5 Irrational Fears & Beliefs About No Contact
When you need to step back from an unhealthy relationship and employ No Contact (NC) after the breakup, irrational fears and beliefs which are used to try to control the uncontrollable but to also prevent you from taking real action, can often provide the trigger for you to either break NC or decide that there’s no point in starting it at all. I hear from readers who have been going back and forth with an ex from anything from a few months… to a few decades.
Variations of the irrational fears and beliefs highlighted below keep them on the disappointment cycle and it’s only once they stop treating the irrational as rational and recognise where they’re opening themselves up to more pain and keeping further away from a healthy relationship, that they can finally stop torturing themselves and take the focus off their ex so that they can use boundaries for self-care and breaking the pattern. In this post, I share the first five and you can download the full ten – link at the bottom of the post.
1: If I cut contact, it will make them realise what they've lost.
If they have to lose you to value you, the relationship isn’t going to work no matter which way you slice it. This is not least because you shouldn’t have to be like the umbrella that someone keeps misplacing and damaging for them to notice your absence from their life.
Cutting contact in an attempt to coerce this person into the position that you want is an attempt to prevent them from not realising your value by messing with supply and demand. If you cut contact to make them desire you more, you believe that the way to prevent your relationship from ending is to end it. However, this means that you then have to keep ending it or at least threatening to, to generate the demand. This is exhausting work. It’s also important to point out that unavailable people respond to the loss of control by chasing you and get back in control by pulling back and managing down your expectations and/or exiting.
The lesson: Breaking up whether it’s done via the traditional route or you have to do NC, is to end a relationship. Don’t use it as a means of attempting to force people to do what you want.
2: If I'm eliciting responses/ crumbs of attention it means that they're thinking about me.
This is how you end up chasing them for crumb ‘top-ups’ and being chained to your phone checking for texts and emails. Avoiding NC and holding this belief is believing that what can often amount to feeble amounts of effort from their end is you being kept ‘front and centre’. People who require NC often engage in this low-level contact and dribbling crumbs of attention with about as much effort as ordering a pizza. They’re very of the moment. What you actually need for a loving relationship is for the other party to show that they want you by being in a relationship with you and treating you with love, care, trust, and respect.
The lesson: Having a full-on relationship instead of trying to stay in someone’s mind is always the better option. You won’t get to discover this in a new relationship if you keep chasing (and accepting) crumbs though. Also, there are better ways to be remembered than emails and texts. Someone doesn’t have to forget about you if they’re in the relationship with you.
3: Cutting them off will make them change or trigger remorse, which will in turn make them give me the relationship I want / that they promised me.
It might make them give it to you for a short period of time, but it’s important to remember that the type of person that requires NC equates desiring you with feeling out of control of you. Next thing you know, you’re getting hearts, flowers, and violins and a sudden change in behaviour and think, Oh, they really get my pain this time…, and you get back together and then shazam, it’s a matter of hours, days, or weeks before the rot starts to set in again. NC is to end a relationship not to force someone into giving what people in even moderately healthy relationships give without coercion.
The lesson: If the only way that you think that you can get them to feel remorse or change is to end it, this relationship is not worthy of your time. They are not a child. Stop trying to raise an adult from the ground up!
4: Once I feel a bit better, we'll be able to be friends again.
This ‘ole chestnut is the fastest way to send one of those lazy texts or emails to reach out, only to find yourself being burned again. How much better you feel is subjective and the idea of grieving a relationship isn’t actually for you to make way for their friendship – it’s for you to make way for you so that you can move on. The truth is, far too much emphasis is put on finding a way to be friends again. Friendship is organic! If you’re going to be friends, it will happen without being forced and when you’re both back in neutral territory. That said, if there are very shady reasons for why you have to cut them off in the first place, I wouldn’t exactly break your neck to be friends.
Be your own friend first. Focus on you. If you try to be friends before you are enough of the way along in the healing process to be too impacted if they don’t behave as you’d like, you will reopen your wound. If you’ve got friendship on your mind, it’s likely a sign that you need to refocus your energy.
The lesson: Friendship is what happens, 1) when you’re over them and 2) they have shown themselves to be friendship worthy, neither of which the object of NC is at this time.
5: They don't realise how much their behaviour affected me and how inappropriate they were.
Yes, they do. They might claim not to realise it on a conscious level, but only someone who is incredibly emotionally immature and a responsibility dodger would have no clue about how, 1) inappropriate their behaviour was/is or, 2) its impact.
Genuinely believe that they don’t recognise this? In that case, you have no business trying to have an adult relationship with them.
As humans, we cannot bumble through life as if our actions have no impact on others – it’s called integrity, empathy, compassion, awareness, responsibility, and accountability. Let me assure you that if you mistreated them, you’d soon know all about it! They know! Stop treating them like a child! Also, if they don’t understand what the issue is/was, they will repeat the behaviour if you get back together. It’s not your job to fix or overcompensate for them.
The lesson: If they can’t empathise without you dragging them like a horse to water, a mutually fulfilling relationship isn’t possible. NC is the way of communicating that the relationship is over and that their behaviour has affected you, but it doesn’t mean that they’re going to do anything with the realisation. If you’re making excuses for your ex, you’re absolving them of responsibility, which also deals a fatal blow to any ideas you have for a relationship with them.