The Hard Truth About Going No Contact With A Parent

Thanks vs

That article is really brilliant and the accuracy was a bit eerie.

For me it was my MIL and she did not have the stealth to mask her self like I have seen others talk about si after about 15 mins of meeting her I wondered what I had gotten myself into.
But because of that I've had so so much of the
"It's just what she's like"

And I do belive it. I do belive she is incapable of change. But that does not explain why we should be miserable and suffer by having her around.

I experienced more anger than my husband as I wanted to stop him experiencing the emotional manipulation and triangulation.

What mother argues with one son and then calls the other to stir?

Interesting Violetsky, I have to say though, that I don’t think my mother is a narcissist, she hasn’t got enough emotion for that.
She is unkind, cold, critical, spiteful, she makes me feel like the absolute worst version of myself, she made me feel ashamed, embarrassed, disgusting but apart from the odd smack we were not abused
I certainly agree though, that estrangement can be liberating and sometimes I don’t think you realise how bad it has been, till after you’ve escaped.

I certainly agree though, that estrangement can be liberating and sometimes I don’t think you realise how bad it has been, till after you’ve escaped

This resonates with me so much. When I see posters say that the only reason for cut off is physical or serial abuse I am genuinely puzzled.

Why would someone choose misery? Do they not believe in divorce either?

As someone who has been fortunate to not have suffered from emotional abuse or to have had to consider going no contact, I found this article very interesting. The most pertinent point I think is the comparison to an abusive spouse and divorce which nobody would criticise you for. to those on here who have made the difficult decision.

I think I may be the mother who is being 'no-contacted'.
We live 400 miles from my son who has had cancer. This has been completely removed, yet he is having chemo for a lymph node that has picked it up. It is making him feel very ill.
He rings me every week, but a couple of weeks ago he got annoyed because I mentioned Macmillans to him as a place he could get more information.
I obviously intended to be helpful, but he lost it and said he did NOT have cancer and if I continued to insist that he did he didn't want anything to do with me.
Now he's ignoring my phone and emails, and never rings.
(I have apologised of course).

Try not to worry ExDancer, that said I understand that just a few weeks can feel a lot longer in this situation.

May I suggest you email him and tell him that you want to respect what appears to be his wish at the moment to not have contact with you, so you wont contact him and wait for him to contact you when he's ready.

I hope it wont be long until he does so .

Bibbity

*I certainly agree though, that estrangement can be liberating and sometimes I don’t think you realise how bad it has been, till after you’ve escaped*

This resonates with me so much. When I see posters say that the only reason for cut off is physical or serial abuse I am genuinely puzzled.

Why would someone choose misery? Do they not believe in divorce either?

I think many feel that if they had to suffer, why shouldn’t you? It sounds absurd but you have plenty of people shouting it all the time.

You hear/read people saying “my mother or MIL was awful to me and I never abandoned her”.

At it’s core, this is the misery loves company attitude. Some people cannot fathom that their choice to not be happy or at peace isn’t something their son or daughter would choose. And if their son or daughter chooses differently than them, the son or daughter is automatically wrong. They don’t see the separation as breaking the cycle of dysfunctional relationships. They find it hard to see things from perspectives that are not squarely their own. They can be told over and over what someone’s reasons for wanting to end the relationship are prior to it even happening, and still claim to not know because those reasons do not resonate with them. The problem is that this attitude is a giant roadblock to self-reflection, growth, and subsequently reconciliation. So instead of accepting that the behavior they exhibited toward their offspring was at least partially wrong, they demonize the offspring and frequently assign blame to the spouse. My MIL likely blames me for my husband’s lack of relationship with her, but the truth is her own son found her to be a bit of an energy vampire.

That was really insightful thank you.

I know for a fact my MIL blames me as she recently text me asking me to see her son and grandchildren and how I promused not to cut her off like her other DIL.

I made no such promise I made non committal noises in response to being put in a very uncomfortable situation.

Estrangement can also bring liberation for those who have been estranged as they look back at the relationship and see just how bad it had become and the negative affect it was having on their lives.

We never got to that stage as it happened so quickly but having learned what others have gone through, and what some continue to go through, we can see what we managed to avoid even though the decision to estrange wasn't ours.

For some, never abandoning the person who treated them badly is because of a sense of duty and in some cases what they regard as an unbreakable bond. Others find ways of managing the relationship by reducing contact rather than estranging.

There are those who come to understand why someone has behaved they way they have, which of course doesn't condone it but does enable the one on the receiving end to have some understanding, and can be a major factor in the decision not to estrange.

I think abandon is a very interesting choice of word.

You abandon a defenceless child or animal.

I don't see severing a relationship with a functioning independent adult as abandoning them as they bare no responsibility for their physical, mental or emotional needs.

Bibbity

That article is really brilliant and the accuracy was a bit eerie.

For me it was my MIL and she did not have the stealth to mask her self like I have seen others talk about si after about 15 mins of meeting her I wondered what I had gotten myself into.
But because of that I've had so so much of the
"It's just what she's like"

And I do belive it. I do belive she is incapable of change. But that does not explain why we should be miserable and suffer by having her around.

I experienced more anger than my husband as I wanted to stop him experiencing the emotional manipulation and triangulation.

What mother argues with one son and then calls the other to stir?

I really liked the article, and the wording too, felt friendly lol

If MIL was a narcissist, they quite often talk about different types...

