How to Survive Going No-Contact

Therapy in person in Wichita and online across Kansas

Going No Contact With Family

Family: safety or chaos?

From blithe “Just cut them off!” advice from people who have no skin in your game, to dismissive “Kids these days don’t know what real trauma is” anger from estranged parents, you already know going no-contact is a polarized social issue with intense emotions. You feel the sharp pains of it, too: deciding what to do with painful or destructive family relationships is not easy.

People choose to end contact for a huge spectrum of reasons. Family connections can collapse due to enmeshment, helicopter parenting, parentification, dementia, divorce, coercive control, failure to protect children from predators, and a myriad of other issues. These family patterns, social forces, addiction, divorce, abuse and trauma are complex roads that can end up at the same destination. Going no-contact often boils down to feeling like it’s the only way left to survive.

So how do you survive, after going no contact? For this article, we’re going to sidestep the issue of whether you should go no contact with someone in favor of focusing on how to move forward after making that decision. (If you’re experiencing an estrangement you didn’t choose, you may find this article more helpful.)

Losing part or all of your herd is an intense experience

Coping With No Contact

While people go no-contact for a huge spectrum of reasons, there is frequently a sudden tipping point (sometimes a small point) after a long period of trying to make it work. By then, you’re just exhausted by the ever-growing list (even while the other person may be bewildered by the apparent suddenness and can’t think of why it happened at all!). Afterward, you might be among the many who hold the boundary (perhaps in fits and starts) while simultaneously wishing things could be different.

Heartache, trauma, and uncertainty often trail the decision to go no contact. If this describes your experience, you may find the book Who Deserves Your Love by K.C. Davis, LPC, helpful in wrestling with boundaries in complex relationships.

Either way, know that it’s common to feel a range of emotions and that some people do experience oscillating between opposite emotions like anger and self-blame. Be proactively kind to yourself in the early days surrounding an estrangement. Some practical steps that might help you get through:

• Be mindfully present with your own body experiences as much as you can: notice the sensation of warm water when you wash your hands, pause to listen to the birds when you walk to your car, practice deep breathing at intervals through the day. Bring your attention to the narrowness of the present moment, over and over across the day.

• Practice intentional self-care. Set alarms to move yourself toward bed at a good time, practice sleep hygiene, eat well-rounded meals, do deep breathing, spend time outside in the fresh air, and move your body. Go through the motions of normal life even if you’re not feeling them right now.

• Consider volunteering in some way that connects you to nature or other people and benefits others: sign up to go tend kittens at the shelter, help construct a house with Habitat for Humanity, visit lonely people in a nursing home, or help put new plants in the ground at the local botanical garden. Caring for other people, animals, and nature are classic ways you can help yourself successfully walk through loss.

• Take up a new hobby: enroll in a class, learn to knit, play chess, or whatever else you can find that sparks curiosity! Learning new information and skills is a fantastic way to reduce how trauma is affecting you.

Making a herd of different individuals

Long-Term Healing Work

Healing flourishes in safety: it’s hard to heal when your brain and body are busy fending off harm. This instinct is behind many people’s decisions to go no contact. But safety may be broader than just stepping back from harmful relationships: you may also need stability in things like housing, employment and finances, and it may take time to build a new community that will provide the social support to facilitate healing. (Relationships are both the place of tremendous wounding, and one of the greatest factors toward healing - deep healing is not a solo project!) Be patient with yourself if it takes time to build these resources up and thus healing feels harder than you had hoped.

But as you move out of initial crisis and think about your longterm healing, some of these things might become relevant in the weeks/months/years to come:

• If abuse and other types of harm were part of the equation in your decision to go no-contact, consider trauma therapy. This post may help you discern what type of therapy would be most helpful to do this healing work.

• Know that things sometimes shift as you heal. Your need to be no-contact might shift to a boundaried reconciliation, being low contact, or gaining absolute clarity that you need to be no contact permanently. Allow yourself time to sort it out: don’t feel you have to decide about forever, immediately. Healing is a multi-year, unfolding task; the needs of today might be different than five years from now, which might be different than ten years from now. Allow yourself to rest in what feels right today without having to know the future.

• Be very intentional about other relationships. It is difficult to replace the safety net that healthy, stable families usually provide, so invest in a wide range of relationships that are well-balanced in giving/receiving. Be okay with being the initiator as long as the relationship is reciprocal and balanced otherwise; don't wait for people to initiate with you! It may help to think of replacing the single, deep safety net that family usually provides, with a wide net of many relationships. You may not find someone who will be the end-all substitute for family, but you can build a network of people who can cumulatively help hold you when life inevitably throws a curve ball - and where you can feel some belonging by doing the same for them. Read some tips about building community here.

• Seek opportunities to be invested in relationships that span different ages and genders. If you’ve lost the grandparents / aunts / uncles / parents component of family life, seek other places to be in multi-generational relationships. Being in relationships that span decades of life experience can help you feel more well-rounded, and navigating life transitions is easier if you’ve watched up close how other people did it well.

• Stretch yourself toward complex, paradoxical thinking. A traumatized brain often saves energy for survival by shuffling people and situations into binary, rigid categories like Good/Bad, Safe/Unsafe, True/False. This is a fantastic survival mechanism of the brain, but it also leaves you somewhat vulnerable to people who don’t fit the risk categories your brain is expecting - be aware that harm comes in forms other than the forms you have experienced. And, you may be missing the support of people who don’t fit into a traumatized brain’s simplified thought patterns. Practice telling yourself, “This feels really stark to me right now and that's okay because my brain is trying to keep me afloat through a difficult experience” or “I feel this emotion one day and that emotion another day. They're both valid even if they feel like opposites right now.” Lean toward paradoxes.

• And finally, if breaking generational patterns is part of your goal for yourself and the children after you, include thinking about the concept of “differentiation.” Differentiation is the capacity to maintain some connection to people you are different than, while remaining true to yourself. In unhealthy families, differentiation is often suppressed, causing ongoing difficulty through the generations in connecting to people who are different, or ongoing difficulty remaining true to self, or both. So if you’ve gone no contact because your family was unhealthy, be curious whether enmeshment, control, or cutoffs were patterns across the generations, and if so, look for other opportunities to lean into differentiation. Build relationships with people who believe and live differently than you while also holding on to who you are. A therapist who utilizes Bowen Family Systems theory in their practice may be helpful for this project.

Therapy Around Going No Contact in Wichita, KS

If you need help figuring out a healthy boundary, developing coping strategies for the immediate aftermath, or some of these tasks for long-term healing from family estrangement sound like what you’re ready to do, reach out to schedule your free consultation today! I see clients in person in Wichita and online across Kansas. I offer free consultations to all new clients because I believe you deserve to enter therapy confident that you’re in the right place for the work you want to do.

Elizabeth Peters, LMSW is a licensed therapist seeing clients in person in Wichita and online across Kansas. She provides EMDR and somatic therapy for adults who are overwhelmed by anxiety, trauma, painful relationships or spiritual harm.