Going ‘No-Contact’ With A Family Member Is Hard To Do

“I’M DONE,” I thought as I hung up the phone. “I’m never speaking to him again.” After a lifetime of arguments and anger and a blow-up I was certain marked the end, my relationship with my father was over.

It wasn’t that simple. Of course.

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GOING “NO CONTACT” is having a moment. Counsellors with huge YouTube followings offer advice on how to write a no-contact letter to toxic family members. Reddit forums, such as “raisedbynarcissists,” offer support to people coping with narcissistic parents. In the U.K., the charity Stand Alone offers support and conducts research on family estrangement, while in the U.S., the Cornell Family Estrangement and Reconciliation Project, under sociologist Karl Pillemer, studies how “reconcilers” manage reconnection after periods of limited or no contact. A 2014 Ipsos study conducted for Stand Alone found that one in five U.K. families were affected by estrange­ment, while Pillemer’s U.S. research, the basis for his 2020 book Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them, found that 27 percent of respond ents were currently estranged from a close relative. Relationships with fathers are particularly vulnerable: One U.S. study suggests that one in four adults will be estranged from their father at some point, while just one in 20 will be estranged from their mother. And with growing political polarization further complicating family relationships, those numbers could be even higher.

As awareness of emotional abuse and healthy boundaries have grown, the kind of emotionally corrosive behaviour that may have once been tolerated is getting called out. “We’ve been sold this notion that blood is thicker than water,” says New York-based Eamon Dolan, author of The Power of Parting: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement. It’s a notion that pressures family members into accepting toxic behaviours they would reject in any other relationship.

While Dolan’s childhood relationship with his mother was marred by physical abuse, for many of the people he interviewed for his book, emotional toxicity was central to their decision to cut a relative off.

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MY FATHER was a bully. Even now, my fingers stumble on the keyboard as I type that word, tripping over the bluntness of my betrayal. We weren’t beaten, though like many kids raised in the 1970s, we were spanked. We had a roof over our heads, good food, vacations. But our emotional lives were shaped by the gravitational pull of my father’s anger and insecurity. He loved an argument, was gleeful as he tied you in conversational knots until you conceded he was right. And he was, in his opinion, always right. He hated bragging—any sharing of an accomplishment counted as “blowing your own horn”—and his precisely aimed takedowns were sure to deflate your puffed-up ego. By my 20s, I’d learned how to fight and how to hold my breath when sharing good news, always fearing a withering look or piercing sarcasm.

My solution to my family troubles was geographic: I spent my adult life more than a thousand kilometres away from my father, he in New Brunswick and me in Toronto. I came home for holidays—until I gave that up too, exhausted by the fights that flared as alcohol and close quarters added pressure to family fault lines. Through it all, my mother did her best to mend fences, patch egos, soothe hurt feelings. Still, her first-aid efforts were no match for our fractures.

Then, after 26 years in Toronto, I made the move back to the East Coast. My parents were aging, and I didn’t want to regret time I hadn’t spent with them. Or more accurately, time I hadn’t spent with my mother. My father? Well, I’d just have to deal with him.

And then, in 2014, Mom left Dad.

It was early September, and I was waiting for a friend at a café when the email popped up on my phone. It was addressed to my two siblings and me. She wasn’t crazy, Mom wrote, but she’d decided to leave our father. They’d been married 51 years. She was just about to turn 75.

I was still absorbing the words when my friend arrived. She’d known our family for decades, knew the challenges we’d faced dealing with Dad, shared our affection for Mom. I showed her the email. “Holy shit,” was all she could muster.

I love you and support you no matter what you do, I typed back to Mom. Will call later.

Calls with my siblings followed. No one was surprised Mom was leaving, but at the same time everyone was surprised she was finally leaving.

I realized their separation might mean I’d no longer need to navigate my own toxic relationship with Dad. When I mentioned this to a friend whose parents had also split up later in life, he had a different take. “Aren’t you going to have to give him more support now that he doesn’t have your mom?” he said. “Her parole is not going to be my life sentence,” I snapped back. Once Mom moved out, I said, I wouldn’t have to deal with Dad again.

It wasn’t that simple. Of course.

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“ONE OF THE myths about estrangement is that it’s all or nothing, and that it’s permanent,” says Dolan. “But now is not forever.” Choosing to distance yourself from a family mem­ber can happen in stages, and it can be revisited if circumstances change. “You can break the cycle. You can make sure what was passed down to you stops with you. That’s a staggeringly powerful thing to do.”

And shifts in one relationship may cause shifts in another. When we’ve grown used to orbiting around an unhealthy relationship, we can imagine its loss will send all the planets in the family solar system spinning out to the edges of the universe. “It’s often not true,” says Dolan. “Most of the sur­vivors I talked to retained relationships with their [other] family members.”

In his own case, Dolan was worried that his relationship with his sister would be damaged if he retreated from their mom. It wasn’t: His sister supported Dolan in his choice.

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IN THE MONTHS after Mom left Dad, our family universe continued to wobble. Despite my plan to limit contact with my father, my friend hadn’t been completely wrong: Dad and I were still enmeshed in the sticky glue of my mother’s guilt and worry. While she didn’t want to be with Dad, she also couldn’t ignore his unravelling. His bills went unpaid. His apartment was a hoarding nightmare. He was in danger of eviction. My siblings were two provinces away, so I was the one closest to the fallout.

Dad, in turn, shouted down phone lines at me, my siblings and anyone else he thought responsible for sabotaging his marriage. “You’re delusional,” I told him in what I soon labelled our “last” conversation. “You’re accusing people of things you’ve done. I’m not listening to this.” No more, I thought. I’m done.

Still, my boundaries shifted. I visited him to get his bills paid and his lease sorted out but declared conversations about Mom and criticisms of other family members out of bounds. I took his calls—until I couldn’t anymore, and that burden shifted to another family member. I granted myself the flexibility to have contact that made sense to me.

I felt grief. I felt guilt. And I felt flashes of freedom, as I learned to recognize that the inner critic who had whispered in my ear for decades often spoke in my father’s voice. As our orbits shifted, that echo diminished.

It wasn’t that simple, of course. I never managed the clean break of “no contact,” a phrase I didn’t hear until after Dad died in 2016. But with each boundary, each self-aware decision, each choice for self-care, I fought less. I breathed easier. And I broke the cycle.