The No Contact Rule

by Natalie Lue

  This experience is bringing up something for you that needs to be faced and resolved in your mind. The thinking attached to whatever it is that this situation is bringing up is contributing to your current position. The way that you see a previous problem is the problem. It’s not your worth, it’s not that this situation is confirmation that you’re an unlovable person or that you ‘deserved’ previous abuse or that when people and situations don’t meet your expectations, it’s ‘because’ of you. The longer that you place other people’s behaviour and the outcome of this relationship and even previous situations on you is the longer that you will remain trapped in your feelings and thoughts.

  RESISTING IS PERSISTING UNHEALTHILY

  There’s a lot of resistance going on. You’ll resist letting go, you’ll resist getting real, you’ll resist accepting the reality of the person and the relationship, you’ll resist making decisions, and you’ll resist change. Resisting, resisting, resisting, resisting all the way. Resistance is driven by fear and this permeates every single area of your life but it can have particularly disastrous consequences for your self-esteem and your relationships. When you’re in a cycle of unhealthy relationships and feeling bad about yourself, the ‘familiar uncomfortable’ seems more comfortable than the prospect of the ‘uncomfortable unknown’.

  Unevaluated fears will lure you back into the cycle even though the fear is not actually real whereas the consequences of what you’ve been currently and previously doing are.

  Being involved with somebody and a situation that runs counter to what you’re saying that you want means that you’re committed to playing out your beliefs about relationships, love and yourself, which of course results in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Resisting is sabotaging your own chances at happiness because rather than engage with someone when there’s a genuine possibility of a relationship and mutual interest while taking responsibility for your own happiness and life, you’d rather keep flogging a dead horse trying to force someone to ‘see’ you. This is where some of you may become confused because:

  1.You believe that you love him/her,

  2.You believe that they love you but they just don’t know it, or they love you but they’re too afraid to show it, or they love you because they tell you that they do even though their actions say otherwise, or,

  3.You believe that you have an amazing connection and this is your destiny because the sex is great/they’re funny with a great sense of humour/no one's ever made you feel like this before and blah, blah, blah... or,

  4.You feel that you love them and if you feel this way then surely they should appreciate how much you feel for them and love you back because you have projected how you think and feel onto them and you believe that you are the best they’ve ever had, or

  5.You believe you can do enough loving for the both of you and that in time, they will realise it and you'll live happily ever after.

  Pain is not love, it’s pain.

  If you’ve found yourself in the position of having to go NC and have experience of emotionally unhealthy relationships, you have learned the wrong associations about relationships. You think that the feelings created by fear are ‘love’ and that the excitement and desire you feel is ‘love’ when it’s actually fear. Much of the pain stems from fear and drama and you mistake your feelings of fear and penchant for drama as love, because you have poor relationship habits that have been learned over an extended period of time, often from childhood. This means that your behaviour and desires may seem completely normal and even familiar as you can be playing out subconscious patterns, likely in an attempt to try to right the wrongs of the past and gain validation. What you learn though, as you become aware of your relationship habits and harness your pattern, is that if you don't address how you feel about love, relationships and yourself, your perception of love becomes very skewed.

  You learn to accept crumbs, feeling grateful for slivers of attention from people who really don’t deserve any more of your time and energy.

  You convince yourself that what you're getting is what you deserve or it must be what you want, because surely if you didn't want this person and this relationship then you could walk away?

  You believe that the magnitude of pain that you experience is in direct correlation to the amount of love you have, hence the more pain you feel, the more in love you believe yourself to be.

  You convince yourself that you're not good enough to expect or get more and that a better relationship will elude you.

  You believe that because you have such poor experiences and that time is passing that you must 'settle'.

  You become obsessed with getting attention from these people and aren't concerned with the quality of attention so you end up with drama, either sought out or thrown in your direction. Not all attention is created equal!

  You become codependent. The very person who is on one hand the very source of your pain, also appears to be the sole source of your happiness. You can't seem to function without them and you believe it's because of your love when in actual fact it's because of fear.

  You think that the familiar 'butterfly' feeling that you get around these people is excitement and passion when in actual fact, when you have a habit of being with the same poor partners, it's familiar fear.

  You expend so much mental energy thinking about them, what you think they feel and do, what you think you do and feel, the coulda, woulda, shouldas and betting on potential that you lose sight of the reality of them and become obsessed and infatuated with an illusion.

  You end up being convinced that obsession and desire to be in control of this person and the situation is love.

  Many of the dysfunctional things that happen in poor relationships are easy to bag and tag as 'love' and 'passion' but it’s important to remember that reality becomes distorted in poor relationships because it's far harder to stick around when your feet are in reality – you can end up on an entirely different planet!

