The No Contact Rule

by Natalie Lue

  They’re the type, if told that they should leave you be for a while, they’ll respect your wishes, whereas the type of person that you need to cut contact with has no empathy for what you are experiencing and is focused on what suits them. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re incapable of empathy but what it does mean is that it’s not something that they employ due to making themselves the centre of their universe and yours. It’s all about making themselves comfortable and their attitude is that they feel OK with your relationship as it is, so ipso facto you should too. Or they reason that because they’re uncomfortable with you blanking them that you should make them feel better about it by not cutting contact, or by giving them sex or whatever. This means that even though they have nothing further to offer you, possibly even less than before, they’ll still poke around in your life because they want to.

  They assume that you’re sitting around, eating ice cream by the tub, sobbing into your tea and biscuits and struggling to get through the day waiting for them to dignify you with some level of contact. Unfortunately, often you are and it’s time to shake things up.

  We also have to accept that we can be just as willing to engage in, or even start lazy communication while seeking attention and validation, and modern breakups seem to involve a hell of a lot of ambiguity as well as the likes of sex, virtual sex and even trying to continue the relationship unofficially. It’s all too easy to get involved in game playing and yes, passive aggression in the form of appearing to go along with an ex’s agenda while having our own agenda that we’re really trying to get pushed through. Next thing you know, our expectations have been managed right down.

  Modern dating has taught many of us to expect crumbs and to believe that the crumbs are a loaf, when in actual fact, they’re just crumbs. NC puts an end to all of these shenanigans.

  Depending on how we have been raised or our experiences in adult relationships, we have our own idea of what we think love or a relationship is, and for some of us, those beliefs are not very healthy. The fundamental problem derailing self-esteem and relationships is a lack of boundaries; we either have none or very little, or we don’t enforce them. You’ll hear the term ‘boundaries’ a lot throughout this book because 1) you need them for yourself and 2), you need them for whoever you’re cutting contact with and in all of your relationships because boundaries teach people what you will and won’t accept and also teach them how to treat you.

  No Contact establishes boundaries, something I can assure you that you desperately need.

  Think of boundaries as your personal electric fence that allows you to actively decide what you will and won’t accept while also enabling you to ensure that you’re living your life in accordance with your own values – the things that you believe that you need in order to live your life happily and authentically. Boundaries set limits. NC is opting out due to having reached your limit and then some.

  A breakup inadvertently creates a boundary that draws a line between you both. It’s not the case that everyone breaks up because something bad happens but boundaries do help you to recognise how you want to feel or not feel in a relationship, and how you want to be treated. By breaking up, a new boundary is created that communicates that the relationship you had is over and the privileges and fringe benefits that you’ve both previously enjoyed are now over too. If you’ve broken up, you cannot continue to behave in the way that you have. You can’t expect, need or want to the same levels. Otherwise, how is the other party supposed to recognise and understand that it’s over so that they can move on? How are you supposed to move on in body, mind and spirit? Of course you’re going to struggle emotionally with a breakup if your actions are not communicating that the relationship is over.

  Tempting as it may be, you cannot have your cake and eat it too. Someone will get the short end of the stick and if you’re contemplating cutting contact, that person is you.

  -- You can’t say it’s over and then try to control who they see, what they do and where they go.

  -- You can’t say it’s over and then get mad if they get involved with someone else or start getting on with their life sooner than you do.

  -- They can’t expect to not meet your needs but still keep creeping back expecting the same fringe benefits.

  -- They can’t say that they want out but then keep you in their back pocket as a rainy day option.

  You’ll quickly discover when you have no boundaries and you stay or keep taking your ex back, that they become the person of diminishing returns – you’re doing the same as before or even more and getting even less back while they reap the rewards. This is the fundamental problem with your relationships because you need to adjust your needs, expectations and wants to align with the fact that the relationship isn’t working and it’s supposed to be ending. But they also need to realise that they cannot enjoy the same access that they had while in the relationship, outside of it.

  Often the people who require NC are the type that want your emotions, ego stroking, a shag and a shoulder to lean on without the ‘trappings’ of a relationship.

  People are getting away with things that they could not have gotten away with before, and it’s partly down to making use of lazy communication methods like texts, emails and Facebook, but it’s also because they can. All that’s happened is that their options for mucking you around have expanded plus the social consequences of not being in a relationship or even getting married have significantly lessened over the past couple of decades in particular. They engage in lazy communication because they want to know that you’re still there and often you’re only too eager to let them know that you still are.

  It took me a long time to realise, but there are certain types of people out there that can’t commit – they can’t commit to being with you and they can’t commit to not being with you. Don’t let the first time you truly realise and accept this truth be when you’ve already devoted your entire life to trying to make somebody like this do otherwise.

