When People Become Pathogens

How Moral Certainty Turns Relationships into Contamination

---

There is a recurring move in human history that feels both ancient and uncomfortably current, one that reliably reappears whenever societies grow morally certain while remaining psychologically anxious.

We take people who are inconvenient, destabilizing, or difficult to integrate into a preferred moral narrative and begin to reframe them not merely as wrong or limited, but as dangerous to be near, as though proximity itself carries risk. Once this shift occurs, the ordinary moral restraints that govern human behavior begin to loosen, as distance is reframed as virtue, exclusion is justified as care, and acts that would otherwise be recognized as harmful are recast as necessary forms of prevention, allowing those who participate in the exclusion to experience themselves not as cruel, but as morally responsible, even righteous.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

If this feels familiar, it should.

As a psychotherapist, one of our central tasks is to notice patterns, especially those that repeat across time, context, and ideology, changing their language to suit the era while leaving their structure intact. When you study human behavior long enough, clinically and historically and relationally, you begin to recognize certain moral reflexes that never disappear. They simply adapt.

When Abstraction Becomes a Person

It is one thing to describe these dynamics in the abstract and another to encounter them where history always reveals their true cost, in the life of a particular person.

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thousands of women in Ireland and the United Kingdom were confined to institutions known as the Magdalene Laundries. These women were not imprisoned for violent crimes. Many were sent there for being unmarried and pregnant, for being sexually active, for being considered morally troublesome, or simply for being inconvenient to their families.

What matters most for our purposes is not only what happened inside these institutions, but how the decision to send women there was justified. Families were often told this was for the woman’s own good, a chance for reform, protection, or moral restoration. Distance was framed as care, isolation was presented as compassion, exile was treated as virtue.

Once inside, women were stripped of their names, denied contact with loved ones, subjected to forced labor, and deprived of any meaningful avenue for explanation, protest, or repair. Their humanity was not violently erased in a single moment. It was slowly dissolved under a moral framework that insisted their removal was necessary and right.

What is haunting about the Magdalene Laundries is not only the cruelty, but the sincerity with which it was administered. Many believed they were acting responsibly, even lovingly. The women themselves were framed as the problem, as morally destabilizing, as something that could not be safely integrated into ordinary relational life.

This is what pathogen logic looks like when it becomes normalized.

The Moral Psychology Behind Exile

This is not primarily a story about bad people. It is a story about ordinary moral psychology operating under conditions of fear, certainty, and group reinforcement.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written extensively about how human moral reasoning functions less like a neutral judge and more like an advocate, reaching conclusions quickly and assembling justifications afterward. In his account, morality performs a double role. It binds us together, creating shared meaning and identity, while simultaneously blinding us to the humanity of those who fall outside the moral circle.

Once a person or group is perceived as a threat to the moral order, empathy contracts, complexity becomes suspect, and doubt begins to feel dangerous. Disconfirming information loses relevance, while certainty is rewarded. At that point, people no longer experience themselves as choosing harm. They experience themselves as choosing responsibility.

A Generational Casting of Threat

In the current cultural moment of family relationships, this dynamic has taken on a distinctly generational form. In dominant cultural narratives, Baby Boomers and older parents have increasingly been cast as a primary threat to a new moral order, described not simply as limited or flawed, but as emotionally immature, toxic, or narcissistic, with these labels often functioning less as clinical descriptions and more as moral verdicts.

What was once understood as ordinary intergenerational tension, shaped by differing norms, values, and historical conditions, is now frequently reframed as evidence of pathology, with older parents positioned as obstacles to psychological health rather than participants in a shared human struggle. Within this framework, moral suspicion replaces curiosity, proximity is treated as risk, and distance becomes not merely an option but an ethical imperative.

The Pattern in the Therapy Room

These dynamics are no longer confined to history books. Increasingly, they appear in contemporary family systems, often clothed in psychological and therapeutic language.

I recently worked with a mother whose adult daughter had completely severed contact, including removing grandchildren with whom the mother had long-standing, loving bonds. There were no accusations of physical abuse, sexual abuse, or even verbal cruelty. There was no singular incident that could reasonably account for the totality of the rupture.

Instead, there was an idea, held with remarkable certainty.

The daughter believed she was fundamentally incapable of being functional in the presence of her mother, that proximity itself was destabilizing, and that distance was therefore not merely preferable but morally necessary. This belief was reinforced by a broader cultural narrative that framed withdrawal as evidence of growth, healing, and self-respect.

When the mother, grieving and sincere, asked for help together in therapy, the responses she received were not overtly hostile. They were composed, restrained, and final.

“I love you and wish you well.”

On its surface, the phrase appears benevolent, even mature. In practice, it closed the door on dialogue, foreclosed the possibility of repair, and recast permanent separation as care. It allowed the sender to experience herself as loving, even as she enacted something else entirely.

What struck me most in working with this family was not only the finality of the rupture, but the tone in which it was carried out. I was genuinely shocked by the level of cruelty embedded in the daughter’s responses, cruelty that was unmistakable to anyone reading them plainly, yet experienced by her as maturity, kindness, and emotional regulation. The messages were polished, composed, even friendly in affect, often punctuated with smiley faces and softening language, while simultaneously stripping the mother of her humanity, her history, and any claim to grief or relationship. It was some of the most thorough dehumanization I have witnessed in clinical work, made more chilling by the fact that it arrived wrapped in the performance of warmth and psychological virtue.

