Well, my family was pretty screwed up so I’ve had periods of NC with more than one family member.
With my mum I was LC/NC for a year in my late twenties because I needed space to really work through my emotions about my childhood. It was tough, but we both did a lot of soul searching and we came out with a new, better and stronger relationship after that. It became more peer to peer and less mother to daughter (and as I was a heavily parentified child, less of the inverse too).
I didn’t see my father for a long time, from about age 7 to my early thirties to a very complicated and nasty family breakdown, involving gambling addiction, domestic violence, bankruptcy and abandonment. He attempted contact once in my teens and once in my late twenties, where there wasn’t much in the way of sustained contact. His attempted contact in my twenties actually led about a year later to the LC/NC period with my mum.
Then in my early thirties, once my mum and I had gotten into a healthier pattern, I did make contact with my dad, and made a fairly sustained effort to rebuild a relationship with my dad. It didn’t work though. Fundamentally he hadn’t changed and still saw himself as the victim in the whole situation. He did apologise for something that he had done that hurt me very deeply though, but later he exhibited behaviour in the same vein, so the apology did’t really show the self-awareness, reflection, growth or change that would have been necessary for a relationship to be possible given the events of the past.
When he was dying a decade later, his step-daughter got in touch via a private investigator to ask if I would see him before he died. I did consider it but when it became clear his wife/her mother wasn’t on board with that I declined to see as I felt like I would be walking into a very messy situation.
After my mum died (I looked after her whilst she had terminal breast cancer) my aunt and my granma started to treat me as they had treated my mum- namely bullying and triangulation. The family pattern was very much that my granma was a narcissistic mother who played her children, my mum and my aunt, off against one another to maintain control and create a sense of emotional safety for herself. My mum was the scapegoat and my aunt was the golden child. As side note my dad was fairly narcissistic too, so I think my mum sadly feel into a classic pattern of picking a partner through whom she would relive a parental dynamic.
About a year after my mum’s death, it became clear that the old pattern was reasserting itself, but this time with me in the role of scapegoat. I declined to play that role and walked away, explaining that I had seen them bully my mum for my whole life and that I wasn’t going to tolerate that behaviour.
Prior to this, my aunt had indicated that she felt it would be difficult for the three of us to have an easy relationship because I had seen how she and my granma had treated my mum. She also said she knew what was going on, hadn’t liked it but had gone along with it. It wasn’t an apology exactly but it was a sign of some level of self-awareness, so I had had some hopes we might be able to navigate to a healthier pattern but it wasn’t to be.
I didn’t hear from either of them again until my granma died, when my aunt called to inform me of that.
I didn’t speak to my aunt again for a long time. When Covid hit and we were in lockdowns I didn’t speak phone to see if she was ok. A couple of years later when her husband died, she got in touch and we resumed contact, and we emailed and phoned regularly although we never met again in person due to distance. We stayed in touch on an almost daily basis until her own death.
So that’s a long way of saying that being LC/NC can act as a sorting mechanism as well as a way to protect your peace. If (all) the people involved have a degree of self-awareness, a deep bond and a willingness to change then new patterns can be built.
Sometimes that is possible and I have to say that I am forever grateful in a number of ways to have experienced those renewed and reshaped experiences with my mum and my aunt, difficult though it was to get there. And with my granma and my dad, it,was for the best that they weren’t in my life. I do grieve at times for what might have been, but I do accept that as the people they actually were, rather than whom I might hope they could become, it was better to keep a good distance.
Sowmtimes you’ve just got to play the hand you are dealt as best you can, and that can involve letting people go. Or running away like a bat out of hell.