Cutting off a parent used to be a quiet decision made behind closed doors. Now it comes with a hashtag, a shared vocabulary, and a big online following.

Therapists are sounding an alarm that the trend may be pushing families apart over wounds that could still heal. The warning is that some of the hurt behind these splits is not necessarily permanent, and that a movement built around ending contact can make repair harder to reach.

Videos tagged #nocontact have reportedly drawn about 1.9 billion views on TikTok. The coverage also includes first-person essays, the kind of personal accounts that help explain why someone decided to step away from a parent.

Estrangement is not new. Families have always had painful splits, and many of them stayed private for years. What has changed is the language. Online, a difficult choice can be packaged as a identity, a community, and a set of phrases that make it feel common and easy to explain.

That shift is the heart of the debate. Supporters of cutting off toxic relatives see the trend as a way for people to protect their peace. Critics, including the therapists quoted in the reporting, worry that a viral label can turn a complicated, emotional decision into a default one.