Hey {{ first_name | Reader }},
I read a doctoral dissertation this week. Don’t tune out just yet.
A counsellor named Taylor Bourque from the University of Holy Cross in New Orleans interviewed 8 married millennial mothers who had gone no-contact with their parents (Bourque, 2026). Borque wanted to understand the cutoff from their side. One of the themes she pulled out of those interviews caught my attention.
She called it "Cycles of Reconnection and Leverage."
The millennial mothers described reaching back out to their parents, but with conditions. The reconnection happened when there was something to gain or something to extract. When that ran out, they cut contact again. Bourque also describes a pattern of using grandchildren as leverage points in the reconnection (Bourque, 2026).
I want to be careful sharing this information with you, {{ first_name | Reader }}. And here’s why:
A dissertation is not the highest standard of evidence. This is one researcher, eight participants, and no control group.
But this caught my attention because it is the first time I have seen an academic source describe, from the adult child's own mouth, the exact pattern that parents on the other side of this have been describing to me in my Instagram comments section for a long time.
It is also a clue about what might actually be driving a chunk of the cutoff trend.
When you watch the comments on my reels, and I read almost all of them, a lot of the cutoffs are not happening because something terrible occurred.
They are happening because of:
A “vibe.”
A read on a tone of voice or an interpretation of a look.
A feeling that mum is being passive-aggressive when mum is actually just tired.
The problem with vibe-based decisions is that vibes are filtered through whoever is doing the reading. And a person's ability to read a vibe accurately is not evenly distributed.
There is a decent body of research showing that people with traits common in Cluster B personality disorders, like borderline personality disorder, systematically misread neutral expressions as hostile.
In eye-tracking studies, patients with borderline personality disorder are more likely than controls to label a neutral face as angry, and they direct their gaze toward the eyes faster, scanning for a threat that isn't there (Bertsch et al., 2017; Seitz et al., 2021). It's not malice. It's a perceptual bias.
The same group of traits is associated with black-and-white thinking. The technical name is “splitting,” where a person flips between "you're wonderful" and "you're toxic" with very little in between (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). One missed call, and a parent who was fine yesterday is now a narcissist.
If you start with a slightly hot threat detector, then add a culture that hands you the word "toxic,” and toss in a therapeutic vocabulary that teaches you to read every difficult interaction as abuse, what do you get?
You get a generation of people cutting off parents based on vibes rather than reality.
And then, per Bourque's dissertation, reconnecting on transactional terms when something is needed.
What I find moving about Bourque's work is that the adult children in her study are probably not bad people. They are doing something coherent, given how they perceived their childhoods. But it is also true that some of those perceptions, examined from the outside, look like the perceptions of someone whose threat detector and binary thinking are running ahead of the actual evidence.
That tension is what I am writing about in my upcoming book, Cut Off. If you know a parent who is being treated like this, send them this email so they can feel heard and validated. It might be the first time they hear that they are not imagining the pattern.
As you may know, a lot of these issues are being driven downstream by bad practices within the mental health profession. I am now the Vice President of a coalition of concerned professionals who are trying to steer mental health services back in an evidence-based direction. It is called Ethical Standards for Mental Health. You can support us by volunteering or donating to our cause.
Take a breath,
Richard
The best HR advice comes from those in the trenches. That’s what this is: real-world HR insights delivered in a newsletter from Hebba Youssef, a Chief People Officer who’s been there. Practical, real strategies with a dash of humor. Because HR shouldn’t be thankless—and you shouldn’t be alone in it.
References
American Psychiatric Association (2022) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th edn, text revision. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association Publishing.
Bertsch, K., Krauch, M., Stopfer, K., Haeussler, K., Herpertz, S.C. and Gamer, M. (2017) 'Interpersonal threat sensitivity in borderline personality disorder: an eye-tracking study', Journal of Personality Disorders, 31(5), pp. 647–670. doi:10.1521/pedi_2017_31_273.
Bourque, T.M. (2026) The impact of no-contact: understanding how Millennial married mothers navigate parental estrangement. PhD dissertation. University of Holy Cross, New Orleans.
Coleman, J. (2021) Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict. New York: Harmony Books.
Seitz, K.I., Leitenstorfer, J., Krauch, M., Hillmann, K., Boll, S., Ueltzhoeffer, K., Neukel, C., Kleindienst, N., Herpertz, S.C. and Bertsch, K. (2021) 'An eye-tracking study of interpersonal threat sensitivity and adverse childhood experiences in borderline personality disorder', Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation, 8(2). doi:10.1186/s40479-020-00141-7.
