If your child has gone NC

[fintangle]

If you’re a parent of an adult child who has gone NC with you, do you know why?

I’ve read so many accounts, on here and elsewhere, of parents who seem completely baffled and heartbroken by it, can think of no reason at all.

But surely for a child to do something as drastic as cut all contact, you must have an inkling why?

"People use vague and general terms to describe it to you because these are extremely personal and upsetting things that nobody wants to discuss except with their therapist or those extremely close to them. If you asked me in person why I don’t talk to my mother I would answer exactly as you’ve stated that people do: that she’s toxic, abusive, narcissistic. Would you really expect people to recount such upsetting details to you in person, unless you are their partner or one of their closest friends?
Surely you can understand why people are “vague” when you ask them such deeply personal and upsetting questions? Doing so in the first place is quite insensitive given the trauma that would almost always be involved in someone having to make such an extreme and final decision about ceasing contact with their own parent."

Was going to write something similar, but @brightwhiterteeth has put it perfectly.

It's also a lot more efficient saying "my mum is narcissistic and was very abusive, so I'm NC with her." No one wants to listen to me recount 22 years of abuse. I don't want to recount 22 years of abuse.

@fintangle It's actually quite an insensitive thing to say that the children essentially might be dramatising facts by simply saying "they were toxic/narcissitic/abusive." Those words mean something very serious and so people use them to coney something very serious without having to goninto detail. I even felt like, when I read that, I was doubting myself and that maybe I was exaggerating my mothers abuse because that's how I describe her to people too. But I'm not exaggerating. Not dramatising. Nothing. It's the facts that those words (abuse, narcissistic, toxic) encompass.

@bonden- that’s a very compassionate and loving response and your love and concern for your child comes through. I’m sorry for your pain and the pain of others on this thread.

The word ‘narcissist’ is used so much these days . However, it’s worth stating that only a qualified healthcare professional, e.g. psychiatrist can carry out clinical interviews and make a formal diagnosis to confirm NPD in a person. Even a therapist cannot tell a patient that their parent (or any other relative) is a narcissist without this diagnosis.

It can be easier to walk away from
difficult relationships than deal with them. Emotionally immature parents will raise emotionally immature children (unless they do the work to deal with it)

In this scenario, and in a society that gives you permission to walk away, going NC becomes really commonplace.

Going NC because of abuse is always the right decision, going NC because the relationship is difficult or you have some resentments rarely is.

But I’ve come onto this thread and answered your question. Do I know. Yea I do.
am I at fault. Yes.
have I made mistakes. Yes
am I going to recount in details every little thing to satisfy your nosiness. Hell no.
i am not perfect. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve messed up and I would give everything to make it right.
have I learnt from this. Yes I have.
none of us are perfect and claim to get everything right.
there are also outside influences that have effected my relationship which I have no control over. Yes I can blame them but I hold my hands up to my failings.
you know what that’s a very hard lesson and I live with the guilt every single day.
so don’t come on here being vile to people. You have no idea of what goes on in people’s lives. Nothing is that black and white.

Yes. This is such a good point. Immature parents are people who don’t see the vulnerability of children, but chiefly focus on their own hurts and vulnerability.

You don’t have to label someone a narcissist. The immature parent is an emotional bomb that a child had to experience over and over again which is the cause of the damaged relationship.

That this shows up later on in life when a child gets external help is not surprising. The immature parent may want to fix it, but only on their simple, child like terms. They are mostly deaf to the idea that it was not one thing or a few but who they were as a parent that caused the rift.

The idea than that further contact with parents like these will enable a child to have good adult life is wrong. The immature parent will still stick to this narrative of “I don’t know what I did”. This is the same behaviour that alienated and frightened the child over and over the years.

NC is very powerful. I have seen adult children do this and build successful and better lives with their own children. Parenting is a reflection of who we are. The immature parent never wants to look at that. They want explanations. And while they pretend to want them, they will also dismiss them or ask for them to be ignored. Children are not like that. They are literally made to remember in granular detail what you did.

I also congratulate those people who have taken these decisions and moved on to better lives who are on this thread. I have seen several people manage NC and they are invariably intelligent and courageous. They change a cycle. They change things not just for themselves but also for their children.

It was actually me that wrote that.

