You’ve likely seen a lot of posts online about people who have gone no-contact with their families. Many people are breaking generational cycles of abuse by cutting relatives out of their lives instead of tolerating their cruelty forever, but going no-contact isn’t as easy as it sounds.
Estrangement is an awful thing to deal with, and the freedom and peace that come with it are counterbalanced by a great deal of difficulty — especially when it comes to special occasions and other people’s opinions of you. Here’s what nobody tells you about going no-contact with toxic family.
1. How much grief and guilt other people will toss your way.
People who haven’t been raised in an abusive, toxic family often cannot imagine that close relatives can be anything other than supportive and loving. As a result, if your estranged family turns to these people with sob stories about how horrible you are for abandoning them, or how worried they are about your well-being, they’ll often believe your toxic relatives immediately, without bothering to hear your side of the story.
After I cut my family out of my life, they recruited relatives, friends of the family, and even people I had gone to school with decades before, to reach out to me on their behalf to guilt-trip and coerce me into getting back in touch with them.
2. That holidays and other special anniversaries can feel painful and lonely.
Films and images about various holidays and special get-togethers nearly always revolve around happy family dynamics. You’ll see several generations of loving relatives gathered around a table to share a meal or open gifts, and the general sentiments are of love, warmth, and togetherness.
Those who choose to go no-contact never experienced these kinds of situations. Or, if they did, they were on the outskirts of it: invited without being included, potentially shamed or mocked while those around them had fun. If you’ve chosen to go no contact, then every occasion will be a painful memory of past hurts, with added loneliness if you don’t have a close group to celebrate with.
3. How difficult it really is to go it alone.
When most people go through difficult times — whether emotional, financial, health–related, or otherwise — they usually have family members to lean on to help them through it. For example, friends of mine have had parents or siblings to help them out after they’ve had surgery or when they were going through cancer treatment, or who have stepped up and helped them when they were widowed unexpectedly.
When you’re estranged from your family, you don’t have that safety net. Some people are lucky enough to have close “found family” in their close friends and in-laws, but most others are simply forced to go it alone.
4. How difficult it is to explain to “normal” people why you don’t talk to your family anymore.
Those who didn’t grow up with parents who tortured and tormented them daily can’t conceive of what it must be like to survive those circumstances. The dynamic they had with their families involved comfort, security, love, and reassurance, and they assume that everyone else had similar experiences to their own. As such, it’s inconceivable to them that anyone could have gone through anything bad enough to go no-contact with their closest relatives.
They might start off by saying things like “but it’s your family…”, and try to convince you to reconcile because it’s “the right thing to do”, and won’t relent until you share some personal horror stories with them. Then they’ll have to choose whether to disbelieve you for their own mental wellness or avoid you. They don’t know how to deal with the cognitive dissonance of knowing what you’ve been through, and struggle to comprehend that family members could actually be so atrocious to each other.
5. That truly horrible narratives will be told about you when you aren’t around to defend yourself.
Those you’ve gone no-contact with will inevitably start a smear campaign against you to explain why you’re suddenly absent from their lives. Since you aren’t able to defend yourself, they have carte blanche to say anything they like about you while painting themselves as the injured, victimized party.
Sadly, most people who haven’t witnessed how they’ve behaved behind closed doors will believe them. If you run into these people later, expect to be treated as though you were the abuser or that you’re unhinged and in need of drastic psychiatric intervention.
6. You may find yourself wondering (hoping?) whether, if you make contact again, things will be better this time.
Those who go no-contact usually have trial periods in which they’ve gone low-contact for a while (or even cut ties temporarily), but have inevitably gone back to see if this time, things will improve; that their families will magically realize how awful they’ve been and do what they can to make amends.
This never happens.
Any family members who try to reach out and reconnect with promises of reconciliation are only doing it to hoover you back in. They don’t mean what they say, and if you do allow them to draw you back into the fold, the abuse will be worse than ever before.
7. The guilt that comes with feeling free.
When you’ve lived with pain and hardship for a really long time, the experience of suddenly being free from those sensations can be alienating and overwhelming. The baseline standard you’ve acclimatized to is suddenly gone, and it can feel disorienting, like you’re in free-fall without a solid foundation.
Furthermore, you may feel guilty for feeling so much joy at carving your family out of your life. After all, “family” is supposed to encompass strong, loving bonds, devotion, loyalty, and care. You may feel like an awful person for feeling such elation about your freedom from these individuals, and that you should feel sadder about those bonds being severed permanently.
8. How difficult it is to see your estranged family members’ features and behaviors in yourself.
When a person grows up with cruelty and abuse, they associate certain turns of phrase, scents (like perfume or a particular toothpaste), sounds, and visuals with their abusers. In toxic family dynamics, these traits are often inextricable from the family members who treated them so poorly. As a result, it can be disturbing and traumatizing to discover those traits in oneself, especially if they’re due to genetics rather than personal choice.
Here’s an example for you: I had to consciously change the way I laughed because I started to hear echoes of my mother’s voice when I did so, and it sickened me. It took a couple of years until it became second nature to me rather than an intentional, focused effort, but it was necessary if I ever wanted to be able to laugh again.
Other people who see their abusive parents’ features in themselves may dye their hair, wear colored contact lenses, or even get cosmetic surgery so they aren’t looking their abuser in the face every time they pass a mirror.
9. Part of you will always wish that things had been different.
No matter how long you’ve been no-contact with your toxic family, part of you will always yearn for what might have been. Any time you see photos of your friends’ families at holidays or other special get-togethers, or achieve a goal that you’d really love to share with those close to you, you’ll have a pang of longing for the family you could have had if you hadn’t been saddled with the one you were born into.
Please remember that there’s nothing you could have done to make things different. You likely poured an extraordinary amount of effort into trying to maintain a relationship with those who only hurt you and took you for granted, constantly drawing from your light without offering anything in return.
It would have been nice to grow up with a warm, loving family, but that wasn’t the hand that was dealt. As such, you have the chance to cultivate your own now and make the memories that you wish you’d had when you were growing up.
Final thoughts…
If you’ve gone no-contact with your family, then it’s for a good reason. Very few people wake up one morning and decide that they aren’t going to talk to their closest relatives anymore without just cause.
“Family ties” are hard-wired into our DNA, and it takes an extraordinary amount of toxic behavior and abuse to thin those out to the point where they eventually snap. Don’t let other people invalidate or diminish the awful things you’ve been through, or guilt you into re-forming bonds that will only end up damaging you further.