  Fear means that whatever you’re currently afraid of isn’t happening because if it were, that would be knowledge not fear and you’d be responding to that instead. You may be ‘loving’ this person because the recognition that certain things aren’t happening activates your attachment to this person based on the desire to gain validation. Or you are treating fear as knowledge and not responding appropriately in spite of the fact that what you fear is now happening and needs a healthy response. This is caused by denial, that refusal to accept an uncomfortable truth as fact even though it is.

  If you don't reconcile who you think you love with the reality of who they are and the relationship you have, you will fail to process those feelings of drama and fear for what they are – fear and drama – and as long as you’re doing this, you’ll continue to fall into a cycle of poor relationships that result in similar experiences. Fear and drama make you dependent on surrounding yourself with experiences and factors that make it more comfortable for you to believe that this is how things are. It also causes inaction and you can end up being comfortable with the pattern of the very uncomfortable, because it seems far more uncomfortable to make positive changes that will make you accountable for your own happiness (or misery) and throw the spotlight on where you’re expending your emotional energy which may reveal some uncomfortable truths. However uncomfortable these truths may be, the truth will actually set you free if you’re willing to face it and deal with it instead of avoiding it.

  KEY FEARS THAT TRIGGER THE DESIRE TO RETURN TO THE RELATIONSHIP

  Having an awareness of your vulnerabilities as you’re embarking on NC means that you can consider an alternative and more appropriate response to breaking NC, as it would be more beneficial to find healthier ways of responding to these situations than doing what at times can essentially amount to using a hammer when you need a drill.

  Identifying the underlying fear behind your actions and thinking is critical because it’s a primary driver of your trigger(s). Where you can’t identify a clear fear, you can be sure that you
are mislabelling, and so treating one trigger like it’s another or just using the same default response for anything and everything that you find difficult to handle.

  For instance, you might struggle with feeling bored, lonely, afraid and rejected and rather than differentiate between these, you might lump them all together and not really understand your feelings or needs in these situations and then think, “Hmmm, I’ll remedy it with some attention” which may be in the form of reaching out or even sleeping with them.

  It’s a good idea to try to identify where your habit of drama seeking or ‘soothing’ yourself on unhealthy comforters stems from because repeating this unhealthy pattern of thinking and behaviour can have you repeatedly trying to return to the person or the relationship, even though only hours or days before, you were fully aware of how toxic this involvement was. Suddenly, because you experience the trigger, you’re ready to override real concerns and are eager to paper over the cracks or to even attempt to negotiate your way back into the relationship because you don’t want to deal with these feelings, thoughts, or even your reality. You basically end up having a relationship with your fear and impulses.

  How you respond to these triggers may be rooted in childhood due to experiences such as experiencing abandonment by a parent, and when you get into that zone of being afraid that you are going to be abandoned, or already feel that you have been, it’s because something about the situation is familiar, or your overriding fear plays out and you act on it due to not being able to differentiate between now and then, or your feelings versus reality. You end up reliving your fears and experiences while trying to shoot for an alternative ending where you get to right the wrongs from the past. By trying to go back, you’re effectively opting back into your unhealthy cycle and you attempt to stem the pain of the breakup by minimising what you feel is the pain of the perceived abandonment. Of course the tricky thing is, is that the abandonment you’re trying to stem the pain of cannot be soothed by a painful relationship, especially when you’re abandoning yourself in the process.

  Abandonment - Fear of being deserted and having to ‘fend’ for yourself, scared that you're losing them. You're wondering what you did to chase him/her away or scared that you’re currently ‘scaring’ them off. Unfortunately you’re highly likely to choose people that exacerbate that feeling of abandonment and everything you are doing is unfortunately just pushing someone who is already flaky even further away.

  Boredom – Fear of being unoccupied or ‘excited’. When you’re in a relationship, this will be fear that everything is going stale and that you need to inject some excitement or else the relationship is doomed. You get nervous when there’s no drama, so you may create it, for instance, by ending it to put things back into the uncomfortably familiar. When you’re out of the relationship, you become afraid of having to be responsible for consuming your own time. Everything has been so tied up in who you are or were when trying to be with this person, that you feel at a loose end and not like an individual entity if you’re not with this person or attempting to be. You’ll also ‘miss’ the drama and it may make you feel nervous, agitated and ‘bored’.

  Feeling neglected - Fear of being unheard, unloved, not cared for, and not needed. Fear that your efforts don't count. Unfortunately even though you feel neglected within the relationship, when you’re out of the relationship, you’ll seek them out and try to be heard, loved, cared for and needed so that you can feel validated. What’s failed to be understood is that NC is symptomatic of the fact that your needs weren’t being met when you were in the relationship and that you will feel less neglected when you step up and discover and learn how to meet your own needs.

  Loneliness - Fear of being alone. You’re so scared of being alone that you seek solace in people who still make you feel alone when they’re in the room with you. You’d rather be lonely in your illusions than trying to rebuild your life with real connections. You’ll also find that by being so trapped in your feelings, you’ll inadvertently end up isolating yourself. This is why if we make partners our focal point, we end up losing ourselves in them and don’t know how to function and be an entity without them. We end up codependent and we also make desperate choices in our desperation to avoid the ‘loneliness’.

