What They Don't Tell You About No Contact
What losing my sister taught me about healing
I'm no stranger to going no contact. Due to my history of trauma bonding and my Borderline Personality Disorder, I have a past littered with lovers whose betrayals forced me to walk away or die.
And even walking away felt like a death.
But it felt like the only death in which any sliver of hope resided in the world, the only death in which that which was most precious inside of me--my heart--wouldn't be totally maimed beyond all recognition.
As the scapegoat child to one sociopath parent and the invisible child to another sociopath parent, I had a fraught relationship with my parents in my adulthood too, which was pock-marked with periods of no contact.
It wasn't until after I confided a rape to them in a vulnerable moment of need for comfort that I made the choice to cut both off for good: they both responded immediately by telling me I must've done something to deserve to be raped.
It was then that the truth cut me open and the last of my love for them bled out: you can't say that to someone you love.
I wouldn't wish what I went through on the devil. No one deserves to be raped.
But if they could say that to me especially--who'd spent a lifetime forgiving them for the unforgivable, who'd spent literally tens of thousands of dollars on therapy and a psychology degree to heal from them, who'd loved them truly unconditionally, who may have been the most authentic love they'd ever known...then they absolutely never knew me at all and they never would.
Initially after I hung up the phone, I told my therapist. I immediately followed with, "I know I have to be the bigger person and forgive them and speak to them again, but...."
"Actually, I don't think you have to," she replied.
Record scratch.
"Forgive them?" I asked.
"No."
"Speak to them again?"
"Not that either."
Her words shook my world like an earthquake collapses a foundation.
Permission.
Freedom.
I immediately felt a weight off my chest, like I'd spent a lifetime with an elephant sitting on it and could breath for the first time.
"But....I would be a bad person. I would be.....just as bad as them. Petty."
"No, you'd be saying that you're worth better treatment than that. You'd be defending the woman who didn't deserve to be raped and you'd be defending the little girl who didn't deserve to be unloved, beaten, neglected, and put in solitary confinement."
I haven't spoken to my parents in 6 years. I feel quite certain I never will again. My mother stopped hoovering via email after the publication of my memoir that exposed some of their worst crimes.
Anne Champion (Author) Format: Paperback
But there's one gnarly trauma bond that took me YEARS to cut full contact with: my sister, the golden child to my mother, scapegoat to my father. She inherited the narcissism in the bloodline.
Narcissism is a mental disease that's violated me and taken a lot from me in my life, but there's nothing more grave than the fact that it took the soul of my little sister.