Bubble Trouble: What the 'No Contact' Surge Tells Clinicians About Individualism and the Fractured Person

A young adult arrives for a session and mentions, almost in passing, that she has not spoken to her mother in three years. She uses the phrase clinicians now hear with some regularity: "I went no contact." She reports feeling clearer, lighter, free. The presenting complaint is anxiety. The deeper story is a severed bond she has come to understand as self-care.

This is the human moment at the center of Noelle Mering's forthcoming book, No Contact, which the National Catholic Register covered in a July 2026 interview.[^1] Mering argues that the accelerating rate at which young adults permanently cut ties with family is not primarily a psychological event but a cultural one, and she has a specific image for what's actually happening. It isn't a healthy immune response, clearing out something genuinely toxic. It's an autoimmune disorder: the system has lost the ability to distinguish normal familial friction from real abuse, and it attacks both the same way.[^1]

For clinicians working from a Catholic Christian anthropological orientation, the book raises a clinical question that is structural rather than anecdotal. When a client presents estrangement as growth, what exactly is the practitioner assessing?

The diagnostic gap individualism creates

The dominant therapeutic culture surrounding "no contact" draws heavily on trauma-informed language. Clients arrive having already self-diagnosed a parent as narcissistic or toxic, often after months in online communities where cutting off family is normalized as boundary-setting. The presenting emotional relief is real. That relief does not settle the anthropological question.

Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, in A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, ground personhood in a structure that is irreducibly relational.[^2] The person is constituted, in part, by the bonds she participates in, not a sovereign individual who constructs relationships voluntarily and dissolves them at will. Family membership belongs to this constitutive layer. Estrangement from parents reorganizes something near the center of what the person is; it is not simply a lifestyle adjustment.

This is not an argument against ever limiting contact with a genuinely harmful family member. Abuse and real danger are clinical facts. The diagnostic issue is narrower: when a client presents family estrangement as self-actualization, the clinician faces a category error the dominant therapeutic framework is poorly equipped to name. The Catholic Christian clinician has a framework that can.

What Mering's argument hands the practitioner

The distinction matters clinically. If estrangement rates are rising because families are objectively worse, the clinical task is trauma processing. If they are rising because the cultural grammar for interpreting family conflict has shifted toward what Mering calls an "empowerment delusion," the belief that a person can determine the meaning of every relationship by will alone, the clinical task includes formation: helping the client build a more accurate account of what she is and what familial bonds cost and give.

Jacques Maritain, in The Person and the Common Good, draws a line between the individual and the person.[^3] The individual is the atomized self, existing in competition with others for resources, including emotional ones. The person is a being ordered toward communion, whose flourishing is inseparable from giving and receiving within a network of real, particular relationships. Mering's individualism is Maritain's individual writ large across a generation.

The clinician working from this distinction can begin to ask: Is the client's estrangement a response to genuine danger, or the logical outcome of an anthropology she has absorbed that defines freedom as the elimination of obligation?

Practical clinical moves

Assess the anthropology before assessing the injury. Before accepting a client's relational history at face value, the practitioner maps the framework the client is using to interpret it. Clients who have spent significant time in online "no contact" communities often arrive with a pre-formed narrative: parent as pathological, self as victim, separation as the only therapeutic option. The clinician's task is to hold that narrative with genuine openness while noting its intellectual genealogy. A useful question: "What would it mean for you if some of what you carry from your family was worth keeping?" The question doesn't refute the client's pain. It opens the possibility that inheritance and harm are not the same category.

Distinguish the fallen condition from culpable behavior. The Catholic Christian Meta-Model distinguishes the Created, Fallen, and Redeemed states of the person.[^2] In the Fallen state, every family member, including parents, operates under the pressure of disordered desire: concupiscence, self-protection, the tendency to prioritize the self over the other. A parent who was emotionally withholding, inconsistent, or self-absorbed may not have been malicious; she may have been wounded. The clinician who introduces this distinction opens a therapeutic register the trauma-only framework closes off: the possibility of understanding a parent as fallen rather than monstrous, and of grief rather than severing as the appropriate response. This doesn't collapse genuine abuse into moral equivalence. It gives the client a third option between idealization and condemnation, which is where most real family histories actually live.

Work the loss, not just the relief. Clients who have gone no contact frequently report short-term relief. That relief is real, but clinicians who treat it as sufficient miss what comes after: the structural absence of people who, whatever their failures, are bound to the client by something older and denser than preference. The grief that surfaces months or years into estrangement often does so precisely because the client has no framework for it. She was told she would feel free. She does, sometimes. She also feels the absence of something she cannot name.

The Catholic Christian practitioner can name it: the loss of a particular form of belonging that no friendship or chosen community fully replaces, because it is belonging by nature rather than by will. Helping the client grieve that loss, rather than pathologizing the longing for it, is a concrete clinical contribution the dominant therapeutic framework rarely offers.

The cultural formation question clinicians carry

Mering's book is addressed to a cultural audience. Its clinical application is narrower but no less serious. The therapeutic culture surrounding family estrangement has developed its own vocabulary, its own authorities, its own account of what healing looks like. That account is coherent, and shaped by an anthropology Catholic Christian practitioners have specific reasons to examine carefully.

A person is most fully herself when the loves she bears and receives are ordered well, not when she has minimized obligation and maximized autonomy. Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 101, locates the virtue of pietas precisely in this ordered love toward family and origin: not blind loyalty, but the proper honoring of those to whom one is bound by nature.[^4] When that ordering is damaged, repair requires more than emotional validation. It requires accompaniment toward a richer account of what the person is.

Clinicians who carry that account into the room are offering, as Maritain would say, the resources of the person to the individual who has forgotten she is one.

References

[^1]: Flores, G. (2026, July 20). How the 'no contact' phenomenon may point to a broader societal breakdown. National Catholic Register. https://www.ncregister.com/interview/noelle-mering-on-the-how-the-no-contact-phenomenon; Mering, N. (2026). No Contact: How a Seductive Ideology Broke Families and Friendships and How We Can Repair Them. Penguin Random House. (Sept. 8, 2026.)

[^2]: Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration of psychology and philosophy within a Catholic Christian anthropology. Divine Mercy University Press.

[^3]: Maritain, J. (1947). The person and the common good (J. J. Fitzgerald, Trans.). Charles Scribner's Sons.

[^4]: Aquinas, T. (1947). Summa theologiae (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Benziger Bros. II-II, q. 101.