Going No Contact With a Parent: What No One Tells You, From People Who’ve Done It
Last Tuesday night, I sat on my couch at 10:30 p.m., cold chamomile tea seeping into a cardboard coaster, scrolling the local parenting group I’ve joined since my son was in first grade. Most posts that time of night are frantic requests for a last-minute babysitter or rants about middle school math homework, but a new post popped up at the top, posted two minutes prior from a profile with no photo: “Anyone who has gone nc with a parent please help. I sent the text three days ago and I can’t keep food down. I don’t know if I did the right thing.”
Within an hour, there were more than 400 comments. A handful were the familiar, unhelpful lines: “You’ll regret this when they’re gone.” “Blood is thicker than water.” “Just go to therapy and work it out.” But most came from people who’d hit send on that same text, or loaded the last of their things into a car after a final fight, and knew exactly what that hollow, shaky stomach felt like. I lead low-cost parenting workshops through our local community center, so I’ve sat with dozens of people working through this exact choice, but that thread laid out the messy, unglamorous parts of no contact that rarely get talked about anywhere.
The first long comment came from Marisol, a 42-year-old fourth grade teacher who went no contact with her dad seven years ago. She wrote that the first three months, she kept her phone on loud in her desk during school hours, half waiting for angry voicemails, half waiting for a cousin to call and yell at her for breaking the family apart. She kept grabbing his favorite peppermint gum at gas station checkout out of habit, for two months after she cut contact, before she remembered she didn’t have to buy it for anyone anymore. The nausea the original poster described? Marisol had that too, for 10 weeks. Her doctor told her it wasn’t a sign she’d made the wrong choice—it was her body adjusting to life without the constant low hum of waiting for the next fight, the next guilt trip, the last-minute demand she’d be shamed for turning down. When you spend 30 years tuning your system to one person’s moods, it doesn’t reset the second you hit block.
Her first tip, which got 200 likes, was to write a physical list of the specific reasons you chose this, and keep it somewhere you can grab it at 2 a.m. when the guilt hits. Don’t write “he was toxic.” Write the actual, specific moments: “2017, he called my partner lazy to his face at our housewarming. 2020, he told my 7-year-old her drawing was ugly because she colored the sky purple. Last March, he showed up unannounced at my classroom after I asked for space, and yelled at me in front of my students.” You don’t have to re-litigate the entire relationship every time you feel wobbly. You just pull out the list and read it. It cuts through the fuzzy nostalgia that makes you forget all the parts that hurt.
Another comment came from Jake, 36, a construction foreman and dad of two who went no contact with his mom 18 months prior. He wrote that the best small thing he did for himself those first few months was pick one tiny weekly routine he’d never been allowed to stick to when she was in his life. Every Saturday morning, he stops at the gas station on the way to his kid’s soccer game and gets a blue raspberry slushie, even though it’s 8 a.m. His mom always called sugary breakfast “selfish and irresponsible” and would lecture him for an hour if he so much as brought a donut home before noon. It costs $1.79, takes two minutes, and it’s a quiet, physical reminder that his time and choices don’t belong to anyone else. You don’t need a big grand gesture to remind yourself why you did this. A slushie works just as well.
Dozens weighed in on endless questions from extended family, the aunts who text every holiday asking when you’ll “stop being stubborn” and make up. Almost everyone who’d been through it agreed: you don’t owe anyone a full explanation. A lot of people wasted weeks drafting long, careful messages laying out every hurt, trying to get cousins or grandparents to understand, and it almost never worked. Most landed on one short line they reused every time: “This is a boundary I’ve set for my own well-being, and I won’t be discussing it further.” If the person pushes, you leave the conversation, mute the text chain, or pack up your things and leave Thanksgiving early. One 22-year-old college student wrote that she keeps a Tupperware of her own sweet potatoes in her car when she goes to family gatherings now, so she doesn’t have to stay for dinner if someone corners her. It’s silly, but it works.
As I read, I kept glancing over at my 16-year-old, on the other couch yelling at his friends over a headset during a video game. I hear so many parents of younger kids say things like “my kid would never cut me off, I feed them and clothe them” or “all this boundary stuff is just kids being dramatic these days.” But not one person in that thread said they made the choice on a whim. Every single one tried smaller boundaries first. They asked for apologies that never came. They went to family therapy. They gave second, third, twelfth chances. They held on for years waiting for the parent they wished they had, instead of the one they actually got. For those of us still raising kids, that’s the quiet takeaway: when your kid tells you you hurt their feelings, even if it seems small, even if you didn’t mean it, you don’t have to be perfect to keep them close. You just have to say “I messed up, that sounded awful, I’m sorry” instead of calling them sensitive, or listing soccer fees to shut the conversation down.
A lot of people also wrote about the guilt of grieving, even when they know they made the right call. One woman keeps her mom’s old meatloaf recipe card in her junk drawer, even though she’ll never make it, because the edge still smells like the vanilla perfume her mom wore to church. Jake still cries sometimes in the cereal aisle, because his mom taught him to pick the least crushed Cheerios when he was a kid shopping for his little sister. You don’t have to erase every good memory to be sure of your choice. Grief doesn’t mean you were wrong. It just means you lost something, even if you chose to walk away. A social worker named Lila commented that she first went no contact at 39, reached out three years later when her mom had a heart attack, and went back to no contact after 10 months when nothing changed. It’s not a failure if the line shifts, she wrote. You don’t have to make a permanent, unbreakable vow to protect yourself right now.
Two weeks after the original post, the anonymous poster came back to leave an update. She still has bad days, she wrote. She re-blocked her grandma for the third time after three begging voicemails. Some nights she lies awake wondering if she should have tried harder. But last Tuesday, she made tacos for dinner with extra cilantro, the way she likes it. Her dad always said cilantro tastes like soap and made her pick every leaf off her plate. She didn’t pick a single one off. That was the whole update.
I ran into Marisol last weekend at the donut shop by the park, where she eats her Sunday morning glazed donut before grading papers. She had crumbs on her spelling test stack and laughed at a meme a student drew in the margin of her lesson plan. She didn’t look like someone who’d made a huge, controversial choice. She just looked like someone getting through a Sunday, one quiet 20-minute routine at a time. Most days, no contact isn’t a big dramatic statement. It’s just a life, slowly stitched back together, one taco with extra cilantro, one cheap slushie, one donut in the park at a time. Some days it still hurts. Some days it’s just normal. That’s all it has to be.
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