Those, who have been NC 5 yrs or more, please share thoughts

[My New Life]

This month marks five years that I have been NC with an uNPD and uBPD parent. 
 
My experience going NC with a parent, is that society, most family, and a lot of therapists don't really get it.

And it is isolating.

Even within the small community of people, who have gone NC with a parent, the circumstances differ greatly, making true connection, sometimes difficult.  The experience of those, who have gone NC with a parent, who ignored them - not trying to meet any of their needs; differs significantly with the experience of those, who were enmeshed by a Narcissist and lost ownership of their own lives; which differs significantly with the experience of those who went NC with an abusive Narcissist.  There are some similarities to all of our experiences, but the emotional landscape is always unique. 

I believe people, including my spouse and adult children, perceive me differently - now, that they know I am capable of amputating a diseased relationship from my life.  A little on edge - afraid I might do the same with them.

The only prize, for facing the pain and isolation of going NC, is freedom from the chaos of crazy.  Which is a good thing.  A necessary thing.  However, almost immediately, begins the work of discovering who you are, outside of the Land of Crazy.  And this does not always feel like a reward.  It is tiresome work, that often results in more questions than answers.

I've worked all my life, to heal.  The first decades, I worked to heal myself, by saving her.  The past five years, I have acknowledged I cannot save her, so I have just worked to heal myself. 

Even as I do this work, I question my decision to go NC daily (and I know I question myself because she didn't question herself - she was always right, and I never wanted to be like her).  Certainly, as she descends into dementia and other medical issues, I question if my decision is a moral one.

It is a lot to carry.  I am grateful I have a place, like this forum, to write it out, so it does not eat me whole.  To know that while our experiences differ, we are allowed to voice our experiences, and be heard, without a lot of judgement. 

Those of you, who have been NC, 5 years or more; what are your experiences, or nuggets of wisdom?

[Adria]

I'm so sorry New Life,

It takes a lot of strength and courage to go NC.  It's truly a last ditch effort, when all else fails, to save yourself.  I have been NC from my entire family for over 30 years.  It took a long time to adjust.  I always wish things were different, but they will never let them be.  My family is extremely narcissistic and they basically tried to destroy me on every level. 

It was the only road I could take to save myself and my children.  I don't know if I have many words of wisdom. Just want you to know I understand, and understand you questioning yourself. I know I will never be able to change NC with my family.  But, that doesn't mean that it can't change back if you need it to.  For many people, it is for a season. For extreme cases, like mine, it's a life time. 

I wish things were different every day, but I feel I have to play the cards I'm dealt, so keep pressing forward.  I have a nice life and I have peace, something I would not have if I went back. 

Maybe you just need a break for awhile.  Time will tell.  Don't be too hard on yourself.  Just to get to this point is because of much mental and physical anguish endured.  In these situations - there comes a time . . .

Be patient and kind with yourself, understanding this is not an easy thing to do.  You will have ups and downs, good days and bad days, but the most important thing is to stay true to yourself. Hugs, Adria

[My New Life]

Thank you for such a beautiful response, Adria. I am sorry for your loss, and have such respect for your resolve. 

NC with my mom is for a lifetime.  I knew it was a lifetime decision, when I made it. As you said, it was a last ditch effort to save myself and to break a destructive family dynamic for my children. It's interesting, how on some days, that doesn't feel like enough. I do not regret my decision, yet somehow still question it.  It's a bit murky.  Thanks for understanding.  Hugs.

[Call Me Cordelia]

I feel for you, My New Life. I'm NC six years with my parents and not much less than that with my entire FOO. For me I'm pretty sure this is a lifetime deal as well. My father is a threat to my children. My mother will never do anything against my father, so she's a threat too. By the time we no longer have a minor child in our home, my parents will be 90ish so we'll see if they even make it that far. There is the possibility of hearing from my sisters when the time comes for moving them out of their house, etc. like so many on this forum have dealt with. Which would take a lot of hutzpah on their part but, well, having the scapegoat around is handy at a time like that and both of them have a good dose of entitlement and intolerably low self-awareness. Having any sort of relationship worth having is not possible with either of them, either. All the masks came off at the time it fell apart with mom and dad.

