Why don’t I feel guilty for going NC with my mum?

[LondonLady1980]

To cut a long story short I’m 42 years old and over the last few months I’ve come to realise what an extremely dysfunctional childhood I had due to my mother’s behaviour. She made mine and my sister’s life so unhappy as children and teenagers and we both have ongoing issues due to the type of childhood we had.

My sister doesn’t really have much of a relationship with our mother whereas due to my circumstances she has very much remained an active part of my life.

However, over the last two years things have been getting more and more difficult being around her. I have found myself trying to suppress how I feel but alongside that I have also been gaining a whole new perspective on the kind of mother I have and what kind of person she is.

It came to a head 10 weeks ago and I cut contact because everything became too much and I just couldn’t cope with her moods and behaviour anymore.

In the last 10 weeks the only contact we have had is two text messages: one was about 4-5 weeks after the initial fall out, and the second time was today. Prior to the fall-out we would usually speak on the phone about 3 times a week as well as seeing her twice a week, so it’s been a drastic change.

I’ve been going to counselling for the last 6 weeks which has really helped me to unpick my childhood and it is also helping me to sort out all the confused feelings I have about my mother.

What I’m really struggling with though is how little I care about the fact she isn’t really in my life anymore. I want to feel guilty, I should feel guilty, but I don’t. I want to miss her, but I don’t. I feel nothing towards her except anger.

During the last 10 weeks she’s been saying quite nasty things about me to other family members, including telling outright lies about me to paint herself as the victim and me as the evil and unkind daughter.

Has anyone else ever been in this place of going NC, and wanting to feel guilty about it as “she’s my mother”, but actually not missing her presence at all.

I feel like such a bad person 😢

I cut mine off in December, haven't felt guilty about it either. We aren't bad people, they were bad parents and cutting them off was a final resort. It's like when you stay dating someone for ages but emotionally checkout, then you finally break up and don't feel sad.

I've been complete no contact with my father for nearly 36 years, I was 21 when I cut him off.

Final straw was when he left my mother for another woman 2 days after my wedding...he'd been having the affair for 6 months while he was working/living in London (it wasn't his first), and kept ducking out of my wedding reception to call her. Turned out that he nearly didn't come to my wedding because the other woman wasn't happy that he'd be sharing a bed with my mother...

Like I said, that was the final straw. The fact was he'd been a pretty shit father for the 10 years before that - he'd never actually wanted children in the first place, my mother told him that she couldn't have children when they met...she was pregnant with my older brother 4 months later. So basically a 'shotgun' marriage. The met in the January and married in the December. My father turned 20 2 months before the wedding(my mother is 5 years older than him, he lied about his age when they met). Myself and my younger brother only exist because my mother is Catholic.

He'd started working abroad when I was 9. We hardly saw him after that, he'd come home for a month every year on average. I honestly didn't have much a relationship with him.

I miss the idea of a father, not him. I don't feel guilty about cutting him off. I have no idea where he is, or if he is even still alive. As far as I'm concerned, he died 36 years ago.

I didn’t speak to mine for three years at one point. It was a massive relief. The guilt did start to set in after a couple of years though. To be honest I would have saved myself a lot of grief if I had left it as it was.