My personal story of going no contact
I went no contact with my parents almost 26 years ago, and it was the single hardest thing I have EVER done.
And I’ve given birth twice!
But this was still WAY harder than that.
So if you’re thinking about going no contact with your family, I want to share with you why I went no contact, why it was so freaking hard, and why I still chose to have no contact with my parents for over 15 years to help you decide if this is a decision that you want to make.
I’m Nicola, and I grew up in an emotionally challenging family, and I’ve spent the last 25 years trying to heal and find my way back to my true self so I can live a happy and meaningful life.
It started in a wonderful place…
It was January 2000, and two weeks earlier, I’d proposed to my now husband. (He said yes.)
At the time, we’d been living together for a few years, but we just didn’t have the cash to pay for a wedding.
We weren’t looking to do anything particularly fancy.
We were going for a very simple wedding, but we still didn’t have the cash to pay for it.
So we asked my parents for a loan – for a loan, not to pay for the wedding, but to borrow $5,000 from them.
At the time, I think a normal wedding cost about $10,000, and a big fancy wedding cost about $20,000.
We were aiming for just around the $5,000 mark.
We wanted to borrow this from my parents, and it was going to be a loan.
We weren’t going to owe them anything.
We were going to pay it back over time.
And they said yes.
But then things went downhill
But then a couple of days later, they came over to our house to have a chat about it.
And over the course of the conversation, it came out that they would be only willing to lend us the money if we would let them have a significant role in the organising of the wedding.
Now, for most people, this might seem like not such a big deal, but I’m a very independent person.
And honestly, I was only getting married because it meant so much to Paul.
I could have gone either way.
I didn’t really care about getting married, but I knew it meant a lot to him.
And so I was willing to do it.
But for me, I was committed.
I didn’t need a piece of paper to say that this was the man that I was going to spend the rest of my life with.
But there was no way in heck that I was going to hand over control of my wedding to anyone else, let alone my parents.
And I’d only just escaped their control a few years earlier by moving out of home.
And I wasn’t going to go back to an arrangement when they had control over my experience.
That was just simply not an option.
And unfortunately, from there, the conversation degenerated, and we ended up with off track, unhelpful attacks and unfounded accusations.
And I really found myself starting to get very angry.
And it takes a lot to make me angry.
Usually, I don’t get angry that easily, probably because as a child, I wasn’t allowed to be angry.
But on this day, I found myself getting very angry at my parents, so angry, in that I asked them to leave.
I went to the front door, I opened the front door, and I said, “I think it’s time you go.” And when they ignored me, I screamed at them, “Get out.” And they left.
And it wasn’t just about what had happened on that day.
This was the culmination of a lifetime of dysfunction.
All of these things that had been out of balance came together in that moment.
And something in me just said, “No, I’m not doing this anymore. Enough.”
The struggle that ensued
Most of what happened after that is a blur of that day.
I remember being out in the backyard on my hands and knees, crying and screaming, “I hate them, I hate them.”
And just trying to come to terms with what I had just done.
It was pretty challenging, I can tell you.
And over the next few days, weeks, months, or even years, my parents attempted on many occasions to re-engage with me.
They rang, they sent letters, they tried everything.
They were nice, they were nasty, they tried guilt trips, they tried every emotional manipulation trick in the book to try and get me to re-engage.
And all I did was refuse to respond.
I did not communicate with them.
I gave them the silent treatment.
And that made me a terrible person.
I learned to hate the sound of the phone ringing.
And when the letters turned up, I would recognise their handwriting and hand it to Paul to read.
And if it was too much, which most of the time it was, he would just file it away and I would never look at it.
And so in the early days, I badly wanted to take it all back.
I so badly wanted to say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it,” and to bring them back into my lives.
Just take it all back.
Let’s go back to the way things were.
And yet there was another part of me that said, “No, no more. This is enough.”
And thankfully, that part of me was stronger because it kept me from crawling back to them.
It kept me from making that choice.
And I’m very grateful for that part of me.
I sank even lower
Then it turned into depression.
I would find myself crying often during sex, and I’ve got a whole video about that and how that was part of my healing journey that you might want to watch to understand that better.
But I found myself in depression, lying listlessly in bed, watching awful television at 3:00 AM, just unable to sleep, just in an awful state.
And eventually it turned into thoughts of taking my own life.
But the only thing that kept me from doing that was Paul.
I didn’t want to leave Paul, and I didn’t want to do that to Paul.
And so he was what kept me.
He’s the reason I’m here today.
And once I reached that point, I realised I needed help.
And so I told Paul what was going on for me.
And he helped me find someone to talk to.
What finally helped me recover
We, first of all, managed to speak to a really awful counsellor, but then we found someone who gave me what I needed.
And what I needed was validation.