Like you I feel this was a completely forced decision. What was meant to be a temporary break for my sanity from their hurtful comments and lack of care was turned by them into a scorched earth all-out war and I refuse to let them destroy me, so here we are.

I too feel the isolation. I have many people in my life who have difficult parent relationships. One other has gone NC. I'm the only one I know IRL NC with both parents and IL's. The in-law situation is not quite so cut and dried as with my parents, but bad enough I really don't question that decision either. Except insofar as how it may be perceived by others. I relate to other people possibly looking at me as though I'm ready to cut them off too at the drop of a hat, although I'm fairly convinced that perception is in my head. In my actual normal relationships, I am in fact able to work out conflict reasonably well. I would like to be able to shake off that feeling of wearing some kind of scarlet letter marking me as Not Normal.

[clarityjane]

My experience is so much like yours. Down to the difficulty of connection, its so true. For certain reasons, I cannot fully break contact, although I wish every time that I could. This is with my HPDmom, but my NF, I broke contact with long ago.

I think its difficult for me because I had to believe for so long that one parent loved me. Abandonment issues are strong here because of my childhood.

If there was any advice I could give, it would be that for every time your thoughts drift toward them, do something nice for yourself. It feels really strange and I forget to sometimes. But it has helped me. You're worth more than they can appreciate. Maybe when you question yourself, ask if she is ever putting your best interest ahead of her own? Or something like that.

I struggle with feeling guilty for the LC I have now. So, youre not alone there.

[DaisyGirl77]

This December will be 9 years NC with my uNM.  June is 11 years NC with uBPD eF's mom (she lost all rights to the title of grandmother), & 13-14 years NC with my father's brother.  Longer than that for the one cousin I have on the paternal side.  All except for the cousin were explosively NC.  Cousin chose to ghost me the second I started telling her that our grandmother was looney tunes.  She sided with her, in the end.

I think it's a mixed bag.  There's a huge part of me that still grieves for the relationships I thought I had before they showed their true colors.  Family is so important to me; all I honestly want is the close connection that I see portrayed on TV, where everyone so clearly loves & respects each other & show it in a thousand different ways.  All of them claimed it to be important to them, too, but all the things they did aren't things family ever does.  I grieve for the family I'll never have; the loss of the idea of family I've always wanted.  I grieve for the me who was just so hurt by the betrayal of all of them & all the time & effort & energy I POURED into cups that never would be filled in the hopes that they'd JUST SHOW ONE OUNCE of love & care for me that I'd been BEGGING for for YEARS.

But I also don't regret being NC with them all.  In the uBPD's case, it quite literally came down to sacrificing my mental health & actual physical safety for her, or protecting my mental health & physical safety for me.  It came down to my mental health for my uNM as well.  I had to choose me.  I had no more options left.  I was "tried" out.  I'd done everything I could have, done truly herculean efforts, to make her SEE me as I truly am, not the picture of the horrible child she's made me out to be since literal infancy.  Nothing doing.  She chose to remain angry & refuse to give me the apology I asked for & to make real changes if she wanted us to heal.  So her decision finally broke that last straw.  I chose me.  I've spent all this time in therapy healing from the damage.  I don't regret it.

But I still find myself wishing I could just call up both my parents & get their approval for all the little things.  To see how proud they'd be of each new success I make.  But I constantly have to remind myself that I need to find approval from me, because I know I'll fall into the trap of being hungry for the next sign of approval & completely abandon all the progress I've made.  I also have to grieve for the inner me when uNM eventually dies because that'll be the end of ever repairing the mother/daughter relationship my sisters have & that I never had & have always wanted.

It really is such a mixed bag.  So the only thing I have, honestly, is to be kind to yourself.  Recognize all the progress you've made so far.  It's fuckin' HARD, man, & you've done it.  Yeah, you're missing all those people, but you're missing the people you thought you had, & the chance of calling them up for the 1% they'll actually congratulate you or tell you they love you or that they're really sorry or whatnot.  Keep focusing on what's best for you & choose that.  Just be kind to your heart.

