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The Breath Geek, Walnut Creek, CA (2026)

10/28/2026

Fathers are cut off about 4x as often as mothers. 26% of adult children had a period of estrangement from a father, 6% from a mother (Reczek, Stacey & Thomeer, 2023, J Marriage Fam, n=8,119).

5 predictors, weakest first.

5, having a daughter. 28% of daughters had been estranged from their father at some point, against 24% of sons. A real gap but a small one, and it loses significance once everything else is controlled for.

4, the child's sexuality, where the reason matters more than the number. Compared with straight adult children, bisexual ones had nearly 3x the odds of ever being estranged from a father. With mothers, no significant difference. Often the father had not rejected anyone. The child withdrew because of what they expected him to do.

3, re-partnering. Divorced fathers living with a new partner saw their grown children less often than those living alone (Kalmijn, 2015, J Fam Issues). One caveat: it compared different men at 1 point in time, rather than following the same men.

2, divorce. In a German panel of 10,228 people, 20% had a period of estrangement from a father, 9% from a mother (Arránz Becker & Hank, 2022, J Marriage Fam). The mechanism is kin-keeping. In most families the mother maintains the father's relationship with the children, so divorce doesn't just end a marriage, it removes the thing holding that relationship up. That's the likely explanation, not something the study tested.

1, and it's the one that surprised me. Among the strongest predictors in that German data was already being estranged from another parent figure. The researchers call it a crossover. Not 1 broken relationship, a family pattern.

2 things I should add. "Estranged" in this research doesn't mean a permanent cut-off. It means little contact and little closeness at some point. And most of it didn't last: in the American data, 69% of father estrangements had reversed by a later wave.

A predictor tells you where to look. Never who is to blame.

I go deeper into this in my book, Cut Off. Search "Richard L. Blake Cut Off" on amazon.com or amazon.co.uk, or tap the link in my bio.

Comment yes if you've seen this happen in a family you know.

10/23/2026

People are cutting off their parents for failing to follow a parenting style that did not exist when they were children.

Gentle parenting went mainstream somewhere around the mid 2010s. So if you are thirty now, the years your parents were actually raising you ran from the late nineties through the 2000s. Every one of them predates the rulebook. They could not follow a method that had not been written yet.

There is a principle in law for exactly this situation: no punishment without a prior law. You cannot be penalised for breaking a rule that came after the act. It is close to universal, though not quite absolute, and it is extended as a matter of course to people accused of serious crimes. It is not extended to parents.

Here is the part that stings. The people most sure their parents got it wrong are often the ones raising children right now, on an approach that is barely tested under that name. The children raised on it are still children. Nobody will know how it turns out for another twenty years.

Meanwhile the answer has been sitting there since 1966. Diana Baumrind found that the style associated with the best outcomes is neither strict nor soft. It is warm and firm at the same time. High warmth, high standards, both together (Baumrind, 1966, Effects of Authoritative Parental Control on Child Behavior, Child Development, 37(4), 887 to 907).

Warmth without boundaries already has a name in that research. Permissive. It is the pattern linked with poorer self-control in children.

So a generation is punishing its parents for missing an untested method while ignoring sixty years of evidence about what actually works.

Warmth was never the problem. Warmth without a spine is.

This is one of the core arguments in my book, Cut Off. Search "Richard L. Blake Cut Off" on amazon.com or amazon.co.uk, or tap the link in my bio.

Or comment CUTOFF and I'll send you the link.

10/21/2026

A whole generation has been told that an ordinary life counts as failing. That is not a mood. It has been measured.

Between 1989 and 2016, the sense that other people demand perfection of you rose by a third among college students. Researchers call it socially prescribed perfectionism, and it climbed 33 per cent across 41,641 American, Canadian and British students (Curran and Hill, 2019, Perfectionism Is Increasing Over Time, Psychological Bulletin, 145(4), 410 to 429).

Joseph E. Davis, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, hears where that lands. His students tell him that being normal is a failure, that they should be extraordinary.

Older generations had benchmarks you could actually meet. Be a decent partner. Hold down a job. Raise your children. Meet those, and a life counted. Those have gone, and one impossible bar has replaced them. Not exceptional, not rich, not famous, and you are nobody. Against that bar, a normal life looks like losing.

If you were promised extraordinary and you are ordinary, then something must have gone wrong, and the mind goes looking for who. Davis describes it like this: why am I not more than I am becomes a sense of injury, and then "my parents didn't do something for me that they should have done".

The gap between the promised life and the real one lands on the parents. And in a culture that brands cutting off family as healing, the punishment is obvious.

But an ordinary life was never a failure. It is most of human history, well lived. And no parent could have made a child a superstar, because almost nobody is one. That was the lie.

The real damage is not only to the parents who get cut off. It is to a whole generation told that a good, normal life is a verdict against them, and that somebody has to pay for it.