I needed someone apart from Paul, apart from me, to tell me that what I’d done was okay, that my response to that situation seemed appropriate given the circumstances.
And that’s what this counsellor did.
He said, he basically gave me the permission that I wasn’t willing to give myself to accept that my actions were okay.
He also made me understand that what I was doing was trying to understand how to live my own life, that I was now the master of my own ship.
I was in control of my own life, and that was something I wasn’t used to.
And so I was having to learn how to stand on my own two feet, and that’s why I was feeling so lost and why I was struggling.
And so that’s when my journey began, finding my way back to myself that continues to this very day.
Why going no contact was so hard
1. It erased a part of me
But honestly, cutting my parents out of my life was like cutting off my own legs.
It was like taking away my very foundations, everything about where I had come from, my identity, my I just removed all of that.
It was like erasing that part of my life.
It never existed because everything before that moment involved them in some way.
They had the baby photos, they had the memories, the stories, everything was them.
And then they were no longer in my life, and I had no foundations.
I’d lost a part of myself, a sense of who I was, and that was incredibly hard.
2. It felt familiar, despite the pain
It also felt like it would have been easier to have contact with them, even though it was unhealthy and emotionally painful.
It felt familiar, safe, and comfortable.
It would have been easier, at least in my mind, to have that.
And choosing to not have contact was so much harder.
Even though it was the right thing.
3. We were all alone
It was also hard because we were on our own.
We were starting a new life together, getting married, having kids, making tough decisions.
And we had no family because Paul’s family was spread all over the place, a long way away.
And we didn’t have anyone around us.
It was just the two of us trying to figure out all of this stuff, learning like crazy, drinking from a fire hose, trying to figure it all out on our own.
And that was really hard.
4. Our kids didn’t have grandparents
Our kids missed out on having grandparents.
Maybe not the grandparents I would have wanted for them, but they missed out on that experience because Paul’s mum lived a long way away, so they saw her maybe once a year if they were lucky.
And they just didn’t have the experience of having loving grandparents around and in their lives.
And that’s something that was really hard.
5. It caused family friction
This split with my parents also caused friction within my extended family on both sides.
And I lost contact with most of my family as a result of this, including my sister.
They just didn’t want to get involved in this.
And I can understand why, because it was a mess.
It wasn’t easy, and they didn’t want to have to take sides.
So I get that.
But we lost contact with so much of our family, my family, my dad’s family, my mum’s family, because of this situation.
6. I lost friends because of it
I also lost friends over this.
I had friends whose relationship with their own parents was so different from mine that they just could not comprehend why I’d made the choice I’d made, and they could not accept my choice.
They just couldn’t reconcile that this was something that anyone would do.
And I even had one or two of them try and talk me into reconciling with my parents, which may have been well-intentioned, but it reflected the fact that they really hadn’t taken the time to understand why I’d made that choice or what my experience was that led me to doing that and why it simply wasn’t going to happen that I was going to reconcile with them.
And that was really heart-breaking.
7. It was a MASSIVE weight to bear
But ultimately, splitting with my parents was just an incredible weight to bear.
Every single day, I was carrying that weight with me.
It took me months, maybe even years before I stopped thinking about them every single day.
I remember the first day I went without thinking of them, and it was like, “Yay, progress!” It was as though they died, but it was worse than that because they were still alive, and yet we just couldn’t have this relationship.
It didn’t have to be this way, and yet this is how it had to be.
And even when my mother died in 2019, and we’d have a small amount of contact at that point, we still hadn’t managed to reconcile because every time I tried to, she just started playing the same games, and I was not going back to that.
There was no way I was going back to that relationship with her.
And so she died, and we really hadn’t reconciled.
And that was really hard, too.
That was a really challenging time.
So why did I remain estranged for so long?
So given how hard all of this was, why did I stick with it?
Why did I not have contact with my parents for over 15 years?
1. It felt completely right
I think a big part of it was that part of me that knew deep down that this was the right choice for me.
There was something in me, in my soul, that said, “This is what you need to do. This is the right thing to do. 100%, this is the right choice.”
And I’m very grateful for that part of me because it gave me the strength to stick with this, even through all the challenges that it brought up for me.
It allowed me to know that I was doing the right thing deep down.
2. I had support
I was also very lucky to have Paul’s support.
He’d been with me prior to this point, so he knew the dysfunction that we had in our relationship.
And he was there that day, and he saw how they behaved, and they didn’t behave very well to him either.
So he had no compunction about not having them in his life.
And so I had his support, and that made a huge difference as well.
And having that validation from the counsellor actually made a huge difference.
It was a huge turning point for me, knowing that someone who wasn’t from within my family, who wasn’t biased, could look at this situation and say, “Yes, I think what you did made sense. It actually seemed like a healthy, inappropriate reaction to that situation.”
