"It's not my mental health tearing us apart. It's your lack of accountability."

3 Little Epiphanies

1. It's normal to not want to be in a romantic relationship with someone who has major ideological and value differences. This doesn't mean you can't "tolerate different beliefs." You typically want to do more than just tolerate your partner or spouse.
2. Your estranged family member may have mental health issues, this isn't always the reason for their estrangement. Solely blaming their mental health may actually be how the family is avoiding any accountability. More on this below.
3. Some people won't get help for their mental health because they don't want to identify with someone in their family who is "sick" and has gotten treatment. They would rather suppress and avoid than admit they need help.

"David’s family continues to tell anyone who will listen that David has simply “drifted away from God” and isn’t well. They blame therapists and social media. In their opinion, there is no way David made this decision based on their behavior. They do this so they can avoid any reflection or accountability. If they see David as the problem, they can be the victims who are protecting themselves from his behavior. By involving their community in these discussions, they’re clearly trying to craft a narrative that makes David the villain and them the victim."

When Your Family Blames Your Mental Health For The Estrangement

Client: David, 45-year-old male. Tampa, FL

Presenting Concern:​ Estranged from his family because of repeated boundary violations, disapproval of his partner, and conflict over religious differences. The family is engaging in a smear campaign.

Current treatment focus: ​Learning to tolerate being misunderstood, accepting his family members, building self-esteem, and grieving the loss of a family unit.

David sat in my office, his phone buzzing in his lap. Another text from an old family friend—“David, your mother is worried about you. Can’t you just talk to them?”He exhaled sharply and locked the screen without responding. It was the same story over and over. It wasn't an impulsive decision when he chose to step away from his family a year ago. It came after years of exhausting fights, broken boundaries, and the crushing weight of their disapproval—of his partner, his beliefs, and his choices.

David started therapy with me after initiating some boundaries with his parents. He wasn’t fully estranged from the family. He was trying to identify how he could be in a relationship with his partner and engage with religion in a way that made sense for him while maintaining a relationship with his parents.

He tried to explain and make them see that he wasn’t rejecting them. He just wanted to live his life on his terms. But they couldn’t hear him. Instead, they had to turn him into a villain.

Now, they told anyone who would listen that he was unstable, that he was lost. They painted him as someone who had been “led astray,” someone who was mentally unwell, not someone who had simply set limits. The smear campaign stung, not because it was true, but because it erased the years of pain he had endured.

In therapy, we’re working on living with being misunderstood and accepting that his family’s version of the story might never match his reality. Some days, that knowledge crushed him. Other days, it felt like freedom.

He was learning to grieve the family he wished he had rather than trying to force them to become something they weren’t. He was learning that self-worth couldn’t come from the approval of people who refused to see him. And he was slowly learning that it was okay to build a new kind of family—with people who allowed him to be who he was.