Search “toxic parents” on Instagram, and you'll find more than 38,000 posts, largely urging young adults to cut ties with their families. The idea is to protect one's mental health from abusive parents. However, as a psychoanalyst, I've seen that trend in recent years become a way to manage conflicts in the family, and I have seen the steep toll estrangement takes on both sides of the divide. This is a self-help trend that creates much harm.

Research by Karl Pillemer, a family sociologist and professor of human development at Cornell University, indicates that one in four American adults have become estranged from their families. I believe that's an undercount, because others have stopped short of completely cutting off contact but have effectively severed the ties.

“Canceling” your parent can be seen as an extension of a larger cultural trend aimed at correcting imbalances in power and systemic inequality.

Today's social justice values call on us to censure oppressive and harmful figures and to gain power for those who have been powerless. But when adult children use the most effective tool they have — themselves — to gain a sense of security and ban their parents from their lives, the roles are simply flipped, and the trauma only deepens.

Certainly some extreme cases call for cutting parents out of one's life, even if doing so comes at a psychological cost. Far more often, what I see in my practice are cases of family conflict mismanaged, power dynamics inverted rather than negotiated. I see the shattering effect of that trend: scenarios with no winners, only isolated humans who long to be known and feel safe in the presence of the other.

Some of my patients are young adults who decided to end, or are considering ending, their relationships with their parents. They try to process their parents' harmful actions in their childhood, their lack of boundaries, and their narcissistic or intrusive behaviors. Those children struggle with anger, pain and guilt and are often feeling confused and lonely.

In my experience, baby boomer parents are especially troubled. They perceive themselves as products of the 1960s social revolution; many of them rejected their own parents' authoritarian style and followed a parenting approach that at least appeared to prioritize the children's needs.

The vein of online advice about “toxic parents” is a self-help therapy approach that encourages younger people to do the needed emotional work on their own and urges them to reject parental figures altogether.

We're in the era of millennials living in their parents' basements, and also in the era of millennials cutting their parents out of their lives.

What I have found is that most of these families need repair, not permanent rupture. How else can one learn how to negotiate needs, to create boundaries and to trust? How else can we love others, and ourselves, if not through accepting the limitations that come with being human? Good relationships are the result not of a perfect level of attunement but rather of successful adjustments.

Galit Atlas is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Manhattan.