So, You Just Cut Contact with Your Parents
An Unofficial Guide for Voluntary Orphans
Congratulations. I know not enough people have said that to you. If you’ve told anyone at all you’ve probably gotten a lot of questions and pushback to the tune of “but they’re your parents” or “they love you in their own weird way”, and not much support. I know it feels awful, I know it’s one of the hardest decisions you’ve ever had to make, I know that you’re probably swimming in guilt and self-doubt. And yet, you did it. You set a boundary. You decided your emotional and maybe even physical safety were worth more to you than societal norms and the opinions of people who can’t see the whole picture. You chose yourself, likely for the first time in this relationship, and I’m proud of you.
I know it’s been a long road to get here. I know that you’ve done everything you could to salvage the relationship, working for years to try and squeeze out even a drop of what you needed from them. I know that you fought hard for it to not come to this, and that you might feel like you’ve failed. It’s hard to put down your axe and walk off that battlefield. It’s hard to give up on receiving the love you’ve always deserved from the people you should have always been able to count on providing it. You are not the person who’s failed here. Your parents failed you. It’s important that you remember that moving forward.
Now for some practical advice. Expect pushback from your parents directly and create a safety plan. You know your parents better than anyone else. Consider their patterns of behavior and do your best to keep yourself safe. That might look like blocking phone numbers and email addresses or talking to the post office about returning any mail from them without forwarding it to you. It might look like talking to the police in advance about any attempt at a welfare check. You may need to contact HR where you work or your apartment management about them potentially turning up. Do your best to cut any attempt to contact you off at the knees before they get the chance to escalate. Be ready to block the phone numbers of family members your parents may speak to about the situation. They only have the one side of the story, and as tempting as it is to give them yours, you need to know that anything you say will go straight back to your parents. There’s a good chance your parents will try to speak ill of you to anyone who will listen. Let them. You do not need to be understood by everyone your parents have access to. It’s okay if people take their side without ever hearing yours. That line of attack only works if you try to correct the narrative.
The other thing you need to prepare for is absolutely nothing. There’s a chance that your parents will barely respond to you cutting contact at all. I know that sounds like the best-case scenario, and in many ways it is, but there’s an emotional toll involved with realizing that you being out of their life is no real loss to them. Hold firm to your reasons for walking away. Be sure that you’re doing this for yourself and not because you’re hoping to shake something loose in them. Their failure to see what they’re missing by not having their child in their life is not a reflection on you. It’s a reflection of what terrible parents they’ve been all along.
If there are certain conditions under which you would accept contact from your parents, put those down in writing, not for them, but for you. Stick to your guns, and don’t allow for half-measures or half-hearted apologies. You deserve more than that from them and you always have. You should also be ready for them to initially do what you’ve asked, and then return to their previous behavior shortly thereafter. Think through what re-establishing those boundaries will look like for you in advance, so that you can reassert them more easily if necessary.
Be discerning about who you talk to about your choice to cut contact. There will be people in your life who don’t understand how impossible this situation has been for you. They’ll want reasons and will disapprove of anything short of torture. Those people do not deserve to be in your support circle right now. Lean on those who have been your sounding board while you worked toward this point, those who understand what you’ve been through and don’t need an explanation to be supportive. No one else needs to be read in right now. It can wait until you’re more settled and the worst of the storm has passed.
You should also be ready for grief. It won’t hit right away, maybe not even in the first month, but sooner or later, you’ll need to grieve for the parents and childhood you should have had. You’re going to spend a lot of time longing for a parent that never existed for you, and wishing there was another path forward. Eventually, you’ll start to see all the ways your parents have impacted your life, how not being loved and supported fundamentally shaped you. You’ll have to grieve for the child you were, too, the one who developed all those trauma responses to try and keep you safe. Allow yourself to ache for these things. Allow yourself to mourn for the person you could have been and the childhood you should have had. Take as much time as you need. It’s taken years for you to leave this relationship safely. You don’t need to do all your grieving in one day.
Make sure you have a support system around the holidays, your birthday, and also your parents’ birthdays. Those are tricky to navigate the first time around, and having someone in your corner you can talk to or be with will help. Do your best to avoid drugs or alcohol on these days. That’s a dangerous pattern to establish, and one that will be hard to break down the road.
Most importantly, though, be kind to yourself. This is an incredibly difficult path to walk, especially in the immediate aftermath. Let yourself be as sad or angry or jubilant as you need to be right now. Do the things that feel right to you, whether that’s making art, going to a rage room, or talking the ear off of a friend. Give yourself space to be a little messy and out of sorts right now. Once the smoke has cleared, you’ll find that there’s a way forward for you, away from the family you had to leave behind. You’ll get through this, and you’ll find joy again. It might take some time, but you’ll get there.
