06/05/2026
Well, it looks like Dr. Ana on YouTube, who has over 660,000 followers, decided to do a 30-minute hit piece about me. You might think I would be offended by this, but I’m actually not. I was telling my wife that I felt quite honored. I also appreciated the fact that she was never personally insulting. After being insulted so much on this platform, I actually found it to be somewhat entertaining.

I knew when I entered this controversial topic that I would receive a lot of pushback. I would encourage you to watch the video yourself and evaluate her claims. Psychology is an interesting field because it’s always evolving. However, I did feel the need to respond.
I may eventually do a point-by-point response to everything she said, but I think I’m going to wait for now. The one issue I did want to address is her claim that personality disorders are caused by trauma. I think this is one of the key distinctions between people who believe in estrangement and those who do not.
When you think about it, if personality disorders are not primarily caused by bad parenting or trauma, then some degree of responsibility has to be placed on the adult child who is making serious claims about how terrible their parents are. It raises the possibility that, in some cases, those conclusions may be the result of a misdiagnosis or misunderstanding.
I’m not saying that all adult children are guilty of this. In fact, when a claim is credible, I’m willing to assume that the problem may have originated with the parent as well. However, I wanted you to know that I wrote Dr. Ana a letter in response to her claim, and I would love your feedback on it.
Here it is:
Dr. Ana,
I saw your video about me and wanted to thank you for the feedback.
If you're interested in where I developed my position on this issue, much of it comes from the work of Joel Paris, particularly his books Myths of Trauma and Nature and Nurture in Personality and Psychopathology. In my opinion, Paris has done some of the most substantial work examining the causes of personality disorders.
I would also note that John Gunderson of Harvard would likely disagree with the claim that BPD simply "comes from trauma," although he did not write on the subject as extensively as Paris. As you might know, Gunderson devoted much of his career to understanding and treating BPD and consistently emphasized its multifactorial origins.
If you'd like to explore Paris's position in more depth, here are two of his papers:
https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/full/10.1521/pedi.1997.11.1.34
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/070674379804300203
In both papers, Paris argues that personality is substantially heritable, that only a minority of patients with severe personality disorders report childhood trauma, and that trauma is best understood within a gene-environment interaction model rather than as a singular explanation.
For what it's worth, I was originally trained within a heavily trauma-focused framework and held that perspective for many years. Much of my early thinking was influenced by Bessel van der Kolk and similar approaches that emphasized trauma as the primary explanatory framework.
What changed my thinking was not ideology but clinical experience.
Over the years, I worked with many families in which parents demonstrated insight, accountability, humility, and a genuine willingness to repair. Yet in some cases, estrangement continued despite those efforts. At the same time, I worked with individuals who came from objectively abusive homes and nevertheless maintained some level of relationship with their parents.
That observation led me to a conclusion that I believe is difficult to ignore:
The existence of trauma does not automatically lead to estrangement, and the existence of estrangement does not automatically prove trauma.
My biggest disagreement with your position is that you appear to treat estrangement as evidence of parental wrongdoing. I do not believe the evidence supports that conclusion.
Estrangement is an outcome. It is not an explanation.
To infer from the existence of cutoff that trauma must have occurred is to assume the very thing that needs to be demonstrated. The question is not whether trauma can lead to estrangement—it absolutely can. The question is whether estrangement itself proves trauma. I do not believe it does.
In my own work, I have seen estrangements emerge for many reasons: personality pathology, substance abuse, untreated mental illness, ideological differences, romantic partner influence, family conflict, identity issues, unresolved grievances, and sometimes genuine abuse. The reality is that multiple pathways can lead to the same outcome.
I recently surveyed more than 7,000 estranged parents. One of the most striking findings was that the overwhelming majority reported attempts to reconnect, apologize, repair, or initiate dialogue, yet 90% reported receiving either no response or openly hostile responses. You may disagree with how that data should be interpreted, but I do not believe it can simply be dismissed by assuming, without further investigation, that the parents must therefore be the cause of the estrangement.
That assumption is precisely what I am questioning.
I am not arguing that parents never cause harm. Of course they do. Nor am I arguing that all estranged parents are innocent victims. What I am arguing is that we should be cautious about adopting a framework in which estrangement itself becomes evidence that one party is morally or psychologically responsible.
From a scientific standpoint, family estrangement remains remarkably understudied. Many of the strongest claims currently being made go far beyond what the evidence can support.
My clinical concern is that cutoff has increasingly become viewed not as a last resort but as a therapeutic intervention in its own right. For example, I have seen cutoff occur because a parent disapproved of substance abuse, because a parent expressed different political beliefs, because a spouse encouraged separation, because of personality pathology, and for many other reasons that cannot be adequately explained by a trauma-only model.
Where I think we may differ is that I am asking what role adult agency, temperament, personality, peer influence, romantic relationships, and genetics play in these outcomes. If the explanation is always parental trauma, then those variables largely disappear from the discussion.
Ultimately, I am less interested in blame than in accuracy.
The question that interests me is not "Which side is the victim?" but rather, "What actually happened?" and "What explanation best accounts for the full range of cases we see in clinical practice?"
That is the question I believe still needs to be answered.
Sincerely,
Peter Anderson, LMFT
Objective: To examine the relationship between trauma in childhood and personality disorders in adulthood. Method: A review of the literature was conducted. R...
