Megxit was a 'transition' not a tantrum. Eric Charbonneau/Archewell Foundation/Getty Images
“Trump is my mother and Vance is a roommate I had once.” The scribblers of the Reddit board “Raised by narcissists” were watching the Ukrainian President receive a tongue-lashing in the Oval Office on Friday. Another concurred: “Every single one of us who has a narcissist in our life just shuddered, gagged a bit, and scheduled our next therapy session.”
For these commiserators, the spectacle of the diminutive President Zelensky being mocked, interrupted and chastised by the saffron-skinned patriarch and his henchman was less a portent of war than a scene from their own childhoods, a cruel jab in the ribs reminding them of their fate as victim. I get it — this presidential shitshow was remarkable. But must they make it about themselves?
Therapy culture’s answer will always be a resounding yes. And its solution to the fraught dynamics of family life is, increasingly, to go “no contact” — a proposal which licensed therapists deny encouraging, but which would-be patients feel empowered to do by the slow bleed of therapyspeak into civilian life. Stories of “breaking up” with abusive family members are juicy gems in American magazines, and the no-contact vogue is everywhere on TikTok, with minor influencers staging extended “storytimes” about how they one day stopped speaking to their sibling. Perhaps relatedly, estrangement is on the rise, with one study in Canada and Australia reporting a “silent epidemic” of broken families.
Cutting people out is also the supreme theme of “Raised by Narcissists”, that doom-laden Reddit board. To read these forums is to dive into the chaotic family lives of strangers, who introduce themselves not with names and jobs but detailed delineations of neuroses. For most, the dreaded narcissist — the supreme enemy of these boards — is within the family itself, and there are plenty of references to “nmother” or “nbrother”. The users speak in the cultish language of someone who spends more on shrink sessions than groceries — the hated “GC” is the golden child; “flying monkeys” are a narcissist’s minions and enablers; “hoovering” is when a narcissist tries to suck you back into their life; and “WOES” means walking on eggshells. The mind boggles.
These posters are paranoid; in the normal, awkward, hurtful, strained dynamics of daily life they see shadows of abuse, diagnosing colleagues and friends and bus drivers with personality disorders. One poster, for whom I feel genuine pity, reports that they “constantly feel like everyone doesn’t like me” or “is talking behind my back”. Another, a 17-year-old girl, reports that her mother “threatened to kill my mental support animal” (she joked, it transpires, about “unaliving” her rabbit). She pleads “am I right to feel hurt?” Once again, the answer is yes, always and forever.
We have all known people who have just had too much therapy. The signs are immediate and alarming: scrutinising the behaviour of others to root around for explanatory trauma; using the language of self-help to excuse bizarre overreactions (“I am just protecting my boundaries,” they say, severing ties with their oldest and dearest companions for not liking their Instagram stories). Constantly referring to the sainted pronouncements of “my therapist”, who becomes an anonymous Eye of Sauron in the lives of entire friendship groups, casting judgements and conjuring diagnoses from on high — usually in favour of the person who pays them.
The therapy often begins for an understandable reason — bereavements, eating disorders, unabating teenage gloom; it then holds the victim’s hand into the following years and decades, it cannot be done without. It provides weekly lessons on the most fascinating subject of all time: yourself. It arms bad daters with good verbiage: “I am struggling with emotional connections,” they say, right after shagging you and right before getting with your friend. And it gives terrible housemates excuses for hogging the drying rack: “I am at capacity right now. Your communication style is overwhelming.” Therapy so often leads us to an inevitable conclusion: that the only way to “protect your peace”, to avoid the natural and normal human experiences of heartbreak, embarrassment and regret, is to go “no contact”.
A fantastic recent episode of This American Life featured a family rocked by their father’s disappearance down an evangelical, pro-Trump conspiracy-theory rabbit hole; after coming out, his daughter quite reasonably cuts him out for telling her that he simply doesn’t believe she is a lesbian, and God would not want that for her. Here, as in countless other stories in the news, on social media and among friends, enforcing “no contact” becomes a major plot point, the terminal stage of a toxic familial relationship. It carries a sense of sacrilege which does not come with the collapse of friendships: blood is thicker than water, we are told. The premium put on family ties probably comes down to this: to reject someone who has known you your entire life is the greatest possible expression of identity, of the triumph of individualism over the tribe.
In America in particular, the family tableau has re-entered political life: close-knit clans like the Trumps and Vances recall the Kennedys’ dreams of Camelot. Meanwhile normal families are increasingly divided along red and blue lines: Marmite MAGA politics drives a wedge between parents and their children, brothers and their sisters. For horrified Harris voters, nixing Republican relatives is a form of resistance.