I agree: so many posts here attempt to minimise and invalidate the experience of growing up with such parents and the lifelong impact that has on a child; such behaviour is a continuation of precisely the behaviour that the child was subjected to in childhood. Much of the harm such a childhood causes cannot be undone, but to dismiss or minimise the lifelong effect of such failed parenting is re-traumatising for many people and why should they feel obliged to continue to subject them to it?

The fact that a large proportion of these parents think that their children should do so and are outraged or “confused” that their own preferences and demands are not the child’s priority anymore demonstrates the extreme selfishness, superiority complex and lack of empathy that caused them to behave like this in the first place and therefore evidences that they have not changed at all: it’s all still about them and what they want and their “main character syndrome”.

The best many of us can do is learn to live with the pain our parents have caused and create better lives for our own children, and by definition this often means ensuring that the people who caused the damage and still refuse to acknowledge it, accept responsibility or change their behaviour have no part in our lives anymore. Taking the decision to cease contact with a toxic parent is an incredibly brave and difficult thing to do and children certainly shouldn’t be demonised for being put in a situation where they have no realistic option left but to make this decision, or guilt tripped / gaslit for doing so.

Typical of the kind of passive-aggressive twisting of things, trying to paint other people who say things you find uncomfortable as being mentally ill. Literally the definition of gaslighting.

You don’t need my permission to post more information on a public forum. If you want to explain your situation then you’ve been free to do so at any point. I’m not really interested in speaking to evasive people who try to project their behaviour onto other people though so you can do so without repeatedly tagging me in your posts and breaching the talk guidelines with repeated personal attacks.

Interesting article.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/nov/09/the-families-torn-apart-when-adult-children-decide-to-go-no-contact

What an absolutely disgusting comment.

Minimising, making excuses, then trying to twist it around and make assumptions about my life, as though that has any bearing on the discussion.

As it happens I am a parent, yes. And yes, I am a single parent and have been since my children were babies, and will remain so until they are adults because I put them first and protect them. Oh, and both of my children are autistic, so I find your ableist comments trying to blame disabled children for their parents’ failure to meet their needs absolutely abhorrent.

HTH.

i DID do the work. And that’s why I am able to accept how I failed as a mother. And until my child also does “the work” they run the same risk I did, of allowing their own poor parenting to negatively influence them as a parent themselves.

I don't like the fact I'm NC with my mum, especially with Christmas coming up.

I have been told by my grandad (my mum's dad) that I "need to put the effort in to make things right again."

This coming from the man who knows exactly what kind of childhood I had and the kind of person my mother is.

I turned a blind eye to my mother's behaviour and her abuse for over 40 years, and then when I finally stood up to her earlier this year and she flounced off because she cannot cope with being confronted, (hence the NC), I'm now being told it's my responsibility to make things 'right' again.

Things have never been 'right'.

The entire relationship has always been a complete facade of her putting on the pretence of being a good mother to everyone else, whilst I kept quiet and towed the line.

There are two things that are needed for there to be any hope of things moving forwards which is for my mum to say sorry, and to take accountability for her actions. However, she will never do either of those things so I don't think there will ever be a resolution.

One of the challenges here is to accept that you don’t dictate any outcome or action by your adult children. Your actions now might help you. Your children are making their own decisions. You can’t ask or say something should happen.

Immature parenting has a dreadful consequence on children because they only get one childhood. You sound like you have improved your understanding, but it doesn’t follow that your adult children will be interested in that.

Precisely. A parent decides suddenly - as they’re getting old and lonely - that they finally repent (usually having dismissed or minimised the child’s pleading with them in childhood and repeated attempts in their earlier adulthood to address the situation with the parent) and suddenly now the child is meant to drop everything, risk their own hard-won happiness and freedom from the toxic relationship, potentially put their own children at risk of being exposed to similar behaviour as well, all because their parent has now allegedly - many, many years too late - decided that they want to rectify things? The entitlement and selfishness of it is quite astonishing.

Having wrecked their children’s childhoods and then seen them have the strength to overcome this in adulthood and go through the incredibly hard process of finally learning healthy relationship boundaries and developing a sense of self-worth as adults - which is so hard to do without a decent childhood and which their parents failed in their responsibility to provide to them while growing up - these parents expect their adult children to risk their hard-won freedom from the toxicity which ruined much of their life because now it is the parent’s whim that they should do so because it suits them now and allegedly they are now “sorry” and sad about the situation.

