Although cutting contact is a difficult decision, it is often vital for our own healing and growth. If a flower is not growing well, you change the environment. If we can’t flourish in our close relationships, we need to re-define them. “No contact“ is a new definition for a relationship, not the end of it.
No contact with abusers
Cutting contact with abusers is a condition for trauma work. You need to be safe from further abuse, otherwise it will harm you to lower your dissociative protections: You still need them.
The relationship to our abusers is typically difficult and even more so when they are family. We need some distance to be able to feel basic safety, grow beyond their influence, work through our memories and emotions and establish an independent identity. It doesn’t work when we are still living in the same house with them. It is actually considered a major mistake in therapy to start trauma work before making sure that there is no contact with abusers and Ts have been successfully sued about this by their retraumatized patients.
If you are stuck in a dependent situation, your T or a specialized organization will help you to find a way out, get you the support you need, be with you and help you to follow through with it. You are not alone.
Cutting contact with those who interfere with our healing and growth
We often grew up in a family system that enabled abuse. Our family might have their own culture: a way of relating to each other, of communication, mindsets, accepted ways of toxic coping or violence and what is considered normal. Sometimes confronting it helps. But often our relatives are not capable of recognizing their own damaged patterns.
Staying in this environment will limit our possibilities to grow beyond it. Worse, it will support this kind of family culture and its twisted view of ‘normal’.
Cutting contact serves as a painful and clear reminder that there is something going terribly wrong. You raise a wall as a monument that speaks louder than your words could do it: things need to change!
Doubts
With cPTSD it is normal to have a split view of abusive people. Sometimes we remember all the bad things that happened and we know for sure that we need to cut contact. And sometimes we only remember the good moments, when we felt connected and loved. It is how we make sense of the world as children, we think in terms of good or bad, black or white. When we mature we can integrate both kinds of experiences into one picture, without having to deny one or the other. With DID we sometimes need to share experiences between different parts, as we remember different things, to come to a more integrated view of a person.
Cutting contact is not a way of disrespecting your parents. You are taking them very seriously when, after confronting them, you honor their decisions to keep up toxic patterns. You respect their choice so much, you don’t try to change it anymore. What you do is a consequence of honoring them, not a violation of honor.
Sometimes we are told that we owe our parents for raising us. This is supposed to be mutual. Your parents owe it to you to raise you well by protecting you from abuse. If they didn’t, you have no obligation to give anything back. A counselor once told me to “look at your birth certificate. What does it say? It has your name and date of birth on it. No fine print that says you have to be there for their birthdays or nurse them when they are old. Being born to someone doesn’t come with obligations“
by Nadine Hope
How to break contact
You do it however you can. Sometimes it is more important that it is done in some way, any way, than to do it prettily. You decide if you want to do it in person or write a letter or say nothing at all and block them.
I have cut several people from my life and it doesn’t ever get easy. In my experience doing it in person is the most difficult, because it leads to a discussion where your boundary is challenged right away. People who need to be cut from our lives are usually those who don’t honor our boundaries to begin with and we need to be prepared for an attack or manipulation.
A letter gives you time to think it through. You can show it to your T to check what she thinks and also bring a possible response to therapy to get additional support.
Just blocking people will be followed by attempts to contact you or even your friends to find out what is going on. It is a possibility when you are completely overwhelmed, but it would be easier to communicate a boundary to avoid the months of stress that follow a silent boundary.
Some prefer to let the relationship go to sleep by avoiding communication. If you do this you have to expect that you will be contacted at random times that are out of your control. It seems to be a gentle solution, but it comes with the cost of not actually having any real boundary in place. You might get away with using that for a distant aunt, but absolutely not when it comes to abusers.
It is your choice, if you want to explain reasons. Maybe that is not necessary because you have had that conversation. You don’t owe anyone an explanation. Abusers know perfectly well what they have done wrong.
You might want to add conditions under which you would re-consider your boundary (not concerning abusers).
And sometimes you can just let them know that you will contact them when you are ready and leave it at that.
When (not if) your boundary gets challenged, prepare a message for ‘broken record’. That is a technique where you copy&paste the same text, a simple repetition of your boundary, as a response, no matter how the challenge is phrased. You are past the time for one-liners.
The hope of no-contact
Long after you are gone from their lives your boundary keeps reminding people that they need to change. No-contact creates relational pain, not just in you but also in the people you cut off. Pain is a huge motivator for change. If they have not examined their lives before, they might do it now. Time is on your side.
Without your boundary and caught in their ‘normal’ toxic environment, they would never begin to wonder what they did wrong or see any problem. By cutting contact you are doing them a last service and create a hope for reconciliation.
Reconnecting
No-contact is a daily decision. You will feel insecure, especially around birthdays and holidays, and wonder if you should send something. Don’t. Otherwise you will reduce the pressure on them and communicates that change is not needed to be part of your life. If you have DID you need to cooperate for the sake of the system now. Make an effort to comfort each other and support those who struggle.
The first sign of hope is when they stop challenging your boundary by trying to contact you. After that you focus on doing your own work, the healing and the growing and the becoming. When you have done enough of that, you can consider contacting them again on your own terms, if you desire.
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