[My New Life]

Call Me Cordelia,
I am sorry for your losses.  I have great respect for your strength and resolve to protect your children from harm.

Yes, I too believe, for the most part, my perception of how others perceive my having go NC is in my head. I am most likely projecting my fears onto others.   I, like you, am normally good at resolving conflict in my relationships.  Though my emotional response can be heightened, I have learned to give myself 24 hours before resolving problems, so I can do so with a clear mind. 

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences with me.  For some reason, this 5 year NC anniversary hit me like a locomotive:)  I truly appreciate your sharing with me.

[My New Life]

Clarity Jane,

Thank you so much for sharing your experience.  If VLC is possible and does not hurt too much, I think you are wise to keep it.  My mom would not allow VLC.  She couldn't honor any boundaries.  Ours was an enmeshed relationship to the point where my life was her life, and I couldn't hear my own internal voice anymore, just hers.  It was such a sickly, nauseating feeling. 

Your experiences of guilt and a desire for freedom from an unhealthy relationship are so familiar.  All of it is difficult.  Thank you so much for reaching out and sharing your experience with me.  I wish you peace.

[My New Life]

Daisy Girl,

I have found great strength in the quote you have at the bottom of your post, stating you do not need to set yourself on fire to keep another warm.  Believe it or not, this was a new concept for me, and was liberating, both as a concept and also as validation that I was not the only one who had experienced this expectation.

I hear your grief for relationships lost and that can never give you what you want and need.  Grieving is such an important component to healing.  I have been late to that game.  I didn't feel I had the right to grieve, when I was the one who went NC.  I believe I am grieving now.  Gotta be honest, not my favorite part of the process.

I also hear your resolve to protect yourself.  And ultimately, that is what it is all about when we go NC.  I have come to peace, for the most part, with going NC with my mom.  And my mom is pretty deep into dementia, so I am looking at the fact, she will die in the next year or two.  I navigate getting her into a good dementia facility, working with medical staff to insure her needs are met but I do it all from afar - no direct contact with her via email, texts, calls or visits. 

You shared how all you ever wanted was a tv family relationship, and I share your sentiment.  I would love a tv ending, where I reunited with her and she was kind, and I could be loving, without being attacked.  It would be such a great story.  It just doesn't seem to be mine.

Sending support and hugs.

[treesgrowslowly]

Hi My New Life,

I've been NC for almost 2 decades now.

There's the NC from my abusers, and then there's life after we go NC with our own parents. I agree with you - most people do not understand this, nor do they want to. We are at a point in society where a good % of people can understand if a woman has left an abusive spouse, but even that is relatively recent, if we look back 100 years - most people saw that as 'morally wrong', and laws didn't protect people from any of the abuse that happened in the context of the family (I'm referring to north america / western culture). It will be a while before the average person understands narc abuse and parental neglect.

I won't live long enough to see the next shift - where enough people 'get it' about abuse in the family context, to see a change in society where we understand someone who has gone NC with an abusive mother.

There is A LOT going on inside of people that scares them when they have to consider the reality of the abused daughter / abused child who might reach adulthood and *gasp* put an end to access that the abusive mother has had her entire life. It is still taboo; we're all supposed to have loving mothers and say we do, even if we didn't and don't.

So when I encounter people, they range from understanding nothing about this, to understanding a little. But I rarely meet anyone who really gets it.

You're living a life that few people will ever understand.

That said, it is worth looking until you do find a therapist who gets it. Because working with a therapist who doesn't get it, is pointless in my opinion. Their advice won't be relevant to your grief, your loss, your emotional landscape, your situations, and your healing work.

Over the years, I had plenty of ignorant therapists whose guilt and fear (FOG) got triggered when they learned of my situation. So that's no help to us is it?

In my opinion, unless a therapist already understands parental narc abuse, there is no point in trying to work with them. They are too scared, their head is in the sand. They don't want to face facts.

