The No Contact Rule

by Natalie Lue

  If they’ve moved on, “Why them and not me?”

  Raking over previous hurts and rejections and even feeling angry with your family due to, for example, childhood issues.

  After denial tends to come anger, a very natural but unfortunately very often misunderstood emotion that comes about from feeling that you’ve been wronged, offended, denied or even made a fool of. This stage may have actually started before your relationship ended but you either kept a lid on your true feelings or have been going back and forth with them. It can also be a delayed reaction to certain truths or realisations coming to light and sometimes, you just feel angry because your hopes and expectations for the relationship didn’t come to fruition.

  Anger is a normal, valid emotion that we all have to experience and go through because it helps us to make sense of our feelings and thoughts. By recognising our feelings of anger and allowing ourselves to feel and express them, even if it’s to ourselves, we get to understand ourselves further and validate ourselves. Anger is actually a normal emotion and is a natural part of grieving the loss of your relationship. When you have been wronged or have done stuff that has not been in your own best interests, it is OK to be angry. It is normal to be angry.

  Many people have some level of shame or even snobbery attached to anger as if only certain types of people get angry or that it’s ‘wrong’ to feel it or even that all anger equals rage, which isn’t true. Rage is violent, uncontrollable anger. The associations you make with anger are likely due to early, or certainly very difficult, experiences of someone else’s anger or your own and this can affect your ability to not only express anger when you’re pissed off, but to also experience it as part of the grieving process. You may feel guilty for feeling it or even angry and so this period of NC can end up being a good time to not only learn how to sit with your feelings but to address your relationship with anger.

  Denial has a lot to do with what you might experience during this stage due to painful realisations that may come off the back of stepping into reality. You will also find that the more people pleasing and turning red-light behaviour green that you did in the relationship, the more hurt and angry you’re likely to feel. Plus if there has been any deception, humiliation or just what is perceived to be rejection, you may feel akin to one of those pressure cookers that’s been left on for too long.

  -- You may find it easier to be angry with yourself rather than your ex, which is how you get into blame and shame territory.

  -- You might be caught off guard by how angry you are if you’ve suppressed your needs, expectations and wishes.

  -- You may feel angry a lot of the time (especially if you keep feeding it with blame, shame or snooping) and find it difficult to move past it. You end up being angry about the fact that you're angry.

  -- You may be hijacked by your anger and act upon it. In turn this may prompt you to do things that may cause you to feel embarrassed or even humiliated, which in turn will create a vicious cycle of anger and shame.

  -- You might be angry with a lot of people due to this making you see where you may be being taken advantage of or seeing the cumulative effect of the injustices you’ve experienced at the hands of others.

  THERE ARE KEY REASONS WHY YOU WILL FEEL ANGRY

  -- Feeling frustrated and unloved/uncared for and disrespected because you were undervalued. No Contact teaches you to value yourself.

  -- Feeling frustrated and unloved/uncared for and disrespected because your trust has been abused. No Contact distances you from the source of your pain and teaches you to trust yourself and have boundaries.

  -- Feeling frustrated and unloved/uncared for and disrespected because you feel shame. No Contact teaches you not to take on blame and shame for other people's behaviour but to learn positively from what has happened instead.

  -- Feeling frustrated and unloved/uncared for and disrespected because you feel rejected. No Contact, in distancing you from the source of your pain and getting you to focus on yourself and create boundaries, gets you to reject any unacceptable behaviour.

  It’s this sense of injustice – you want things to be fairer and may feel like you’re not getting your chance to correct that wrong. If you become consumed by this injustice, you may perceive it as being about your worth or become consumed by the desire to make things right. It’s during this stage that you may feel particularly tempted to tell your ex all about themselves. You may end up with a whole load of angry draft emails and texts or find yourself halfway to their house ready to confront them only to turn around with tears streaming down your face. You might destroy every photo you have and then be stricken with remorse and regret and so spend a huge chunk of time sticking them back together or printing them out.

  You may find this stage all-consuming and it might hang around for a while or you may find that you vacillate between this stage and others. All of this is normal and it either means that you’re circling back to resolve elements of your grief that are cropping up or it means that you might need to either ease up on giving yourself a hard time or make a very conscious decision to let something go that you keep revisiting. That’s not about ignoring your feelings but if you keep ruminating over the same thing but aren’t going beyond this, the anger is becoming a security blanket that’s also corroborating a story you keep telling yourself.

  There are going to be bad days, really bad days and also OK, good and even brilliant days. Some days you’ll win and some days you’ll lose but the net result if you stick with NC and nurturing yourself is that you’ll make gains.