  Loss of control - Fear of not being able to control the unfamiliar that comes with stepping out of your [uncomfortable] comfort zone where you know what you’re dealing with and by and large know what to expect. Making contact and continuing to try to fit the square peg relationship into a round hole along with managing down your expectations, discussing, trying, analysing, crying, pleading, begging, willing, waiting for him/her and whatever else you can do to hold on because this drama is a ‘safe bet’. NC is then associated with the fear of losing control. But you’re not in control. If you want to be in control of yourself, your life, and your experiences, you need to opt out of the cycle and cut contact. Until then, you’re in pseudo control.

  Pain – Fear of your tolerance levels, fear that you cannot cope. Even though you spend a lot of time in pain, you’re afraid of the pain that you think will be infinitely worse than the current pain you’re in. You greatly exaggerate the magnitude of the perceived pain using this as an excuse to avoid change, often confusing the level of pain that you feel with the depth of your feelings, when actually, while part of your pain is grief, part of your pain is also about your self-esteem and how you cope with rejection and disappointment. You also believe that the pain you’re in now will be offset by the perceived reward of gaining their love, attention, validation and the relationship you profess to want.

  Rejection – Fear of not being accepted, fear that you’re not good enough, fear that they hold the key to your worth. You’re scared of what you perceive as full-on rejection so you stall the process of grieving and moving on so that you don’t end up feeling rejected. This is how you end up returning to the relationship – you’re trying to stem the feeling of rejection. If you go back, you think you’re not being ‘fully rejected’, but it doesn’t take long until you realise nothing has changed and you’re still unhappy.

  STOP TRYING TO CONTROL THE UNCONTROLLABLE

  You’ll send a text, you won’t hear back, so you’ll send another one. If you get a response, even if it’s a short, polite response that conveys no warmth or interest, you’ll try to extract further attention and may then try to call or email, or do something to drive your thirst to gain their attention and some level of validation.

  Yes you may feel it’s better the devil you know, or get a vague comfort from knowing they’ll call every seven days, or come back to you when they’ve been with someone else for 3 months, but the control you think you have is another illusion. You’re afraid of losing control of a relationship and a person that you don’t actually have control over. The moment they go ‘off plan’, you’re going to feel like you’re losing your mind… and them.

  All of your fears are going to continue feeding into each other and driving you batty until you cut contact and see it through. You’re not giving yourself a chance to feel the fear and ride it out. You react to your fear and tell yourself that you’re doing it because you’re a good woman/man that loves this person unconditionally or that you’re fighting for your relationship, or you believe that at least you know what you’re dealing with. Unfortunately, no matter what reasons you’re under the illusion of, you’re engaging in self-depleting behaviour. They’re just not that special that it’s worth going down this road. Find someone who you can keep your dignity with.

  When someone wants out of a relationship or doesn’t want to get into one, or just is quite simply incompatible with you having your self-esteem in tow, it’s a signal that you need to halt.

  -- If they want to be out of the relationship, why don’t you want to be out of the relationship?

  -- What are they seeing that you’re not seeing?

  -- What are you seeing that they’re not seeing?

  -- If they don’t want you, why do
you want them?

  -- If they don’t want a relationship with you, why do you want one with them?

  You are throwing your love at people that don’t want or truly value it enough for you to be continuing to give them the time of day. Loving someone doesn’t give you an IOU. You’re so trapped in your feelings that you’ve projected those on to this person. You have to realise that what you think, want and need is not the same as what they think, want and need. You can love someone but they don’t have to love you back and they don’t have to accept your love. If they don’t see your love and value it, you’re wasting your time.

  It doesn’t make you invaluable – it makes the situation a no-go.

  If you keep throwing your love at people that don’t want it and who have the least likely prospects of actually being present and accountable for a relationship, not only are you setting yourself up for rejection, but you’re persistently putting yourself in the frontline of rejection and rejecting yourself. No Contact will give you back your pride.

  Whatever you think is at the end of the yellow brick road of this relationship, i.e., the ‘potential’ and ‘illusions’ that you hope to make a reality, it will not wipe out the damage you do to yourself by acting without pride and boundaries.

  You’ve got to feel the pain and grieve the loss of the relationship, the illusions and the person. You’ll weep, you’ll rage, you’ll be inconsolable and maybe you won’t eat as much as you should do, or will overeat for a bit, but you need to feel the feelings, not shut them down or distract from them with unhealthy behaviour and thinking. Putting off the perceived feeling of rejection, loss and abandonment is prolonging the agony, and numbing you. You have to recognise that yes, you’re going to feel some pain in letting go, maybe even a lot of pain, but if you feel it and work your way through it, it’s actually only for the short-term.