Often, “no contact” makes complete sense. Nearly every family has an estrangement story — about 25% of people will be estranged from a sibling in their lifetime; about 20% will be estranged from a father, and 9% from a mother. Most children grow up remembering blurred faces of relatives “we don’t speak to”; most absorb the clan lore, most have hazy recollections of shouting in the kitchen, of frosty encounters in the dried goods aisle at M&S. It is nothing new; legendary and irreparable fallings-out are a depressing fact of life. What is new is the prevalence and the intrusion of therapyspeak, which has so completely saturated everyday language that it rolls off the tongues of those who have never seen the inside of a shrink’s office. It started with Boundaries, John Townsend and Henry Cloud’s guide (“Boundaries define us. They define what is me and what is not me,” goes the 1992 bestseller). It ends with baffled septuagenarian parents being iced out by their children for careless comments made 50 years before.
Therapy terms have bled into the general lexicon because they are useful — not because they are particularly understood or relevant or critically considered, but because they confer a sense of saintliness on the doer, giving them the whiff of officialdom. Telling someone to bog off and never darken your door again seems petulant; telling someone that you are “enforcing no contact to protect your boundaries” sounds teacherly, sober and worthy. One only has to think of the ultimate Millennial therapy bro, Prince Harry, who executed the most newsworthy no-contact policy of all time with Megxit: this was described, in the Sussexes’ statement, not as a “sod off” but a “transition” which required “support”.
So often in these narratives, the elderly are shunned for simply being part of a generation which thought differently. For those who grew up in wartime to be asked to understand grandchildren who define themselves principally through psychological labels and neo-identities is absurd. But on a grander scale, the obsessive reinforcement of our individual boundaries, bespoke needs superseding family, friendships and community, is frightening. Therapyspeak’s tendency to favour the patient is a barrier to compassion, and to resilience, which I’m sure qualified therapists resent. Confrontation, and coping with difference and difficulty, is part of life; as families become more polarised, and both the elderly and the young become lonelier, we should surely look to dissolve boundaries, not pile them higher.
Living in the age of “no contact” is confusing. The normalisation of therapy was meant to equip us with a shared framework for understanding the world; it was intended to encourage empathy and self-knowledge. The problem is that the therapy subject is so rarely at fault; to spend any time around someone with BetterHelp brain is to pass the hours with a perennial victim, who is incapable of having a normal argument without needing to use the scaffolding of pop psychology to taxonomise their hurt. We should be wary of any philosophy which tells us always to be on the lookout for emotional abuse, which teaches vigilance instead of resilience. And most of all, we should resist the biggest draw of therapy culture: the delicious appeal of only thinking about ourselves. It makes us bad friends, bad lovers and boring bastards.
“We have all known people who have just had too much therapy”
No Poppy, it’s fair to say we live in very different worlds. Not one of my 10 closest male mid 30s friends have had a therapy session in our lives. Or any member of my family.
“Marmite MAGA politics drives a wedge between parents and their children, brothers and their sisters”
How about deranged Democrat policies drive a wedge between the sane and the terminally deluded
Certainly in my family there is a policy of minimal contact between the rest of us and the rabid socialists
Ah, I get it.
Acutely observed by PS.
There can be few of us who don’t recognise the symptoms described in this essay. Having said that (and as Tolstoy once alluded to, Larkin too) there’s something really awkward about the realisation, often in early adulthood, of the randomness of family dynamics. There’s a great deal of BS in being ensconced with relatives after having flown the nest and experienced life outside that earliest interpersonal dynamic.
Should it result in “no contacting”? Rarely – perhaps only where direct and obvious abuse is concerned. Otherwise, why bother? It just becomes another ‘performative’ thing and PS pretty much nails the narcissism involved.
What makes it insidious, of course, is the Therapy Industrial Complex. There’s skin in the game in outsourcing one’s psychological wellbeing to someone who charges by the hour, in maintaining the sense of victimhood rather than building resilience; and no better way to prolong that dependence than having a client “othering” those with whom they were formerly close.
Yes, it’s all about control, so the quacks can make more money.
I actually did spend a little time on raised by narcissists after my wife cut her mother off for a few years (controlling behaviour, alcoholism, never her fault etc) to see if there was anything to gauge on there. I suspect it started out as a refuge for those with genuine arseholes for parents, but now it seems like it was taken over by people who are less than completely innocent themselves. In a way, them making everything about themselves is fairly narcissistic to put it mildly as per the Trump vs Zelensky incident last week. A short summary of the internet I suppose.
It’s the metoo phenomena, in the broad sense. As soon as a new form of victimhood starts to get traction everybody wants to jump on board.
I watched a therapist recently describe much of this type of behaviour as ‘toxic empathy’, which is mostly ‘female coded’. They’re all affirming each other, being ‘kind’ but ignoring and pushing away hard truths. It is narcissism, but fairly shallow form of it. Perhaps it is a product of social alienation and loneliness in our increasingly disembodied world.
