By the time a woman searches this she isn't asking whether such a thing exists, she's asking whether she's allowed, and whether the people with opinions about it will still speak to her afterward. She's usually tried the smaller things first, the shorter visits, the subjects she stopped raising, the year she only went for the one day instead of the week, and none of it changed how the visits actually went. Going no contact is the decision to end a relationship instead of continuing to manage it, and people arrive at it from a range that runs from documented abuse to plain exhaustion, which is part of why it gets discussed so badly from the outside. Most women who've done it describe it as the hardest decision they've made, and hardly any of them describe it as a first choice.

Keisha Clark, PhD, is a developmental psychologist and the author of Family, Interrupted and Useful Isn't the Same as Loved.

What going no contact actually means

It means ending contact on purpose and keeping it ended, which is different from a falling out that goes on too long, because a falling out is something that happens to two people and this is a decision one of them maintains. The shape of it varies more than the phrase suggests. Some women block the phone number, the email, the social accounts, and tell the family they won't accept relayed messages either, so an aunt who calls to explain her mother's side gets the same treatment. Others keep one channel open, an email address she checks every few weeks, because she wants to know if there's a hospital and doesn't want to know anything else. Some stay in the same town and pass the house twice a week, others move and don't leave a forwarding address, and both of those are the same decision handled differently.

Stopping contact so that a mother will finally apologize, or so she'll understand how serious this is, is a different action with a different goal, and it hardly ever holds, because the moment there's an apology the terms are back to what they were. Going no contact works as a decision about what a woman is willing to be part of, and it works badly as a message she's waiting to see received.

How to know whether you're ready to go no contact

There's no test for it, the women who look hardest for one are usually looking for permission rather than information. What helps more is knowing whether you've already tried the smaller adjustments and what happened when you did, because a mother who responded to a shorter visit by calling four times that week has told you something, and a mother who took it fine has told you something else. It also helps to notice how long you've been deciding. A decision made in the four days after a bad holiday looks different from one you've been circling since March, though both can turn out to be right.

The practical side is the part women skip and then get caught by. If your mother pays your phone bill, watches your children Tuesdays and Thursdays, cosigned the lease, or holds a joint account with you from when you were nineteen, then this decision has a number attached to it and you should know the number before you make it, not six weeks in when the childcare has to be solved in a hurry. Work out what replaces each of those, what it costs a month, and how long you can absorb it. Guilt, by itself, doesn't tell you anything about whether you're making the right call, most women feel it whether they go or stay, and the ones who stay often feel it about the staying.

How to go no contact with a parent

There are two ways to do it, sending something or simply stopping, and both are legitimate. Stopping without a message avoids a conversation that mostly can't go well, though it leaves your mother without a date or a reason, which for some women is the point and for others is more than they want to do. If you send something, keep it to a few sentences and don't build the case, because a list of grievances reads as an argument and invites a rebuttal, and then you're arguing about the third item for a year. Say that you're ending contact, say whether it's permanent or you don't know, say whether there's any circumstance you want to be told about, and stop.

The practical work is worth doing in one afternoon rather than piecemeal. Block the phone number, the email, and the accounts on the same day, so you're not unblocking one of them a week later to check something. Tell your husband or partner what you need from him, specifically, because the default is that he'll answer his own phone when your mother calls him. Tell your siblings what you will and won't discuss, then expect them to relay anyway, and decide in advance whether relayed messages get a response. Decide what you'll do if she shows up at the house or at work, and tell whoever's at the front desk. Handle the money on a date rather than by drifting, close the joint account, change the direct deposit, get yourself removed from anything you cosigned if the lender will let you, and if the lender won't, know that you're still on it and plan around that. And if there are grandchildren, decide the answer and give it once, because a question you keep half answering will get asked every month.

What the first year is like

Relief and grief show up in the same week, sometimes the same afternoon, and the women who expect only one of them are the ones who get thrown. People will come at you on her behalf, an aunt who calls, a cousin who sends a long message, a sibling who forwards a photograph of your mother looking older, and each of those needs a decision from you rather than a reaction. The first holiday is the hard one, it goes better when there's an actual plan in place by early November instead of a vague intention to be fine.

Around month four a lot of women start doubting the decision, because nothing terrible has happened, the pressure is gone, and without it the original problem feels smaller than it was. Month four is when most people reach back out, and it's also when it helps to have written down what the last few visits were actually like, since memory softens fast once the phone stops ringing. You'll also need one sentence for people who ask, something you can say at work without opening the whole subject, and it's fine for that sentence to be that you're not close with your family and leave it there.

Low contact, and whether no contact is permanent

Low contact is a real option in its own right, for a lot of women it's the arrangement that actually holds. It works when the terms are specific, a standing call every other Thursday, an hour and a half at a restaurant rather than a weekend at the house, no overnights, no drop-ins, and a short list of subjects that get a change of topic rather than an answer. It stops working when the terms are only in your head, because then every visit is a fresh negotiation and you're the one enforcing something nobody agreed to.

Some of it is permanent and some of it isn't, contact resumes for the ordinary reasons, a diagnosis, a birth, the death of the other parent, and when it resumes it usually resumes on smaller terms than either woman imagined. What makes it hold the second time is specific and unglamorous, she doesn't repeat what you tell her, she asks before she visits, she stops raising the subject you told her not to raise. An apology on its own doesn't predict much, since a mother can mean it completely on a Sunday and be back to the same behavior by Easter. If you go, you'll have days of thinking you were wrong, and if you stay, you'll have days of thinking you should have gone. What you can actually check is whether anything about the last year would be different in the next one.