Going No Contact With Family: How to Decide, and How to Cope

By Angelique St. Jean, a registered associate marriage and family therapist at My Mental Climb.

TL;DR. Going no contact with family is far more common than most people assume, and it is neither automatically healthy nor automatically wrong. For relationships involving abuse or ongoing harm, distance is sometimes what protects you. In lower-stakes conflicts, low contact or firmer boundaries sometimes do the job without a full cutoff. Either way, the decision usually comes with grief, guilt, and relief all at once, and it gets harder around the holidays. This is a decision to make deliberately, with support, rather than in the heat of a bad moment.

If you have been thinking about cutting off a parent, a sibling, or another relative, the first thing to know is that you are not unusual, and you are not doing something rare or shameful. In a national survey behind the book Fault Lines, the Cornell researcher Karl Pillemer found that about 27 percent of U.S. adults, roughly 67 million people, were living with an active estrangement in their family, and most of them found it distressing. Going no contact is a private decision that a very large number of people are weighing at any given time.

I work systemically, which means I look at the whole web of relationships around a person rather than just the one in question. From that angle, going no contact is rarely a simple story of one villain and one victim. It is usually the end point of a long pattern, and understanding the pattern is what helps you decide what to do about it.

What "going no contact" means

Going no contact means deliberately ending or pausing communication with a family member, as opposed to the slow drift that happens when people just fall out of touch. It sits on a spectrum:

• Full no contact. No calls, texts, visits, or social media. Sometimes a blocked number, sometimes just a decision not to respond.
• Low contact. Staying in touch on sharply limited terms: group gatherings only, short calls, certain topics off the table, replies on a delay.
• An open door versus a closed one. Some people frame no contact as permanent. Others frame it as a pause, with the possibility of reconnecting if specific things change.

Most people I work with try some version of boundaries or low contact first, and consider a full cutoff only when the limited contact keeps getting overrun.

Why people go no contact

A 2017 review of the research on estrangement between parents and adult children concluded that it arises from a diverse range of factors that are often interlinked, and that it is associated with reduced psychological wellbeing, feelings of loss, and stigma (Blake, 2017). In other words, there is rarely one clean reason, and the fallout comes regardless of who initiated it.

In the room, the reasons people give tend to cluster. Abuse, whether physical, sexual, or emotional, and ongoing neglect or betrayal are among the most serious. So are relationships where a family member is actively destabilizing your life, through addiction, untreated behavior that puts you at risk, or repeated boundary violations that do not stop when you ask. There are also values ruptures, long histories of feeling unseen, and relationships that are simply more depleting than sustaining. The weight of these is not equal, and part of deciding is being honest with yourself about which category you are in.

One thing I want to be clear about: for relationships involving abuse, threats, or behavior that keeps endangering you, distance is sometimes the only thing that protects your safety, and choosing it is not cruelty. Pillemer's own work notes that some estrangements are necessary, including cutting off someone who is abusive or threatening. You do not owe anyone continued access to you because you share DNA.

How to decide (without deciding in a crisis)

Our aim is not to tell you what to do, but to help you think it through clearly, so whatever you choose is something you can stand behind a year from now. A few questions help clarify it:

• Is the relationship causing ongoing harm to your safety, your health, or your stability? Harm that is active and repeating is different from harm that is old and grieved.
• Have you already set boundaries, and what happened? If you have asked for specific changes and been repeatedly ignored or punished for asking, you have more information than someone who has not yet tried. If you have not, that is sometimes the step before a cutoff, not a reason to delay it.
• What are you hoping distance will give you, and what will it cost? Relief, safety, and space are common hopes. The costs often include grief, family pressure, and complicated logistics around shared people and events.
• Permanent, or a pause? You do not have to decide this at the start, but knowing which you are leaning toward changes how you handle the conversation, or whether you have one at all.

These are hard to answer honestly in the middle of a blowup. The decisions that hold up tend to get made in a calmer moment, often with a therapist, rather than in the hour after a terrible phone call. If ordinary limits are what has not been tried yet, our post on what a boundary actually is is a place to start, and if you tend to over-give until you are depleted, codependency and the fawning response may be part of the pattern.

If you decide to go no contact

There is no single right way to do it, but a few things tend to make it steadier:

• Decide the terms before you act, not during an argument. What counts as contact, what you will do if they reach out, and whether anyone else is a go-between.
• You can say little or nothing. Some people send one clear message stating the limit. Others simply stop responding. A long explanation often invites a long negotiation, and you are allowed to skip that.
• Expect testing. Many relatives escalate at first, through flurries of messages, third parties, or a sudden show of change. Deciding in advance how you will respond keeps you from improvising under pressure.
• Plan for the shared people. Grandchildren, aging parents, weddings, and funerals are where no contact gets complicated. It helps to think these through before they arrive rather than in the moment.

Wanting your own stability and peace here is not selfish, even when it feels that way or gets called that by others; our post on whether it is selfish to want your own happiness sits with exactly that guilt.

