The No Contact Rule

by Natalie Lue

  -- Don’t make it a declaration of your feelings. It will be a massive ego stroke in the wrong hands. One of the things that you will learn in this book is that a person doesn’t have to be around you 24:7 or even at all, if they feel super-secure in the knowledge that you’re crazy about them and your whole life is going belly up. Don’t feed their ego.

  -- If they reply, don’t respond. It sort of goes against the whole you’re going NC thing and immediately drags you back into discussion and undermines your credibility. If you can’t contain your responding finger and it’s going to be your one and only response, five simple words are more than enough – my mind is made up.

  Remember, you’ve had a whole relationship and a breakup so even though you might be feeling like you need to ‘enlighten’ them, they do have an idea of why your relationship didn’t work even if they’re protesting otherwise or even playing the innocent. The harder that you try to convince them, the more that it looks like it’s you that you’re trying to convince.

  Phone Communication

  You need to limit the ability for this person to reach you on any of your phones – home, cell/mobile, work, Skype and similar – and you of course need to ensure that you don’t reach out or respond via any of these means. If they call from an undisclosed number or they catch you off guard at the office, just get off the phone as quickly as possible. Hang up even. This section also covers texting, the laziest of communications that has kept many a shady relationship/‘connection’ alive.

  You know when you get those texts saying stuff like “Hope you’re well…?” or “Talking to me yet?” or “I miss our talks” and other such guff, they’re fishing texts.

  Besides being incredibly lazy means of reaching out to you and effectively crumbs of attention and communication, texts certainly don’t rank highly on showing even a moderate level of care and if you overvalue them, they create faux intimacy. The trouble with texts is that they can give the impression that you’re on someone’s mind, while being very open to interpretation as they tend to be read in the way that you think that they were written, not how they actually were.

  1. Evaluate your phone habits. This is a good time to think about the way that you use your phone because if you’ve become a slave to it and are jumping out of your skin each time it calls or you seem to spend your whole life tapping out messages and checking to see if your voicemail is broken, or are prone to taking calls and responding to messages at all sorts of hours, this cannot continue if you want to be successful at NC and you also want to have a life and a decent nights sleep. New habits to practice may include:

  -- Turning off your phone after a certain time.

  -- Only checking your phone a few times a day, such as when you get into work, lunch time, mid-afternoon, after work, before you wind down for the evening.

  -- If you tend to spend most of your time on your phone surfing while travelling, it may be beneficial to take something to read or limit the amount of time you spend surfing.

  -- Returning calls after, for example, 9 pm the following day is good practice. In this day and age, most people know that if it’s a genuine emergency, they can call your landline.

  -- Check to see if your phone has a ‘Do Not Disturb’ setting. Mine comes on at 10 pm because I was being driven batty by notifications from apps that seem to ignore that you’ve turned off sound notifications.

  2. Consider turning off your text plan. It’s becoming increasingly common for people to turn off their text plans. Not only does it remove temptation but it can work wonders for making an effort with friends and family. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking, “But what if they’re trying to reunite with me but they’re unable to text?” and aside from the fact that your thoughts don’t need to be on a reunion right now, if there’s genuine intention with matching actions to back it up, it won’t happen in a text…

  3. Delete their number as soon as possible. If you’re going to keep it, do so for no more than three months and that’s only so that you know it’s him/her if they decide to call/text and you’ll know not to answer. Otherwise wipe out all information you have on them as soon as possible, especially because you’ll hopefully have to go to some effort to retrieve it.

  4. Change their name in your phone or the ringtone. Put a nickname that will trigger a mental reminder to stick to NC or go for a song that epitomises your situation. The song of choice for many readers has been Jar of Hearts by Christina Perri.

  5. Is it a block or change number situation? If their inability to respect your boundaries is pretty serious, check with your network provider about blocking their number or, you may need to consider changing yours. If you do change your number, only disclose it to those close to you and request that nobody passes on your number under any circumstance. The chief objection to changing numbers – aside from the inconvenience – is this sense of not wanting to give this person ‘power’ over you, but guess what? When someone is wreaking havoc with your head and your life by being a nuisance, that’s just another form of that person having ‘power’ through disruption. There comes a point when you have to decide whether you want to open yourself to the possibility of hearing from them or whether you want this to end. What this person is doing isn’t flattering and they may actually be getting off on this idea that due to being a nuisance, you’re being affected. They’re able to control you because it may be disruptive to your health as well as your relationships.

  -- If changing your number seems drastic, put your mobile/cell on voicemail and get a temporary pay-as-you-go phone which only a limited number of people are made aware of.

  6. Do check the laws in your country. In the UK it is an offence to continue to call or send unwanted messages to someone more than twice, especially after you’ve requested that they stop or told them not to contact you in the first place. If you are receiving nuisance calls and messages or the tone has become threatening, do seek advice from the police and make sure that you keep a record of calls and texts. Let’s not forget that it’s also an offence in most countries to stalk and harass.