I go deeper into this in my book, Cut Off. Search "Richard L. Blake Cut Off" on amazon.com or amazon.co.uk, or tap the link in my bio.

Comment the word NEWSLETTER and I will send you the sign-up link.

10/16/2026

There is a saying that in a dysfunctional family, the sane one gets made the black sheep. You will see it attributed to Jung, to R. D. Laing, to Krishnamurti, to Bert Hellinger. None of those attributions survive checking. Its origin is unknown, which is worth knowing before you build an identity on it.

The part that is real is older and better documented. Family systems therapists described the identified patient decades ago: a struggling family settles its tension on one member, who carries the symptom for everyone (Vogel & Bell, Psychoanalytic Review, 1960). That is a genuine pattern and it ruins lives.

The problem is what the saying does once you adopt it. If your family says you are the problem, that proves you are the truth teller. If they deny it, that is the cover-up. There is no result that could count against it, which means it can never tell you whether it applies to you.

Now add a measurable trait. Psychologists have described a tendency for interpersonal victimhood: an enduring sense of being wronged across many different relationships, made up of moral elitism, rumination, a need for recognition, and lack of empathy (Gabay, Hameiri, Rubel-Lifschitz & Nadler, 2020, Personality and Individual Differences, 165). It is a measured personality tendency, not a diagnosis, and the authors say it can develop without any history of serious harm.

For someone high in that tendency, the black sheep story fits perfectly. And individual therapy is structurally poor at catching it, because it hears one account, from one person, years after the events.

Here is the test that works. The genuinely scapegoated person can still ask what their own part was. The costume cannot survive that question.

The saying can be true. It just cannot tell you which one you are.

I go deeper into this in my book, Cut Off. Search "Richard L. Blake Cut Off" on amazon.com or amazon.co.uk, or tap the link in my bio.

Comment with the sheep emoji if you have watched this happen.

10/14/2026

The Wall Street Journal asked whether therapists are driving the rise in adults cutting off their parents (Elizabeth Bernstein, Are Therapists to Blame for the Rise of Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?, 21 July 2026).

It reported on two surveys of estranged parents, designed and run by Peter Anderson as part of our work at the Ethical Standards for Mental Health Coalition . We published the data together on the Open Science Framework (Anderson & Blake, 2026, Parental Perspectives on Family Estrangement). Parents were asked whether their child had said therapy influenced the decision about the relationship. A substantial share said yes.

Now the objection, and it is a fair one, so let me make it myself. These are self-selected parents who found the survey through channels for people already looking for answers about estrangement. They were not in the room. They are reporting what they believe happened, and in most cases reporting what their child told them. It is not peer-reviewed, and it cannot show that therapy causes estrangement. The survey says all of that about itself, in writing, on OSF.

What makes it worth talking about anyway is that clinicians have started saying similar things from the other side of the door, on the record, in a national newspaper.

And there is a wider point that does not depend on any survey. Therapy is not free of side effects. In a national survey of people who had used psychological therapy services in England and Wales, 763 of 14,587 reported lasting bad effects, around one in twenty (Crawford et al., 2016, British Journal of Psychiatry, 208(3), 260 to 265).

A therapist hears one side. From one person. Often years after it happened. That is a very thin basis for ending a family.

I go deeper into this in my book, Cut Off. Search "Richard L. Blake Cut Off" on amazon.com or amazon.co.uk, or tap the link in my bio.

Comment NEWSLETTER and I will send you the sign-up link.

10/13/2026

Newsweek ran a piece on adults cutting off family, and I was the expert they interviewed. It's called "More Adults Are Cutting Off Family. Expert Reveals Surprising Consequences."

Here's what I wanted people to take from it.

About one in four American adults are estranged from at least one family member. That's roughly 67 million people (Pillemer, Fault Lines, 2020, Cornell Family Estrangement and Reconciliation Project).

The biggest myth I hear is that you need to cut off toxic family members to protect your mental health.

Family used to be treated as permanent. Now a lot of younger people see a family relationship as something that has to be continually earned.

Some people should be cut off. I told Newsweek estrangement is justified for people who are abusive, criminal or genuinely dangerous. My book is about the much larger group who don't fit that description.

If you want to reconcile, avoid two sentences: "That's not what happened" and "You're remembering it wrong." People need to feel heard and understood, even when you disagree with how they remember events.

I go deeper into this in my book, Cut Off. Search "Richard L. Blake Cut Off" on amazon.com or amazon.co.uk, or tap the link in my bio.

Comment CUTOFF and I'll send you the link.