  Commitment resisters are the ‘driver’ in their relationships - they’re the one with more power and they set the terms. Even though you as the passenger will no doubt have your own commitment issues, the lack of power directly affects the way that you behave as you’re curtailed by the driver. They do exactly what suits them without real care or thought for how it affects you. They do things on their terms. Even though they may make insincere noises of care and concern, their priorities are getting a shag, an ego stroke or a shoulder to lean on for sounding off, or all three of these. They also get ‘turned on’ by absence and are obsessed with feeling the heady rush of desire created by ‘beginnings’ and also by the panic that follows when someone doesn’t dance to their beat, leaving them out of control.

  They’ll flip flop around you, hanging around like an irritating scab, dipping in and out of your life but keeping a firm foothold in it, because they need the security of knowing that there is at least one person out there wanting them, that they can default to or rely on.

  In their mind, you’re broken up with an option to cash in a credit should the need arise, on the basis that you’ll be ready and willing should they need you. I’ve heard so many stories of people abandoning new and far healthier relationships, including engagements and marriages because an ex that they should be steering clear of is suddenly lurking around, promising a future and a change in themselves that just isn’t going to materialise. It’s incredibly painful for the people who leave because they allow themselves to be lured away on ‘chemistry’, ‘history’, sex, promises or their ego that needs to ‘win’ and then they feel like a cruel joke has been played on them and lament the relationship or even personal happiness that they threw away for, in essence, a gamble.

  Due to the lack of restrictions we impose on ourselves in modern relationships and also our eagerness to quickly move on and avoid our feelings, unavailable relationships are highly prevalent.

  In ‘olden times’ it was more evident if you hadn’t moved on. Now lots
of people haven’t moved on and are soothing themselves with people whom they’ve appointed as their own personal emotional airbags. There just isn’t that same pressure anymore to be committed in the way that it would have been, for instance, in our parents’ time. We like to leave the door open ‘just in case’; we have a lot of loose ends, and if we’re entirely honest with ourselves, we get too caught up in worrying about how things look and protecting our egos instead of how things are and our happiness. We make ourselves powerless and resign ourselves to more of a bad deal because we prefer the familiar uncomfortable to the unknown uncomfortable.

  You’re scared to break up, scared of dealing with them when they get back in touch, scared that maybe they’re going to change into something amazing after you let them go, and scared that you may be alone and scared to be alone. If you need to cut contact with someone, it’s likely that you have some love habits that are contributing to what can certainly feel like a vicious cycle.

  The No Contact Rule is your no-holds-barred guide to telling that person to take a run and jump or at the very least to step right back and let you have some personal space without actually having to utter the words. More importantly, The No Contact Rule is about taking back your power and taking care of your own needs. Understand why it’s difficult to walk away and what types of situations make you more prone to needing No Contact to discover what you ultimately need to do in order to move on healthily with your self-esteem in tow.

  I hear from people who have broken up fifty times. FIFTY. I hear from people who are trying to figure out how to cut off an ex from their life that they broke up with one, two or even three decades ago. I’m hearing from people who are knocking on retirement whose lives are literally coming apart due to the ‘torture’ of snooping on Facebook or an email affair that didn’t come to fruition.

  You only have one life to lead – you have better things to do with your time and your emotions than remaining tied to someone who does not truly value you.

  Yes this book is about breakups but it’s even more about empowering yourself so that you can close the door on this relationship and ultimately be available for something more befitting of you. A relationship that requires NC is not doing you justice.

  In this time where you are wide open to so many more opportunities to hear from somebody or see what’s going on in their life without actually being in their lives, having a period of space after a breakup is even more vital. In a world which is excessively concerned with image, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of spending far too much time worrying about how you look on Facebook or how you’re going to be perceived by mutual friends or ‘everyone’ and whether you’re a ‘meanie’, when in actual fact your breakup needs to be have boundaries and you have to manage your feelings and ensure that you maintain a healthy self-image. Being a people pleaser will cripple it.

  Learn how to break up with people that don’t want to break and let you go so that you can live a better life and be a person with higher self-esteem. Learn how to step away even when you don’t want to step away despite the negative impact on your life. The No Contact Rule is the quick guide to avoiding being an option for someone to default to or ‘fall back on’ as a rainy day option while contributing little or nothing, as well as helping you to exit out of situations where you’re at best being taken advantage of, and at worst being abused. Regardless of what has happened in or out of the relationship, this is also about coming out of an involvement or relationship with your dignity intact because if you see yourself as ‘broken’ every time you go through a breakup, this has a knock-on effect with your future involvements as well.

  Break up from a depleting relationship with dignity but remember, you need to accept that it’s going to hurt for a while. But that will pass. Stop fearing the pain!