  -- If they're a work colleague and are using their company phone to badger you, they may actually be breaching the company’s terms and conditions.

  -- A word of caution – be careful of engaging after reporting to the police because it can undermine your case no matter what your intentions were.

  7. Screen. Let calls go to voicemail, especially if you don’t recognise the number. This is especially the case for pesky, shameless exes who will borrow people’s phones and go to great lengths to bust your boundaries.

  8. Delete voicemails and texts (excluding anything threatening obviously). Some people delete messages without listening and some delete after listening. Either way delete because it prevents replaying. It’s important to consider why you’re listening. For validation? Hope that they’ve ‘changed’? This will undermine your NC efforts so be careful. You are also likely to find that listening to voicemails from somebody who has already caused you pain is a painful disruption you can do without. If you’re prone to nostalgia, it may be time to do a big delete on your texts or investigate the possibility of archiving.

  -- iPhones are a pain in the bum for doing full clean deletes. It may be worthwhile taking it to the store where you purchased or contacting your network provider for suggestions.

  9. Make yourself invisible on Skype and similar services. Or make it even easier for yourself and remove them so that they can’t message you. Or just don’t log on if you don’t need to. If you don’t do any of these, the one thing I would do is change the preferences on your computer so that you’re not automatically logged into Skype each time you shut down and restart.

  Email

  It’s best to neutralise, or at the very least limit, the opportunity for email because even outside of NC it creates a great deal of anxiety for people due to many of us feeling harassed by the ‘ping’ and burdened with our own expectation that we ‘must’ respond to all emails, o
r even that we must respond immediately. There are several key things that can keep you out of a lot of trouble with email:

  1. Check with your ISP/email provider about blocking and filter options. Filters automatically select and redirect mail to a folder or trash based on the parameters you’ve specified which can include a specific email address or even keywords.

  2. Go invisible or turn off the chat function. If you’re on the same type of email (e.g. Gmail, Hotmail), make sure that it shows you as invisible when you log in and disable the chat function (if applicable) if you think that they’re likely to message you on it.

  3. Steer clear of conflict on company email. I talk about this further in the chapter on working together, but do avoid responding on company email, especially if it results in you telling them all about themselves or even pouring out your feelings. I’ve seen too many instances of these being used against the person and them being made to look like they’re the one harassing. Don’t let the first time that you take this seriously be when you’re sitting in HR and your job/reputation is at threat. Remember that the less that you respond, the bigger the hole that they dig for themselves.

  4. Stop requests. If you decide to reply to their email to request that they stop contacting you, you only need to send one email and after that it’s ignore and delete or look at implementing #1 if possible as this would eradicate the issue altogether. Don’t go into too much detail and just ask them not to send any further emails. Say that this is the last time you’ll be responding (and mean it because they may email again to test you). You can add (if you feel that it warrants it) that should you receive any further emails, you will pass them to HR, the police etc, but again, don’t go saying this if you’re 1) not going to follow through or 2) it’s not necessarily warranted. Sometimes all that’s needed is, “When I said I needed space, I meant it. Thanks for reaching out but if you send any more, I won’t be reading or responding. Please respect my need for space and privacy at this time.”

  5. Don’t read into joke emails. You may have been included as part of a group and ultimately the email doesn’t warrant a reply or your energy. A reply isn’t expected (or at least it shouldn’t be) and remember that you may have been thoughtlessly added or added with a view to prompting you out of your silence, which is just basically getting you to do the legwork. Leave it be.

  6. Turn off sound notifications. After at one point feeling like a slave to my phone, I no longer get a sound notification and have to specifically go into my mail to get new mail through. I also tend to close down my email for chunks of time because the sound (if the volume is on) is a distraction. Of course the chief reason for turning off the sound is if you’ve tended to be a heavy emailer with this person or have become nervous of hearing from them, and the sound may cause unnecessary anxiety.

  7. Remember that abuse is never acceptable. It’s actually very intimidating to receive a hostile or even threatening email and no one has the right to bully you and use their way with words to dig at you. Ultimately they’re only digging a hole for themselves so print off anything that crosses the line (make sure that the date, time and email address is visible on the printout) and then delete – don’t forget to delete in your trash too. Or archive if you know that you won’t be tempted to keep rereading it. You may want to have a second copy kept separately just in case.

  Facebook

  Whether you use Facebook or not, or you use it a little or a lot, do not skip over this section, because Facebook can end up becoming your Achilles heel when you get into the habit of passively but possibly very persistently keeping tabs on your ex or torturing yourself over what they’re up to. Even people who aren’t on Facebook can get sucked into the pastime of ‘rifling’ if their ex’s page is ‘public’!

  Due to social networking being such an easy means of prying without leaving a trace, it’s important to set some personal boundaries and remove temptation and distractions because if you don’t, you could find yourself very mentally, emotionally and even physically affected – I hear from people who lose entire days in the ‘Facebook Vortex’. It is all too easy to put two and two together and make forty, to engage in comparison, to turn the pressing of ‘like’ into a whole week’s worth of drama and to basically open yourself up to pain.