I think it’s been going on forever, but now it has a patina of virtue.
None of us heard from a sibling for years, until he turned up with parental sex abuse allegations via a therapist he hired to help ‘recover memories’. The ‘therapy’ bit was the added bit of spice that makes it a 2020s tragedy rather than one from the century prior. The ‘no-contact’ he’d been doing anyway, was now official and explicable – to him, anyway.
Where a falling-out is part of a ridiculous re-invention, it can be very dangerous . . . if reality will not co-operate with your ‘New You’, your internal self-story no longer coheres – and that only ends one way. And there’ll be no family around to dissuade you.
I think the only response I have to this is: one should limit one’s exposure to Reddit. It’s useful in a lot of ways, but there are some real nutters on there.
I often think that it must be exhausting to be a young person who is bought into all this identitarian nonsense.
To be constantly “checking ones privilege”, “doing the work” and “being their authentic self”. Permanently on the lookout for micro-aggressions while personally terrified of cancellation for any minor transgression from accepted creed. All the while coping with the massive cognitive dissonance of pretending to believe things which you must know are simply not true.
No wonder they seem so angry and upset all the time.
Yes, who would have thought that the desire to be tolerant would lead to so much intolerance?
Ironically they don’t do any actual physical or otherwise useful work. Though I agree it must be exhausting.
Use language like this, ugly and profane. and you will be no-contacting your readership.
But really who reads Unherd anyway? Reduce the quality of debate suits a lot peolpe. That’s bad for us all.
Ms Sowerby. Love the last sentence. You have summed yourself up perfectly, .
I thought it was a great sentence.
In Bad Therapy Abigail Shrier’s devastating indictment of our ever expanding Mental Health Industrial Complex…..one that medicalises everything and anything that used to be seen as just the trials and tribulations of life’s rich tapestry… she tells how she took her ten-year-old son to a clinic for help with a stubborn stomach ache only to find him assailed with survey questions like: “1.In the past few weeks, have you wished you were dead? 2.In the past few weeks, have you felt that you or your family would be better off if you were dead? Etc etc
“When I was growing up in the ’50s there were still some remnants of the old Christian moral sense that everyone (including oneself) has a Good Side and a Bad Side. Key to the unravelling of this has been the entry into the the Western collective psyche of a supposed deficit of self love….one that needs correcting via the pop-therapeutic embrace of something called Self Esteem. In the post-60’s decades, self-esteem’s central importance to healthy personal development became axiomatic right across the moral/philosophical spectrum from Left to Right. So much so that the potential adverse consequences of ‘liberating’ this self-esteem from its more self-deprecating sister concepts self criticism and personal responsibility rarely featured in our late 20th century Western moral/philosophical discourse. And once you are encouraged to view yourself as axiomatically personally blameless, the next step is to look for someone (or something) else to blame for each and every one of your discontents. Re-cast your wonderful self as a ‘victim’. Ooh that feels nice!…..now where’s my therapist…and who needs to be cancelled?” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/has-liberalisms-flame-burned-too
This is great. And picks up on a theme Josh Schrei dealt with last year on The Emerald podcast, around psychology-speak and over-individualism. “The Revolution will not be Psychologized” https://open.spotify.com/episode/3e5bkfY8mCsdhb9H39dHmy?si=czl5JMdHQ3WE_FsSM84YvQ&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A1OwFblqZ7FIkLSW4rvbJEF
Damn what trenchant substance…
Perhaps modernity has given us tools and time to allow ourselves to spiral down our own throats and exit the other end…
I have a very large extended family and last year one of my cousins announced she was getting divorced, but not to worry, she was putting her two teenaged sons into therapy so they properly cope with the divorce. Her two sons play sports and are in the arts as well and seemed like normal teenaged boys, so a lot of us in the family thought shoving them into therapy as a preventative treatment was foolish. We’re concerned therapy is going to make it harder for them to assimilate into adulthood. My parents got divorced too so I know it sucks, but unless kids are behaving in antisocial ways, they shouldn’t be put into therapy.
”raised by narcissists” do seem as if they fit the category description fairly precisely themselves
The apples falling not far from the trees.
Reading this, I kept thinking of a routine by stand-up comic Samantha Day: “My daughter’s one of them millennials. You know, ‘I’m not very well’. One of those.”