  UNDERSTANDING NC & ASSESSING YOUR SITUATION

  GETTING TO GRIPS WITH THE CONCEPT OF NO CONTACT

  It’s pretty damn painful to find yourself in the position of having to consider cutting contact with someone, especially when you’re either still crazy about them, or you used to believe that they were the centre of the universe. Understandably this is a position that nobody wants to be in but the reality is that you are, and the longer that you fight it, the more you prolong the agony, the further you are from actually getting on with your own life and feeling happy again.

  The likelihood is that you’ve tried things the nice, normal way and it hasn’t worked – the ‘traditional’ breakup. This is where one or both of you recognise things aren’t working; you might have had a series of discussions or even clashes and tentatively broached the subject of breaking up. You may have given it more time or one or both of you agreed that it was time to end it. You’re both upset, you probably both say that you’re going to be friends, speak periodically over the few weeks to a month after you break up to arrange to return possessions, to check on each other (neither of you will admit it’s to make yourselves feel less ‘guilty’), you may even have one or a few last shags for old time’s sake, and then you both steer clear of one another to grieve the relationship and get on with your respective lives. You may even have agreed that you’ll leave each other alone for a while, but ultimately it’s a respectful breakup. It doesn’t feel like you left behind everything including your dignity and self-esteem.

  No Contact (NC and also known as the No Contact Rule/NCR) is the boundary building actions that come into place post-breakup and is especially useful to people who have lost credibility during a relationship, or afterwards, because their own actions and words don’t match.

  NC is a means of mentally, emotionally and physically distancing yourself from somebody so that you can gain perspective, grieve the loss of the relationship and take back control of yourself and rebuild your life so that you can move on. You give yourself space and time to do this by eradicating/limiting all of your contact with the other person so that you can face the loss without disruption that will otherwise set you back and potentially keep you stuck in a cycle of unhealthy behaviour.

  By going NC you change what has been your typical habits with this person or even in your relationships in general and the time you take and what you do with it, will neutralise the effect of this person and your involvement as well as improve your self-esteem.

  NC means literally that - so no texts, calls, email, letters, IM, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn snooping, no tapping up mutual friends for information about them, no sex, no meeting up, no attention seeking. Basically avoiding anything that keeps you in emotional, spiritual and physical contact with them.

  NC makes you unavailable to your ex so that you can get over the breakup and build your self-esteem back up to become emotionally, physically and spiritually available for a relationship that befits you.

  No Contact is what I like to think of as the last resort. So you’ve tried the traditional breakup route, possibly on a number of occasions with the same person and it didn’t work, or due to the nature of your relationship, you already recognise that once you say it’s over, for your own sake and possibly theirs, you will need to distance yourself and cut contact.

  What NC Isn’t

  Many people are confused about what No Contact is, with it being viewed as ‘punishment’, ‘the silent treatment’, a means of playing a game, or what you do only when someone is a really, really ‘bad’ person. Now if you think of NC as being any of these things, you’re not going to do it because you’re either going to feel like a very bad person yourself, or you’re going to be engaging in manipulative behaviour. Or you’re going to either wait until things are 100% bad and dangerous or rationalise that because it’s not ‘as bad’ as whatever you deem to be ‘terrible’ you have no option but to keep hammering away at doing what already isn’t working.

  NC isn’t punishment

  Cutting contact is often seen in one of two misleading ways; self-punishment or punishing the other party. You are most likely to associate NC with you being punished if you tend to see
things in terms of your ‘worth’ or people not doing as you would like them to do as some sort of rejection, so it then becomes a natural next step to think, “I’m in all of this pain and having to make changes and face uncomfortable realisations. I’m being punished and I don’t deserve it!”

  The pain you’re experiencing is a part of extricating yourself from an unhealthy relationship as well as a natural part of grief and loss. Not all pain is punishment and it’s unrealistic to expect to exit a relationship that was causing you pain in the first place, without experiencing some pain. What you’re feeling isn’t about you having done something bad, as if more worthy, deserving people have painless breakups and make difficult decisions and get instant results. You’re also not punishing him/her and the only way it becomes punishment is if you use NC to assert your own agenda in the relationship and attempt to grab their power and manipulate them into doing what you want.

  NC is also going to look like ‘punishment’ if you use it to lash out at them or you use it to impose some sort of sentence on yourself for effing up. NC is actually a very positive, empowering and self-affirming experience which is all the more reason to take the time to understand it and see the positives, rather than the perceived negatives which may legitimise you remaining in a bad romance and feeling ‘helpless’.

  NC is not the same as giving someone the silent treatment in a relationship

  Silent treatment in a relationship is a form of abuse and manipulation and the only time when NC would cross into this territory is if you were actually doing NC with a view to manipulating them into doing what you want. This isn’t NC; it’s game-playing.