Grieving someone who is still alive

What surprises people most is the grief. Going no contact, even from someone who hurt you, usually means grieving a person who is still alive, and grieving the relationship you wish you had been able to have. This living loss is one of the heavier parts of estrangement, and it does not mean you made the wrong call. It is common to feel relief and grief in the same week, to miss someone you also needed distance from, and to carry guilt that has more to do with family expectations than with anything you did wrong.

The grief tends to arrive in waves rather than a straight line, and it intensifies at predictable times: birthdays, family milestones, and the stretch from late November through the new year.

Getting through the holidays

The holidays concentrate everything. The cultural script says families gather, which can turn a decision you are at peace with eleven months of the year into an open wound in December. A few things help:

• Decide your plan early, including what you will say when people ask, and give yourself permission to keep the answer short.
• Build the day you want, with chosen family, friends, or your own small rituals, rather than only bracing against the one you are skipping.
• Expect the pangs and let them pass without treating them as proof you should undo the decision. You can miss someone and still need distance from them.

Our piece on juggling holiday dynamics has more on protecting yourself through the season, whether or not a full cutoff is part of your picture.

Whether to reconsider, and how repair can work

Choosing no contact now does not close the door forever unless you want it to. Pillemer's interviews with people who had reconciled found that many were glad they did, and that repair tended to depend on a few things: dropping the demand to relitigate the whole history, deciding the least you can accept in the relationship, and setting clear boundaries going forward. Reconciliation is possible for some families.

It is also not an obligation, and it is not the measure of whether you did the right thing. Repair is only wise when the behavior that caused the rift has genuinely changed, not just paused. Reconnecting with someone who is still actively harmful usually restarts the same cycle. This is the kind of decision where an outside perspective helps, because the pull of hope and the pull of guilt can be hard to tell apart from the inside.

When to get support

Estrangement is a lot to carry alone, and it is a common and legitimate reason to come to therapy, whether you are deciding, grieving, holding a boundary against pressure, or weighing whether to reconnect. If an abuse or trauma history sits underneath the relationship, that layer usually needs its own care, which is part of trauma therapy. If this is one of several big changes happening at once, that falls under our life transitions work too.

You do not have to have the decision figured out before you reach out. A free 15-minute consult with our intake coordinator is a no-pressure way to talk through what you are facing and get matched with the clinician on our team who fits it best. Book a free consult whenever you are ready. Sessions are online, anywhere in California.

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Related from My Mental Climb: What a Boundary Actually Is · Is It Selfish to Want Your Own Happiness? · Fawning Isn't Kindness · What Is Codependency? · Juggling Holiday Dynamics

Further reading: Karl Pillemer, Fault Lines (Cornell / Evidence-Based Living) · Blake (2017), Parents and children who are estranged in adulthood, Journal of Family Theory & Review

Common questions

What does going no contact with family mean?

Going no contact means deliberately ending or pausing communication with a family member, rather than drifting apart by accident. It can be total (no calls, texts, visits, or social media) or partial, and it can be framed as permanent or as a pause with the door left open. People use it when a relationship has become harmful or exhausting enough that ordinary boundaries have stopped working. It is a decision about contact, not a statement that you no longer care.

Is going no contact with family healthy or wrong?

Going no contact is neither automatically healthy nor automatically wrong; it depends on whether the relationship is causing ongoing harm and whether less drastic options have already been tried. For relationships involving abuse, threats, or behavior that keeps destabilizing your life, distance is sometimes the only thing that protects your safety and wellbeing. In lower-stakes conflicts, a period of low contact or firmer boundaries sometimes addresses the problem without a full cutoff. The honest answer depends on the specifics, which is what therapy can help you sort through.

What is the difference between no contact and low contact?

No contact means ending communication entirely, while low contact means staying in touch on sharply limited terms you control. Low contact might look like seeing a parent only at group gatherings, keeping calls short and topic-limited, declining to discuss certain subjects, or replying on a delay. Many people try low contact first, because it keeps a connection alive while reducing the harm, and move to no contact only if the limited contact keeps getting overrun.

How do I decide whether to go no contact?

There is no formula, but a few questions help clarify it: Is the relationship causing ongoing harm to your safety, health, or stability? Have you already tried boundaries, and were they repeatedly ignored? What are you hoping distance will give you, and what would it cost? Is this a decision you want to make permanent, or a pause? Working through these with a therapist, rather than in the middle of a crisis, tends to lead to a decision you can stand behind later.

Is it normal to grieve a family member who is still alive?

Yes. Grieving someone who is still living is a recognized experience sometimes called ambiguous or living loss, and it is one of the hardest parts of estrangement. You may miss the person, miss the relationship you wish you had, and carry guilt and relief at the same time. The grief comes even when the decision was right, and it tends to arrive in waves, especially around birthdays and holidays.

Can an estrangement be repaired later?

Yes, estrangements can be repaired, and research on people who have reconciled finds that many are glad they did. Repair usually depends on the specific conditions that would need to be different, a genuine change in the behavior that caused the rift, and clear boundaries going forward. Choosing no contact now does not close the door forever unless you want it to, and some people reconnect years later on new terms. Reconciliation is possible, but it is not an obligation.

Last clinically reviewed: October 28, 2026 by Christina Mathieson, LMFT.