Even in therapy fashion trends come and go. In the 1980s psychologists’ obsession with pedophilia resulted in a family’s destruction. A parent lodged a complaint against the grandson of the owner of the McMartin daycare center in Los Angeles, occupying a building with a glass front facing a busy street. In spite of this child’s inability to identify the putative molester, hysteria ruled and the police sent a terrifying letter to McMartin parents, urging them to question their children about possible misconduct. Psychologists joined the mob and soon between 41 and 48 children were at the center of what became 400 counts of child abuse. Coercive and and/or suggestive questioning resulted in fanciful stories involving bizarre forms of satanic worship and even torture—all without evidence beyond the word of a child who had been led into fabrication.

None of it was true.

None. 

In the 1990s, therapists got behind the “recovered memory” phenomenon. Women across the country suddenly recalled childhood abuse. Therapists began searching for such memories whenever a woman presented with depression or other forms of mental distress. Yet simple memory, even a day later, isn’t reliable. Anyone who’s played the game Telephone knows this. The mind isn’t a camera. It’s a selective and biased witness. While it’s entirely possible, even likely, that some women’s experience of abuse was so extreme, their minds protected them by burying the memory, this phenomenon—like the multiple personality phenomenon—is quite rare. Yet at that time recovered memories became commonplace. Coffee klatches were spiced by dubious accounts of what had happened when someone was two or three years old.

Today therapists are boosting the idea of the toxic parent and urging their clients to distance themselves from these monsters. In many cases the “monster” is simply someone who tried to do his or her best, but fell down now and then from being human. The majority of these parents didn’t beat their children or intentionally psychologically damage them. But therapists are telling troubled clients bumbling parents are the source of their misery and must be cut off.

Gone is the need to “work through” anger. Gone is a structure for accepting responsibility and therefore empowering the self. As Sigmund Freud stigmatized mothers by making them the source of all angst, this form of therapy does its adherents and clients no favors, depriving them both of understanding the limitations of human parenting and finding their own way into adulthood. In place of these strengths, the client is offered the crutch of blame.

Most of all, this approach shatters the safety net an ordinary family provides. At a point in our history when community has become a failed dream, it seems especially tragic that this tiniest form of unity too often succumbs as well.

DISCLAIMER: In writing this, I do not minimize the existence of abusive and/or toxic parents. Distancing one’s self from a toxic relationship can be absolutely necessary to psychological health. 

I’m talking only about people cutting off ties with loving parents who are not sabotaging their adult child.