Malignant and Covert are 2 main ones. Malignant are very out there and covert hide it behind a false nice self

Sara1954

Interesting Violetsky, I have to say though, that I don’t think my mother is a narcissist, she hasn’t got enough emotion for that.
She is unkind, cold, critical, spiteful, she makes me feel like the absolute worst version of myself, she made me feel ashamed, embarrassed, disgusting but apart from the odd smack we were not abused
I certainly agree though, that estrangement can be liberating and sometimes I don’t think you realise how bad it has been, till after you’ve escaped.

I know what you mean, I genuinely spent a long time thinking I was the problem because my mother convinced me of that and that anyone else she treated badly deserved it. It was a baffling merry-go-round of her pushing me almost too far and then being nice for a bit.. I actually feel lucky she eventually caused a nervous breakdown... strange as that is to say because I finally got help and my children finally told me they didn't like her either!

HousePlantQueen

As someone who has been fortunate to not have suffered from emotional abuse or to have had to consider going no contact, I found this article very interesting. The most pertinent point I think is the comparison to an abusive spouse and divorce which nobody would criticise you for. to those on here who have made the difficult decision.

Thank you ?

ExDancer

I think I may be the mother who is being 'no-contacted'.
We live 400 miles from my son who has had cancer. This has been completely removed, yet he is having chemo for a lymph node that has picked it up. It is making him feel very ill.
He rings me every week, but a couple of weeks ago he got annoyed because I mentioned Macmillans to him as a place he could get more information.
I obviously intended to be helpful, but he lost it and said he did NOT have cancer and if I continued to insist that he did he didn't want anything to do with me.
Now he's ignoring my phone and emails, and never rings.
(I have apologised of course).

That is a difficult situation for you.

I wonder if he is under a tremendous amount of stress and not coping. I hope he is able to recover and you regain your relationship on good terms

I used the word abandoned as it was in Limcha's post Bibbity. "My mother or MIL was awful to me but I never abandoned her".

When the person concerned is elderly and/or in poor health some people do feel as if by not being there for them they're abandoning them, even if they have been estranged prior to their advanced years and/or deterioration physically.

Limcha I so agree.

I've had to be very honest about how my relationship with my mother has impacted my children.

All the behaviours I learned were wrong when I saw the hurt looks on my own children's faces. Exposing them to her and her favouritism and scapegoating. Letting them be treated like a nuisance in a house she invited them too. Listening to them say that their grandparent wasn't like other grandparents and asking why they didn't get the love their friends talked about.

It breaks my heart now.

My children need and deserve a happy healthy mum and I couldn't really be one in that relationship. It took me too long to see that every time I needed a mum she wasn't there.

What we allow is not only what will continue happening to us but the example we set our children. Its not OK to teach our children that we let people make us unhappy just because they say they love us. That means risking our own children putting up with unhealthy relationships.

The cycle has to stop.

There’s a duty I think towards the people that raised you. As the late Queen said, recollections can vary. This for many people now is an outdated notion, a lot of people, me included, think we do owe people and need to see that they are cared for in old age. The fact that we don’t get on or have mis matched expectations doesn’t come into it. You look after family. I have a really awful neighbour, going senile now, no family and gets on with no one, I check he’s alright, do the odd tasks for him, it doesn’t cost me anything, I don’t get into conversation really, he doesn’t get around well and is a sad figure, the fact that he was a bit of a tyrant and very selfish, doesn’t alter the fact that he’s old and vulnerable, for me as a Christian I could do no other. I’m not a do gooder.

Smileless
You are correct, there are a lot of people suffering really unpleasant relationships out of a sense of duty, estrangement isn’t an option for them, they are family, and that’s that.

Oddly, I thought I was that person, I was always prepared to accept that things were mostly my fault, and that however long they lived I’d have to do penance for all the misery I’d caused.

Then something happened which made me see things clearly, I realised how I’d been manipulated to always think I was the bad person, right from being a small child,

I withdrew from them a lot, but it took another ten years for that moment when I just had enough, and I’ve never looked back.

Not everyone feels they owe people who mistreat them. There is nothing wrong with that. Not one bit.

We don’t all have children so that they can “repay” us in old age, regardless of how we behave towards them. As I said, cycles of familial mistreatment can and should be broken if it promotes healing and happiness to those affected by poor treatment. We can all disagree from a personal perspective, as ‘I chose one way, you chose another’. However, placing judgement or a blanket rule for all according to how we choose to live is both unproductive and misguided.

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Everyone's different aren't they Allsorts. For some a sense of duty overrides everything else and for some, duty isn't something they regard as important or relevant.

As I posted earlier, it isn't always that sense of duty that a decision is made upon. Despite what has happened, some feel an there's an unbreakable bond which can be between the adult child and the parent they've estranged or between the parent and the adult child they've estranged.

It's good that you managed to break free Sara, not everyone as you say is able to do so even though they wish they could.

I also think that, if two parents are involved, it (realistically), means estranging from both of them.

So, aside from any sense of duty, or not wanting to separate your children from grandparents (who may be wonderful GPs), you’ve also got to estrange a parent who’s done nothing wrong.

Each to their own, but I’m glad I didn’t estrange my mother - doing so would have hurt my dad and my children, and that wouldn’t have bought me any happiness.

DiamondLily
I would never have done it while my dad was alive, despite our differences I loved him, and have very happy childhood memories of just the two of us.