  It’s critical to work your way through anger and have some of those bad days… and then come out the other side of it. Each time you do, you learn a little bit more about yourself. Working through means getting it out of your head by talking and writing about it. It’s making sense of it, it’s crying, it’s sometimes having a damn good scream when the music is up loud or when no one is home.

  It’s important to grasp that feeling anger doesn’t mean that you are ‘correct’ in every perception attached to it or that you’re making a permanent judgment about the situation but it is about recognising that you are feeling these feelings for a reason and that in itself is valid. Your feelings are yours. If you allow yourself to be angry, you get to understand the reason, you get to process it and you ultimately get to learn from it and better serve your own needs, wishes and expectations.

  Anger when processed allows you to positively adjust your perspective. Left unattended, anger will warp your perspective and eat you up.

  If you don’t allow yourself to feel all of your emotions during NC and beyond, you won’t be able to recognise what you were missing from this relationship so that you can be better equipped to cultivate these elements in your own dealings with yourself and be more aware next time of how to avoid this situation, or to seek out what you truly want and need.

  The key now is to work your way through the anger rather than rendering yourself immobile by being trapped in it. Until you let it out, it will rattle around in your head, distorting your perception and perspective, and eating away at your sense of self. That anger isn’t just going to disappear – it has to go somewhere and right now it’s in you.

  UNDERSTANDING THE NC GRIEF STAGES: BARGAINING

  WHAT TO EXPECT

  Coming up with ideas that would enable you to return to the relationship – imagining deals and compromises.

  Praying that if X happens you’ll do Y.

  Possibly breaking NC in an attempt to enter into negotiations.

  Ruminating over the ‘If only’s.

  Bargaining is something that you will have started experiencing pretty much as soon as it became apparent that the relationship wasn't going to work out and it's where you make deals and come up with compromises, either privately in your head or with the other person.

  If the relationship isn’t over yet or you haven’t started NC, you'll come up with a compromise to prevent the relationship ending and it’s probably a compro
mise that has you compromising yourself. For example, OK maybe I can try an open relationship if it means that I don’t lose him/her.

  You might bargain with whoever you believe in, with yourself, or even with this person including making promises about what you’ll do if your prayers come true.

  You might bargain with this person and attempt to negotiate yourself into a better position e.g. I won't make any demands on you so that you stay.

  When you’ve cut contact and experienced the denial and anger, at the times when you feel tempted to break NC, it's because you're bargaining with yourself or even with a higher power that you believe in. If you actually fall off the wagon, you will find yourself bargaining with either yourself or them, or both, and this will likely result in you being compromised because you’re not really coming from a place of logic or even dignity – the desire to bargain is being driven primarily by your ego and possibly even desperation.

  When you enter into the bargaining stage, you may feel buoyant due to the fantasy playing out in your head even if it’s tinged with blame and shame such as “If only I’d been slimmer then they wouldn’t have wanted to look elsewhere” or “If only I’d answered the phone that night” or even “If only I hadn’t listened to my [concerned] friends and family.”

  For a time, even if it’s only for a very short period of time, you feel wildly hopeful due to what this bargain appears to represent – hope – and unfortunately this sets you up for experiencing the disappointment all over again because you may have temporarily believed that it was all going to work out.

  Of course it’s very possible that it’s at this stage that you might be tempted to break NC and many people find this confusing because they think, “Well I’ve been through denial and anger so why now?” but sometimes in response to us recognising that we’re processing and distancing ourselves emotionally from someone, we sabotage so as not to face the changes or possibly uncomfortable feelings that we’re dealing with. We become scared and it seems easier to take a punt on someone else changing than it does to take a punt based on us having to make all of the effort for ourselves.

  This is a stage that you may not linger in for too long. After it becomes apparent that you’re not able to strike a deal, you may try to buy more time to come up with a new plan (shifting back to denial) or move into a renewed phase of anger or feel depressed due to the loss of hope and the realisation that what you’re doing is real – that NC isn’t going to prompt this person to spontaneously combust into The Ideal Human™.

  The key to turning bargaining into something productive and moving beyond this stage, is to keep your feet in reality with a clear, real image of who the other person is, and make constructive deals with yourself.

  When we are tempted to break contact, we're bargaining, but we make decisions in isolation often not based on reality but a remarkable set of circumstances that will need to come about if only the other party changes.

  When the bargaining stage really kicks in during your grieving, it's when you’re trapped by your feelings and trying to stem the feeling of the perceived rejection and the loss by contemplating seeking attention from the source of your pain (your ex) so that you can feel less rejected and avoid working your way through the loss.

  If you allow yourself to be hijacked by the bargaining stage, you’ll come up with deals and bargains that will allow you to have the relationship on any terms rather than none at all, which is where you will end up being compromised, especially as you will end up doing things that not only detract from yourself but that open you up to pain, and may also embarrass or even humiliate you.

