Hi {{ first_name | default: "Reader" }},
Newsweek ran a piece on the book this weekend. Daniella Gray interviewed me for a story on why more adults are cutting off family (Gray, 2026), and the line she led with is the one I hear most from people in this situation:
"One of the main myths you hear is you need to cut off toxic family members to protect your mental health."
I also made a point I make in the book. Cutting some people off is exactly right. In my words to Newsweek, that means those "who are abusive, criminal or genuinely dangerous." The book is about the much larger group who don't fit that description, and what the research says about how those families find their way back.
Then I did the thing you should never do. I opened Newsweek's Instagram post about the article and read the comments.
You can probably guess them. “This is rage bait”. “This is a bad idea”. “Good that people are cutting off their abusers”. Plus the usual comments making fun of how I look or speak.
I didn't reply to any of them, so you get the reply instead.
Nobody is arguing that people should stay in contact with someone who abused them. I said the opposite to Newsweek, and I say it in the book. The argument is about what now counts as abuse, and that has changed a great deal in a short time.
Nick Haslam, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne, calls this concept creep (Haslam, 2016). Abuse once meant physical and sexual harm. The concept then widened sideways to take in emotional abuse and neglect, and downwards to take in milder and milder versions of each. Haslam warns that a definition stretched this far becomes overinclusive, and that once abuse rests on the self-identified victim's perception, people can apply it to interactions that look innocuous to anyone watching from outside.
That is what I see in the estrangement stories that reach my inbox. A mother who bought the wrong-sized clothes for her child. A father who criticized a bad relationship or a bad financial decision. A parent with a difficult personality who made for a difficult house to grow up in. Parents have done every one of those things for as long as there have been parents. What changed is the label. Once the culture files a parent's behavior as abuse, the prescribed response is no contact.
So when a commenter says it's good that people cut off their abusers, I agree with them. We're just not talking about the same people.
A couple of book reviews landed that helped me to move on from the haters. One reader kept it to four words: "Your book is gold." Another sent this:
"I purchased and read your new book. In my opinion, it is the most consequential and helpful book I've read. I think I've read every published book on estrangement, and yours gets to the heart of this societal issue. Thank you for sharing your wisdom."
Cut Off is now out on Amazon, in paperback and Kindle formats.
If you're in the middle of this yourself, the comments section is not where the answers are. The book is my best attempt at putting them in one place.
Hold steady,
Richard
P.S. If you've already read it and it helped, a review on Amazon takes two minutes and does more for the book than anything I can do from here.
I wrote the book, so I earn from every copy sold. There are no affiliate links in this email.
References
Gray, D. (2026) 'More adults are cutting off family. Expert reveals surprising consequences', Newsweek, 10 October. Available at: https://www.newsweek.com/more-adults-cutting-off-family-experts-reveal-consequences-12505106 (Accessed: 12 October 2026).
Haslam, N. (2016) 'Concept creep: psychology's expanding concepts of harm and pathology', Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), pp. 1–17. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2016.1082418