a social media moment.
Parents wrote to me, describing their experience in the same words. A letter or message arrived from a child they thought they knew, full of clinical language, rewriting everything that came before it.
The messages kept coming for months. I still think about many of them.
I never planned to write specifically about estrangement. I'd spent years on the science of mental health and where the industry built around it has gone wrong. But I couldn't get the parents' comments and messages out of my head. So I did what I'm trained to do and went looking for the data.
What I found became a book.
Cut Off is out today on Amazon, in paperback and on Kindle.
It isn't a case against therapy.
My wife is a therapist, and so are several people in my family. It's a case against something narrower: a cultural framework that treats family rupture as a form of psychological health. We’ve stretched the vocabulary of abuse and trauma over ordinary family life, and built an industry on validating that framework without checking whether it delivers what it promises.
The research on whether estrangement improves the well-being of those who initiate it is thinner and less encouraging than the industry suggests. The costs to the people left behind have barely been studied at all.
The book covers:
-how estrangement spreads through social networks
-the mental health conditions that estrangement culture can’t name
-what the genetics literature says about where relational difficulty comes from
-how memory behaves under the conditions this culture creates
If you've been affected by estrangement, are part of the conversation in my comments, or shared your story in my inbox over the last 2 years, this book is the long answer to the questions you kept asking. I'd love for you to read it.
Thank you for being here for this. I'm not sure the book would exist without people like you on this list.
Richard
P.S. I would love it if you could write a review for the book on Amazon. It will really help reach more of the people who need to read it.