  Facebook is Kryptonite for people with wobbly self-esteem and super-busy imaginations.

  Now I use Facebook and enjoy it to a degree, but Facebook knows its place in my life because I know its place in my life. It’s not the oracle nor the key to life; it is a social networking website not a person, and it’s largely based on people projecting images of themselves which are not always accurate.

  Many readers who’ve struggled with NC have found it a lot easier after self-imposed bans. Why? Because you can get on with your life and you also don’t have to deal with your ex using Facebook whether it’s directly or through friends to poke around in your life and cause problems.

  It’s not real life and the connections on there are not equivalent to having a great ‘connection’ in reality unless a true, mutual relationship, romantic or otherwise, exists. For your own inner peace, it is important to be honest about whether Facebook has the potential to affect you or already is, and carefully consider how you’re going to limit its impact.

  1. Evaluate whether you need to step away from it until you’re in a better headspace. If you tend to get bothered or even upset by what people post, or you judge yourself based on how you feel you’re not measuring up, it would be best to take a Facebook break until you’re feeling more at peace within yourself. It’s not worth keeping up appearances on a website at the expense of your happiness, so use the time off to get a better perspective.

  2. If checking Facebook feels compulsive, it’s time to deactivate. When hours or even days are slipping through your fingers as you obsessively keep an eye on what they (or their friends) are posting, deactivating your account until you’ve regained self-control is strongly recommended. I would also consider deactivating if you and your ex are heavy users and it has already been a source of drama between you both. You will not lose any of your information and if and when you’re ready, you can resume as if you never left but hopefully with healthier usage habits.

  3. Limit the amount of time that you spend on Facebook. I know people who are on there all day long. Seriously, it’s not good for you, breakup or not. Limit it to checking three times a day for 5-10 minutes at a time so that you don’t end up having the day sucked into a Facebook vacuum. This isn’t just so that you don’t end up torturing yourself over updates that pop up (there’s a remedy for that – see #4 and #5) but it’s also because if you’re feeling quite raw, reading updates from people who may be exaggerating their own lives or sharing joys that you’d hoped to be experiencing but aren’t, will deflate you.

  4. Hide their profile from your news feed. If you can handle Facebook but just need to tune out your ex, you can hide their profile as well as those of mutual friends who you haven’t gotten around to defriending yet. At the time of publication (you know Facebook likes screwing around with the settings and interface), you can do this by clicking on the top right of their update in your newsfeed or you can go to their timeline and ensure that you’re not subscribed to their updates.

  5. If they didn’t treat you well in the relationship and/or have behaved in ways that bust your boundaries post breakup, defriend. A lot less people would experience considerably less angst if they stopped with the faux friendships and feeding this anxiety about virtual social standing. Defriend! They’re not your friend! They also don’t know about it until they attempt to view your profile so it’s not as if they get notified. The true reason why there is so much angst about defriending during NC is because it is the end of your access to them and severs a tie, but that’s what the whole idea of NC is.

  6. Update your privacy settings and ensure that it’s either set to ‘friends’ (ideal) or ‘friends of friends’. Do keep in mind that if you defriend your ex but rem
ain connected to mutual friends, they may be able to see what you post, particularly if that friend ‘likes’ or comments on it.

  7. Be careful with the content of your status updates. Posting statuses that can be perceived as you sending a veiled message to your ex or mutual friends that you’re connected with just fan the tension flames. I would also avoid posting statuses that give the impression that your life is falling apart without your ex, that you’re an ‘angry person’ or even that you’re going off the rails. You’re inadvertently stroking their ego and possibly even giving them the impression that they’re ‘justified’ in shady behaviour. Think reputation management.

  8. Curtail your snooping. Don’t open yourself up to hurt by doing the online equivalent of rifling through their photo collection or doing an investigation of every person they’re connected with. If you do snoop, don’t confront them because you’ll end up looking like you’re a stalker or at the very least clearly not NC and very invested in them. You can guarantee that a confrontation isn’t going to go down well no matter what your intentions. They’ll likely have some wishy-washy excuse for it, you’ll likely be blocked or defriended (though that might be for the best really) and you may become the subject of gossip amongst your ‘mutual friends’. You’re supposed to be NC so that includes curtailing your private investigator activities.

  9. If you block your ex, make sure that it’s what you intended because it’s a bit of a palaver to unblock/re-block. Blocking is what you do when the person keeps messaging you even after you’ve defriended them and you basically want to be as invisible as possible to them. Or change your settings so that only people who you’re friends with can message you. Don’t get into the whole ‘rage blocking’ or ‘nostalgia induced unblocking’ and then panicking cycle because there’s a time lag for unblocking (depending on how often you’ve done it), plus should you change your mind and decide to re-block, there’s also at least a 48-hour delay for that too.