“The users speak in the cultish language of someone who spends more on shrink sessions than groceries”: it definitely reminds me of the type of conversations often heard on the tube between patriarchy/systemic racism-aware teenage girls…
It is easy to look in on other people’s lives and experiences and think they are overdoing things. Maybe they are. But perhaps it is at least better to have a safe place for people to discuss issues of estrangement and family hurt, rather than to have no place at all to vent those feelings and to have a 50’s plastered-on grin of familial Utopia stretched tightly across one’s face. I had to go ‘no contact’ from my family nearly 40 years ago, but I certainly didn’t call it that. I didn’t speak about it, there was no where that I could. Everyone assumed I had a family just like everyone else, so I never mentioned it. I knew there was a huge hole in my life, but at least I could deal with that, it was within my own power, unlike the experiences I had had before I extricated myself. But there was the double pain of being separated from everyone else’s experiences of happy Xmas’s and birthdays, and regular family get-togethers or holidays. Not having an inner circle you could turn to for support made life very difficult. I used to look at quiz shows and the like and think ‘well, I can’t go on those, as I don’t have family members I can bring along for support like everyone else’… might sound trivial to someone who hasn’t lived it, but it wasn’t to me. I guess some people may do this as part of a trend, but for many this is a decision born out of necessity in order to survive. It is an extremely difficult thing to do, and not one I did lightly.
Hear, Hear!!! Well said, Poppy!
” .. the spectacle of the diminutive President Zelensky being mocked, interrupted and chastised by the saffron-skinned patriarch and his henchman was less a portent of war than a scene from their own childhoods …”
More like their own adulthoods, when they were finally cornered by their parents, asked what they had done through their years living off their parents while nominally taking a university degree and now being told that they would have to support themselves. Zelensky and the Ukraine have lived off the support of the US and others, until forced to do so had expressed no gratitude and were now being told that support would be withdrawn.
Give up therapy for Lent!
Poppy and the delicate art of not making a lick of sense.
If these people truly were “raised by narcissists”, then the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, did it?
Thanks for a great article, Poppy.
Let’s face it, a lot of families have assholes in them. I walked away many years ago and never felt a pang.
My daughter has not replied to my wife or I for seven years. Prior to that we had what seemed to be an excellent relationship. Then she left her partner came home with stories of severe abuse, after two weeks she went back to him and the seperation began taking her three children our grandchildren with her. Recently she sent my wife a text telling her that ‘she was bought up believing that she was not wanted and that I (her father), had never wanted her or our grandchildren, that I was controlling and that my wife should get away from me. Seven years of bereavement, the loss of our daughter and our grandchildren and she clearly believes it to be our doing, our choice. This is not separation it is akin to a death, a living death with no ending,l (other than death itself). This is not an flippant situation there is no humour in this, such separation in soul destroying, is likely deadly. I would not wish this on anyone. Wishes of health and peace to all, William
William, I’m going through something similar, so my heart hurts for you and your wife. It IS like a living death without the closure of a funeral, the kindness of casseroles, or unequivocal sympathy of friends (many of whom, like Job’s friends, ask what we must have done to cause this). Instead, there is more isolation because of my real or imagined fear of judgment. I am moving on but unlike an actual death, I still have hope, praying that someday like in the story of the Prodigal Son, I will someday see my daughter walking down the road back home. I will gladly run down to meet her.
People make their own bed. Sleeping in it is their reward.
The vast majority of therapists are liberal. And liberals tend to be much more partisan than conservatives. They also tend to encourage a victimhood mentality. My advice- if you want a cohesive family stay clear of therapy.
Poppy is a tad confused. First of all narcissism is a psychiatric symptom, not a diagnosis. It is a set of behaviours that occurs amongst others in both psychopathy and sociopathy. Moreover those two diagnoses overlap conceptually. The symptom of narcissism also features in people with borderline personality disorders, another set of diagnoses with overlap involving the first two.
People with all of these conditions are usually very hard to be around, and cause a lot of pain those they interact with regularly. Often the only way to deal with such people is to set boundaries that may not be crossed. Sometimes it requires severing all contact. These are practical survival techniques and have nothing to do with therapy. Unfortunately therapy often fails to recognise danger, and avoidable harm is the result.
This piece muddles the effects of cod psychology in its wide application with the need to protect against the predation of a tiny minority of really nasty people.
I have a good friend (divorced) of 50 years whose children summarily eliminated him from their lives simply because he expressed support for the outcome of the Brexit referendum in the UK – and they were vehemently against it. Since then they have rebuffed his attempts, with extreme mental cruelty, to re-establish the relationship with them (and his granddaughter). The generation represented by his awful children has a lot to answer for in terms of their capacity for swift cancellation and adherence to the cruelty of the DEI philosophy. His children certainly fall into the ‘ Narcissist’ category. He, poor fellow, has been seriously injured psychologically by his ghastly offspring. Frankly, he is better off without them. He is slowly groping his way to the same conclusion. It has been painful to witness such an honourable and decent man treated in this manner.
“saffron-skinned patriarch”
Nice bit of virtue-signalling there, Poppy!