I know the feeling of wanting people to understand. In my opinion, there are a lot of people who will never affirm you for what you've had to do (go NC with your mother), simply because it forces them to come out of their age of innocence.

No one tells us that when we go NC, we're going to be left alone a lot. No on prepares us for that part. What we have done, goes beyond what most people can even hear about, never mind talk about, and affirm, and be understanding about.

You're left out in the cold a lot, simply because your lived experience, is too hard for them to hear about. Some people even resent us for telling them a little bit about our situation. People are scared of us. Is that what you feel sometimes?

Its like everyone in our life is on the beach, playing in the sand on a sunny warm day. All is well, they are all happy and everything feels warm and safe, and there I am, telling them about what I had to do when the storms came in and the waves threatened to take me away. No one who is relaxed and lying on the beach with their book, with warm air blowing on them, not a care in the world in that moment, wants to hear about what I did the time the storms came. They look at me like "why are you ruining my sunny beach day with your story about the storm".

There are a lot of people who want to believe that every day will be the sunny warm day on the beach, playing in the sand. They don't want to think about storms, about what happens when the tide comes in, and how different those ocean waves are during other parts of the year. They stay in the warmth of naivety, thinking every day on the beach is a warm, sunny day.

There are people who want to stay in their cozy naive state, thinking we are exaggerating and we didn't really endure what we endured.

Dr. Ramani talks a lot about recovery from narc abuse, and she talks about needing a cogent narrative, so that you KNOW what happened to you - and you know it is true. A good therapist is one who helps us through the process of knowing that what we endured was real, it actually happened, and we're going to be recovering from it, in various ways, the rest of our life. Sadly, anyone in your life who doesn't believe you, isn't going to be helpful with that part of your healing process. Their denial is going to slow down your progress. That is what I experienced.

Many of us were parentified as children, and so as adults we have people in our lives who are dependent on us. Adult children of narcs are often in relationships with people who expect to be parented by us. Even after NC with my parents, my own needs still took a backseat, leaving me exhausted.   

We can't really heal if we don't really know what we are healing from. But depending on our individual factors, we may need the safety of the therapy office, before we can delve into that. For a lot of us, contending with the truth about what actually happened to us during childhood, is very hard to do at home alone, with a book, video, journal and some tea. Being left alone to recover, is going to repeat the neglect we felt as kids.

Processing flashbacks at home alone was very very scary for me. I should not have done it to be honest. I had Pete Walker's book to guide me, but it wasn't the same as having a therapist (such has Pete Walker) sitting with me, hearing me, soothing me while I encountered the memories of being abused. The good therapist provides the safety that the narc parent never could.

I didn't question my NC nearly as often as I questioned my ability to heal from the abuse. I didn't even call it abuse until a few year into the process. The first few years after I went NC (and was also discarded, which may be what you have experienced as well), I didn't know what I was recovering from. 

Getting clear about what happened to me, and having words for it, helped me to heal because I knew what I was healing from. When we go to the doctors we don't just say "somethings wrong but I don't know what" we have to tell them if we have a headache or if we twisted our ankle. We have to say what hurts. But with emotional injury that vocabulary wasn't even there when I went NC. My mother had caused real damage. Her abuse caused PTSD and anxiety.

Going NC put me on a path that I didn't really choose. It is not what I would have chosen, had I been given options. There were no options, it is not as if my parents offered love and support, and I simply said "no thank you". Its nuts that there are people who think we've gone NC with some kind loving person. No, that is not what happened. Far from it.

Going NC means never having anything in common with people who are not NC, in regards to family life. They will go on vacations, and spend their days on the beach, in the sun, thinking that everyone lives like that. Everyone has parents who are basically "like theirs". I think the grief of this is big for us. We will never have any of the experiences they have, and we didn't have access to reliable, sane parents in childhood either.

I think that when we question our NC, it is probably our "healing fantasy" surfacing (we think maybe this time mom will be different) or its our fear around the unknown (how do we thrive in a society where everyone else has more family than we do). How do we get through mother's day each year, for example?

Without this board, I woulda spent the last 8 years thinking I am the only one who struggles on mothers day. 