That allowed me to feel like it was okay to keep making that choice.
3. I needed space to heal
And I needed to heal.
I needed that time and space.
I needed to find my own way without their influence in my life.
I needed to figure out who I was.
I needed to be the master of my own ship, and I couldn’t do that with them in my lives.
Having them not there allowed me to do my own healing, to work through that journey, to figure out who I was and where I wanted to go and what I wanted to be and release a lot of that stuff.
4. I was not going to repeat the past
And I also watched my mum have a dysfunctional relationship with her mother.
I watched every week her get off the phone crying after she’d been speaking to her own mother because her own mother was very cruel to my mother.
And I didn’t want that.
I was not going to repeat that pattern.
I was not going to do the thing that I’d watch my mother do.
5. I wanted to protect my kids
And also, my kids have not been exposed to that.
They haven’t been exposed to me having that dysfunctional relationship with my parents, with my mother.
And they haven’t had to be exposed to the behaviours of my parents that were not so great.
They haven’t had to grow up with that influence around them.
And I’m actually very grateful for that.
6. I’m SO much happier as a result
And honestly, I am so much happier and well balanced than I would have been had I not split with my parents.
I really am in a much better place than I would have been.
I’ve been walking my own path, making my own decisions, doing things my way, figuring out what my way is.
And that is absolutely priceless.
7. I’ve broken the cycle
And I learned so much along the way about how to heal and to break the cycle.
And I have broken the cycle with my own kids.
I have given them a very different experience from the one that I had.
Maybe I wasn’t a perfect parent, but I was a “good enough” parent.
I am a “good enough” parent.
I’ve given them the respect and the space and the skills and the support and the love that they needed to blossom into amazing adults.
Would I make the same choices again?
So you might be thinking, “Well, if I’d known then what I know now, would I have done things differently?”
And the answer is maybe.
Maybe I would have been able to put healthy boundaries in place.
But honestly, I still struggle with boundaries.
And if you struggle with boundaries, I’ve got a step-by-step guide you might want to download.
But maybe I could have put healthier boundaries in place and still had some contact with them.
Maybe I could have communicated more effectively using non-violent communication.
Maybe I could have actually come to them as an equal.
But in reality, I needed that time and space away from them to develop those skills, to have that sense of self, to be able to see them as equals, to not feel so controlled by their behaviours.
I needed that break.
So perhaps in reality, the answer is no.
I wouldn’t have done it differently because I couldn’t have.
This is just how it had to be.
This is the decision I had to make as hard as it was.
My advice if you’re thinking of going no contact
So if you’re thinking about going no contact, here is what I would say.
Don’t make this decision lightly.
This is not something you want to make on a whim or for the wrong reasons.
You need to look at all the possible implications of this decision.
Look at what happened in my case.
Look at all the possible impacts it can have beyond what you might initially imagine and decide, both the good and the bad, are you willing to accept that into your experience?
Now, I didn’t make my decision on a whim, but it did happen in a heartbeat.
And in that moment, I knew this was the right thing for me to do.
This is what my soul said I had to do, and it was the right choice for me.
You also need to make sure that you have support around you.
This is too much for one person to bear.
It is something that you need support with.
Whether that is friends or family who are not directly involved or a partner, or a therapist, or a counsellor, you need help to carry the burden of this decision because it will be too much for one person to bear.
You need to reflect on whether or not this feels right for you, whether you journal or meditate.
And I’ve got guides on both of those that you might want to download.
You need to spend that time to reflect on this and to make sure it feels aligned with what’s most important to you and that it is actually in your best interests.
And if you do decide to go no contact, be willing to open the possibility of reconnecting at some point, if and when you feel ready, with absolutely no pressure whatsoever, only when you feel ready, only if you feel ready to reconnect and to know that if you don’t reconnect, It’s okay.
I didn’t reconnect with my mum in any meaningful way, and that’s okay.
And to know that no matter what decision you make, you will be okay.
You will find a way, you will figure it out.
But to remember that what matters here is that you take care of yourself.
That whatever decision you make, you’re taking care of yourself.
And then after that moment in time, you continue to take care of yourself so that you can deal with the consequences of this choice.
Going no contact changed my life
But you might also find that going no contact is the best thing that has ever happened to you.
It certainly was for me.
It totally changed the course of my life, and I’m in such a better place as a result.
It may give you the space to heal, to find your own voice, finally, to follow your guidance, to figure out who you really are.
It can also allow you to protect others in your life from the influence of these people that you don’t want affecting those other people in your life.
You can take that toxicity, that negative behaviour, away and not have them have that experience.
And may also be able to break the cycle of generational trauma and pain in your own family.
And if you want to understand generational trauma and the impact it can have and how you can break free, watch this video next.
Got questions? Comment below.
And may you find the best path forward to help you heal and grow.