10/12/2026

Same survey, same question, same description of a person who is basically fine. Ask whether that person is mentally ill and the answer now depends on how old you are.
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The description is deliberately ordinary. Basically happy. The normal ups and downs. A bad day, a passing worry, a dip in confidence.
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Work on what gets called mental illness finds that younger adults hold broader concepts of it than older adults do, and are readier to attach a diagnostic label to someone who is currently well. That evidence comes from a nationally representative Australian survey testing what researchers call the diagnostic expansion hypothesis (Reavley and colleagues).
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Nothing about the worry changed. Only the label did.
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Some of that is worth having. Less shame, more openness. But there is a cost. When a normal bad week gets filed as a mental illness, the word starts to mean everything, and a word that means everything helps no one. The person with mild worry and the person in genuine crisis get the same label, and the crisis gets harder to see.
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Feeling anxious sometimes is part of being alive. It is not a disorder.
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Keeping the word illness narrow is what keeps it strong enough to protect the people who need it.
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Would you call that person mentally ill? Comment yes or no.

10/09/2026

Real Tourette's and TikTok Tourette's do not look the same, and that is the whole story.

A short communication in Comprehensive Psychiatry set out what clinicians in the US, UK, Germany, Canada and Australia had begun seeing: young people arriving with functional tic-like behaviours that do not match classic Tourette's (Haltigan, Pringsheim & Rajkumar, 2023, Comprehensive Psychiatry, 121, 152362).

The differences are specific. Classic Tourette's begins in early childhood, around age six, builds gradually, and improves for most through late adolescence. Functional tic-like behaviours typically begin between twelve and twenty five, arrive abruptly over hours or days, are severe from the start, and tend to affect the upper limbs rather than travelling slowly from the head downwards the way classic tics do. Many of those affected can name the exact day it started.

The same shape has been described for dissociative identity disorder. The clinical model holds that it follows severe, chronic trauma and is extremely rare in children. The online version arrives with systems, alters, names and aesthetics, all performed to camera.

The authors' term for the mechanism is in the title of their paper: psychosomatic social contagion. Symptoms spread through exposure and identity, the same way an accent or a piece of slang spreads.

One credit worth giving: the phrase "TikTok's sick-role subculture" is not theirs. It comes from Harness and Getzen in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (2022), and the Comprehensive Psychiatry paper quotes it.

And this is not about teenagers faking. It is about teenagers expressing real distress in the only language the culture currently rewards. Illness. Identity. A label that makes them visible.

Comment with the brain emoji if you have watched this happen.

10/08/2026

88% of college students admit they fake woke views.

Between October 2023 and March 2025, 1,452 undergraduates at Northwestern and the University of Michigan filled in anonymous paper surveys. 88% agreed with this statement: "I sometimes present my views as more aligned with dominant perspectives than they actually are."

The subjects they kept to themselves most were gender identity (78%), politics (72%) and family values (68%). 82% said they had misrepresented their views in coursework. Only 17% said disagreement was openly encouraged.

The part that surprised me was who was doing it. 67% of the sample described themselves as liberal. Even if every moderate and conservative said yes, at least four in five liberal students must have said yes too. Most of the people faking it were liberal themselves.

The report calls the result integrity fatigue. 72% described feeling numb, 68% confused and 64% anxious.

Now the caveats, and they matter. The survey question doesn't use the word woke. It asks about "dominant perspectives", and the report's own title, Performative Progressivism, is how the authors describe what those are. This is a research report from psychFORM Research Lab, lead author Kevin M. Waldman, and it has not been peer-reviewed. It used a convenience sample at two universities, relied on self-report and did not track response rates. Read it as a strong reason for better research, not the last word.

(Waldman, Performative Progressivism and Integrity Fatigue, psychFORM Research Lab, data collected 2023 to 2025. Romm & Waldman, The Hill, August 2025.)

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10/07/2026

Is a devil born, or is a devil made? Therapy picked an answer, and it picked the wrong one.

We were taught to treat a child like wet cement. Parents press in the shape, and that is who the child becomes. But a child is not blank. Temperament is partly inherited, and a child's nature shapes the parenting it pulls out of the room.

Researchers pooled 32 children-as-twins studies of parenting. Nearly a quarter of the variation in how parents behave, 23%, traced back to the genetically influenced behaviour of the child (Avinun & Knafo, 2014, Personality and Social Psychology Review). A calm baby draws warmth. A difficult, hard-to-soothe one draws sharpness and exhaustion, from even patient adults.

And the same inherited temperament that made the child hard to raise carries its own later risk. Children high in behavioural inhibition were more than seven times as likely to develop social anxiety disorder (Clauss & Blackford, 2012, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry).

Here is where it goes wrong. That difficult child grows up, still struggling, and walks into therapy carrying a story. My parents did this to me. Too often the story is confirmed rather than examined. It feels like an answer. It feels like relief. But the genetics that shaped both the child and the parenting never get mentioned.

So, devil born or devil made? It was never that clean. The nature helped write the nurture.

This does not make every parent innocent or every therapist wrong. Real harm happens and it matters. But when the story only ever ends in your childhood did this, the real engine never gets named.

My book Cut Off is now available on Amazon. Tap the link in my bio to get your copy.

Comment INHERITED if you have seen this in real life.