The sheer entitlement of it demonstrates that the parents with this approach to the issue - those who are outraged that or allegedly “confused” about why their now-adult children won’t comply with their demands - haven’t actually changed at all.

You reap what you sow.

Indeed, Hope.

Perhaps you could delete all the posts containing personal attacks, insinuations that posters whose posts certain people find uncomfortable are mentally ill, and the abhorrent, discriminatory and ableist comments about autistic children.

It’s an interesting and worthwhile thread and many people have shared very illuminating personal stories. Sadly, some posters have tried to ruin it with personal attacks evidencing precisely the type of behaviour that is the subject matter of the thread so removing the posts containing these personal attacks and discriminatory comments which breach the Talk Guidelines, so that the rest of us who have posted can continue the discussion without such unpleasant and unacceptable behaviour, would be helpful moderation.

Yet more personal attacks.

Quelle surprise.

Try engaging with the subject matter of the post rather than breaching the Talk Guidelines by attempting to ridicule or disparage other posters with whom you don’t agree.

It is only too easy for them to invent reasons to shirk all accountability, or even worse act like it hasn't happened/!minimising. There is no reason at all not to ask; it shows guilt imo.

I went NC with my dad because he wouldn’t take care of himself to the point where he was hospitalised weekly at the end. He was eventually the subject of a safeguarding referral from a paramedic after years of me trying to tell professionals he was self harming through neglect. I was getting weekly, sometimes more, phone calls from the police about him. In the end, NC was the only way to preserve myself and my marriage and the only way to get him the help he needed. I’m an only child, lived four hours away and had a new baby and a four year old at the time. I saw him before he died and it broke me. He was so completely devastated that I’d gone NC. I’d do anything to change it but DH and I both tried and tried to tell him he was going to have to do something for himself and he wouldn’t. I know he knew somewhere deep down that he was partly responsible, but he would never admit even slightly that he needed to change and would get very nasty if I pushed him on it. I could cry every time I see an old man who reminds me of him. I’ve thought of volunteering with the elderly as penance but DF had a horribly neglected childhood which damaged him for life, so I’m putting all my effort into my children so they never have the issues he did. That’s his legacy and my love for him. Going NC was very much a last resort and will forever be a devastating source of sadness for me.
Edited to add that as PPs have said, yes, there was a long history of issues with him in my childhood too. He had multiple affairs and after he split from DM he only ever had relationships with married women, so my relationship with him was never good.

I think for what it is worth, many emotionally immature parents had similarly neglectful or abusive childhoods. They did not receive guidance into how to be a mature adult which is the basis of good parenting.

Morally however childhood is extremely short. The damage done cannot be fixed or eradicated. The growing child has a chance of being stable and setting new mature standards.

Emotionally immature parents like to imagine that they can still be the good guys. But it is destructive nature of the childhood they provide that can never be repaired. It would require a kind of supreme heroism by the child to forgive it.

@Accaron I very nearly went NC with DM as well - she is a viciously toxic narcissist, I do have some sympathy with my dad - but she had exactly the change of heart you describe after her parents died and I became her only living relative. We’ve had some huge rows about her behaviour since I became a mother. It really does change your perspective on your own childhood and I don’t tolerate any nonsense around the children. I think the fact I went NC with DF and let him die alone really underlined to her that I would and will put my marriage and children first. She’s pretty much behaved since then, so I do think that going NC with DF saved my relationship with DM.

Oh gosh sorry! I was writing that in a hurry and obviously didn't pay enough attention to the username that wrote it!! x

Please don’t blame yourself. You had no other realistic choice. It is NOT your fault and you have no need for penance.

It is incredibly sad and as you say, only something that anybody does as a last resort. But sometimes that is all that is left and that is absolutely not your fault as the child.

That you are still suffering for his mistakes long after he is gone is so sad. Please don’t continue to blame yourself. You have broken the cycle and should be very proud of yourself. If, deep down, he was a good person then that’s what he would have wanted.

It’s ok! I often find the format with quoted posts very confusing.