For me, I have come to realize that I can only be around "non's" so much, because their FOG starts to affect me if I stay too long in 'their world'.

Their parents are safe, and mine are not. They were not abused as children, and I was. If I spend too much time with them, and their naïveté does me in. I start to gaslight myself, in order to cope with the pressure to belong in a place I don't belong. Their world.

My reality scares them. They can't even imagine surviving what we've survived.

The more clarity I got about my situation, the easier it got to leave people where they are. If they are naive, and in denial about parental narcissism-  so be it. What happened to me, didn't happen to them. This got easier to accept after I found therapists who believed me and helped me through some of the grieving. I would say that a good therapist, does make a big difference.

Trees

[xredshoesx]

this is a very thought provoking topic for me, @mynewlife - ty for starting the conversation

I'm almost 53 and went NC with my mother around the time I turned 22, and have not seen her/ spoken to her since other than driving by my old house by chance and seeing her in a car driving next to me before I moved to the other side of town.  I'm also NC with her side of the family which includes my half brother and his family (which was harder than not being in contact with my biological mother bc we were fairly close)

for me it was different bc I had already not lived with my mother several times due family/ the state pulling me from her several times when I was a child so I was already used to not having her around.  I had to step back to see the true dysfunction in the family that started with her parents and carried on through her, and thankfully ended with me being NC.

it's true that many folks just don't get it- if I had a dollar for every time I shared and someone said ...buuuuutttt it's your mooooother.  . .  .  I;m at the point where i've lived long enough without her in my life I can't be bothered by it. 

something that helped me was having strong female friends that I could model myself after as I learned how to be an adult woman- it also helped that a few of them had met and experienced my mother and got it.

something that helps now is my DH is also NC with his biological father so having a spouse that gets it has been CRUCIAL too because there's no pressure from him to make amends now that we are all getting on in years.

best to you as you navigate the world of life after NC.  I always say my worse day without my mother in my life was still better than the best day with her in it...

[My New Life]

Hello Trees Grow Slowly and XRedShoesX,

Thank you for your thoughtful replies.  I identified with so many things you shared. 

The concept of being parentified at a young age, which then shapes many of our adult relationships. So when we look to family or friends for support, we find they are not able to be a support.  We are supposed to be the strong ones -the support.  I have found, I "outgrew" several friendships after going NC, and gaining the space to heal and recognize that constantly taking care of others was a survival skill, but not how healthy relationships work.

The tendency to not want to call it abuse.

Mother's Day - the struggle is real.

The need for female role models, when we do not want to follow the path of a mother.

The need to grieve - this one I fought for a long time.  "I'm fine."  "So many people have it worse than me.  They're the once who have a right to grieve."  When I stopped fighting it, I could feel a knot in my belly release.

The gift of having a spouse, who understands and does not try to get you to make amends.

How going NC, goes beyond what most people can even hear about, never mind talk about, and affirm, and be understanding about.

And the cruelty of the response - "But she's your mother" 
There were so few people I have trusted with the truth of what life was like with my mom.  And when I finally shared, and their response was something like, "I'm sorry, that's really bad stuff.  But I don't know what you can do about it.  She's your mom."  It was devastating.  I have come to understand that this is all they had to give - this was all they knew to give.  So I am not angry with them but I don't reach out to them anymore.

I have found healing in therapy.  I have also found it through dreams.  One dream that occurred right before I went NC was especially poignant. 

My family - me, my husband, kids and my mom -had been in a shipwreck.  I had my immediate family in a lifeboat, but not my mom. She was submerged in water screaming for help.  I paddled to her and tried and tried to get her in the boat but she would not get in.  My children were exhausted and hungry.  I knew I had to paddle them to the shore, to safety.  I tried one last time to get her in the boat but she refused.  So, to save myself and my family, I left her and paddled to shore.  But I can still hear her screams.

I woke up knowing I had to go NC with my mom.  And that dream was what the decision felt like.  To say to someone, who has had to make such a horrible decision - to go NC or to save themselves and their families.  To say to them, "But it's your mom..."  It is just cruel.

Peace and Love.