Even more troubling was the fact that I knew this language had not emerged in isolation. It had been crafted, at least in part, with the guidance of a therapist. I recognized the phrasing immediately, the careful neutrality, the emphasis on self-regulation and emotional closure, the way finality was framed as health. There is a growing body of language circulating in therapeutic and quasi-therapeutic spaces that allows cruelty to be administered with the patina of maturity, where withdrawal is praised as clarity, emotional abandonment is reframed as boundary-setting, and the refusal to engage is presented as evidence of growth. In these moments, therapy does not merely fail to interrupt harm. It lends it moral authority.

I have seen versions of this pattern many times. Another parent I worked with received a carefully worded message after months of silence that read, “I’ve done a lot of healing, and I’m choosing peace right now. I’m not available for this relationship, but I wish you growth.” It was delivered as though it were a gift, as though the restraint itself were evidence of moral sophistication. There was no reference to shared history, no acknowledgment of grief, no curiosity about repair, no space for dialogue. The parent was not engaged as a person, but dismissed as a category. What made it especially striking was the sender’s genuine belief that this constituted emotional maturity, when in reality it functioned as a polite form of erasure, a way of ending relationship without having to reckon with the human cost of doing so.

This is not love. It is exile. And it is often experienced by the one imposing it as righteousness.

When the Social Contract Breaks Entirely

If we want to understand how pathogen logic works, we have to look at the starkest moments, the ones where the ordinary rules of human decency would typically hold even when a relationship is strained.

One example is the adult child who does not show up to a father’s funeral after a sudden death, even though, until a year before the cutoff, there had been loving contact and recognizable attachment. Whatever else is true in such a story, something more than self-protection has occurred. A social contract has been broken, not simply between two people, but between a person and the shared human obligations that usually survive conflict, especially when death collapses the possibility of repair.

Another example appears in end-of-life contexts, when a parent is severely limited, sick, or dying, and is denied even the most basic forms of recognition. A dying person who wants to speak to you, who wants to apologize or make some final human offering, is not capable of harming you in any meaningful adult sense. You may feel grief, anger, nausea, or rage. Those emotions are real. They are not dangerous. You are not a child. There is a full self there that is capable of standing in the moment and treating the other person with humanity precisely because the power to harm has passed.

And yet we are increasingly watching a culture bless the refusal of these moments as courage, presenting emotional non-engagement as strength rather than as a choice with moral cost.

Certainty as a Moral Solvent

What makes these situations so difficult to interrupt is not malice, but certainty. The person imposing exile does not experience herself as cruel. She experiences herself as clear. The moral story she inhabits leaves no room for ambivalence, no space for grief to coexist with discernment, and no pathway for complexity to survive.

Naming the Reality

Some people insist that they are being treated like pathogens. They are often told this is defensiveness, projection, or an inability to respect boundaries. In many cases, however, they are not imagining it at all. They are correctly identifying the moral framework they have been placed inside.

Discernment names specific behaviors and remains responsive to evidence and repair, whereas pathogen logic collapses the person into the problem and treats continued contact itself as moral failure.

When someone believes your presence is contaminating, destabilizing, or inherently unsafe, there is no relational work to be done and no meaningful conversation to be had. You cannot negotiate intimacy with someone who has reclassified you as a cancer. You cannot repair a relationship from within a moral system that treats your humanity as the problem.

Naming this is not bitterness, it is clarity.

One of the most heartbreaking realizations I sometimes have to offer parents is this: at some certain point, your child has come to believe that you are a pathogen. As long as that belief is intact, there is no script you can memorize, no apology you can perfect, no inventory of accountability you can complete that will restore relationship, because the problem is no longer about specific behaviors. It is about a moral framework in which your presence itself has been defined as harmful.

Once that idea takes hold, people will do things they would never otherwise justify. They will speak cruelly, erase history, deny grief, and sever bonds in the name of self-protection, all while experiencing themselves as ethical and mature. This is not unique to families. It is a pattern that operates in many spheres of human life. It is simply more devastating when it unfolds inside parent-child relationships, where bonds that once seemed indestructible prove unable to withstand moral reclassification.

The late Christopher Hitchens once observed that it is not difficult to get good people to do terrible things when they come to believe a very bad idea. This is what that looks like in relational form.

A Pattern That Keeps Returning

From a historical and psychological perspective, what becomes evident is that this is not a new problem, nor a particularly modern one. Human beings are remarkably adept at reinventing old moral instincts in updated forms, changing the vocabulary, refining the theories, and professionalizing the justification while preserving the underlying structure.

Again and again, we divide the world into the safe and the unsafe, the clean and the contaminating, the worthy and the disposable, often convinced that this time we have finally gotten it right. The most dangerous versions of this pattern are not announced with overt hatred. They are camouflaged behind virtue.

The Harder Moral Task

The work history repeatedly places before us is not the elimination of discernment, but the preservation of humanity in the presence of it. It is the capacity to hold moral boundaries without collapsing moral complexity, to tolerate ambivalence, and to recognize that human beings can harm and love, fail and repair, injure and grow.

This does not mean refusing to name harm. It means resisting the temptation to reduce people to it.

Because the cost of this moral certainty is not limited to the parents who are cast out, but extends forward into lineage itself, as children grow up inside ruptured family systems, deprived of continuity, memory, and the stabilizing presence of bonds that once endured complexity rather than fleeing from it.