They Think You Got This From TikTok

There's an argument about us being made in rooms we're never going to sit in, in journals written for judges and lawyers and mediators, and it goes like this. Estrangement is up because people are more selfish than they used to be, because a generation learned words like narcissist and boundaries and toxic from their phones and started using them on mothers who were only giving unwanted advice, or voting differently, or being disappointing in the ordinary way parents are. Most of what gets complained about online isn't abuse at all, the argument goes, it's rules and expectations and hurt feelings, and a generation raised to chase its own happiness is throwing away people earlier generations would have found difficult and kept anyway.

It goes further than that. Some therapists, the argument says, have gotten into the business of helping women detach, easing the guilt a daughter feels about leaving when that guilt was telling her something true, taking her sense of responsibility and calling it codependence or enmeshment or over-functioning until it goes away. So the guilt was information, and somebody with a license talked her out of listening to it.

Notice where that leaves us. Feel guilty and the guilt proves we were wrong. Don't feel guilty and we've been coached out of a conscience by a therapist and the internet. There's no way for our feelings to come out in our favor, which usually means somebody started at the answer and worked backward.

Your relatives have picked up the popular form of it, which is why you keep hearing that you got this from the internet. Your aunt says therapy makes people selfish. Your brother says everybody's a narcissist now. Somebody says nobody in this family ever went around cutting people off, as though the absence of a word for something in 1974 proves it wasn't happening in 1974. None of them has ever asked what happened, not one, and that's the part to notice, because they have an explanation for you that requires no information at all about your mother.

Some of it is fair. Plenty of estrangements are not about abuse. People leave over politics, over religion, over a husband who was never accepted, over years of small deflating conversations, and the political ruptures in particular went up sharply after 2016 and again after 2024. A word can also do more than it should, calling a difficult woman a narcissist can turn a complicated relationship into a settled question and stop a daughter from thinking about it any further. And some women leave and later wish they'd tried something smaller first.

But a daughter who reads about emotional neglect and recognizes her own childhood didn't get the childhood from the article, she got the words for it. They came from a screen because nobody in her family described anything to anybody. No one at that table was going to hand her language for what was happening at that table, so she found it somewhere else, which is not the same as being talked into something.

And none of it has anything to do with what leaving actually took. Nobody decides this over a weekend after watching a video, it takes years. Four days of vacation moving her out of the apartment she got evicted from. Whole afternoons on hold with her insurance company. Leaving work early often enough that a manager started asking about it. Most of us tried the smaller things first, seeing her only in restaurants, keeping it to phone calls, the one direct conversation where we said exactly what we needed and were told we were dramatic.

People like this explanation because it's comfortable. If we left because of therapy culture then nothing happened, nobody has to reconsider a woman they've known for fifty years, and the family goes on as it was. If we left because of what she did, then some of them stood next to it for decades and said nothing, and a few of them did well out of it. Most people will take the story that lets them keep their Sunday dinners.

So when your uncle tells you that you got this from the internet, he's handed you something you can't win, because anything you say next confirms it for him. You don't have to play. You can say you're not discussing it, and then say nothing else.