  For example, I'd rather have him on any terms than be without him. Things could work out because I'll be more understanding and when I get back in touch with him, he'll be relieved to have me back, see the error of his ways, and we can make the relationship work.

  UNDERSTANDING THE NC GRIEF STAGES: DEPRESSION

  WHAT TO EXPECT

  Being caught off guard by what feels like overwhelming loss at times.

  Crying suddenly.

  Feeling despondent.

  Feeling rejected – “I wasn’t good enough for…”

  Previous loss and anger that you haven’t resolved returning to the fore – you may feel very sad about other areas of your life that this relationship helped you to avoid.

  Blaming yourself.

  Realising that it’s been X weeks or months since you started NC and feeling bad about having to do it in the first place.

  Feeling that you’ve lost your investment.

  Focusing on regrets.

  Feeling like you’ll never get over this even though you’re likely forgetting that you’ve actually been feeling overall better for being out of the situation.

  Feeling guilty even though you really don’t need to.

  Being freaked out about not thinking about them all the time and then going into thinking overload.

  Secretly or even openly being afraid of moving on and having to get on with your own life and having a new purpose.

  Depression is unexpressed anger turned inwards and also a very deep sense of sadness and disappointment that you don’t know where to place, so it’s put on you. It happens after you’ve been through the other stages and have started to realise that the relationship is really is over, that NC really is needed and the other person isn’t going to change. That understanding that this is it can leave you feeling very down. Realising that whatever bargains that you make with yourself or with them are a waste of time or at the very least very painful can feel so disheartening because it means accepting that it is over and you may not feel like your heart can cope with that just yet.

  You may move through this stage very quickly or it may linger, especially if exiting this relationship is causing you to have to face up to other aspects of your life that you’re not happy with.

  Even though NC allows you to regain your power and rebuild your life, you may feel depressed that you didn't have enough power to have them come crawling back on their hands and knees in remorse, to make them change their ways, or to even feel enough regret to try to break down your NC walls.

  You may feel so much pain at the loss of the relationship or still feel like you're drawn to them even if you're not acting upon it and it may feel depressing because you really wish you didn't feel like this.

  This feeling can be especially difficult to deal with if on the face of it you recognise how toxic this person was and yet you still feel drawn to them. You may end up feeling a great deal of blame and shame and what’s easily forgotten is that you’re human, you loved and you wanted to be loved. Sure you recognise that this person is certain things but you’re grieving and it takes some time for the feelings to catch up with the reality. Being impatient with yourself or judging yourself for not being over it faster isn’t going to help you.

  You’ve likely been very affected by your involvement if you need to go NC so you have to realise that it’s entirely understandable that it’s taking time. What you have to be careful of is letting the disappointment eat you up because when the depression stage lingers, it’s because you’re judging yourself in some way. You may also still feel entitled to the desired outcome that you envisaged regardless of the fact that the outcome didn’t match the person or the actual relationship you were in.

  Sometimes when you're NC you get depressed because realising it's been a month, or 6 weeks or many more months and that you still think about them frustrates you and you feel angry because you convince yourself that they must still matter. Then you feel guilty that they still matter and get caught in a cycle of feeling that you're letting yourself down. I should add that sometimes the whole thinking about them is actually habit, not any real sign of feeling towards this person!

  We can feel odd if we don't think about them all the time, much like people who grieve someone after they die and then feel weirded out that they're moving on.

  It’s also the loss of hope or even the activation of
shame that can be experienced due to an involvement. This person may seem like they walked off with all of your possibilities or even worse, it may seem that they walked off with the knowledge of something that you judge yourself about the harshest. If you allowed yourself to be vulnerable, if you shared something and then it was used against you, even though you’ve actually got nothing to be ashamed of, it feels like what you shared or did has been used against you. This in itself is enough to scare you off the possibility of trying again so this in itself can leave you feeling depressed about your prospects.

  Loss and disappointment is something that most people struggle to come to terms with to some degree and it’s made all the more sad by a pervasive culture of not taking mental health seriously and attaching unnecessary stigma to it. It’s no wonder that so many people end up keeping their feelings to themselves when really, what they need to do is talk about what’s happened instead of locking themselves away in this isolated bubble of blame, shame and rumination.

  It is totally OK to have down times whether they last a day, a few days, or even a few weeks. These feelings and thoughts are about you processing the loss on a deeper level and if it didn’t hit you at some point you would be missing an important part of grieving (even if overall the relationship didn’t last for long). If your relationship was a lengthy one or quite traumatic, it may take months to work through – but you’ll get there. If you take care of yourself and work your way through your feelings and at the same time don’t get hijacked by them and throw yourself onto the front line of pain with him/her, you will come out the other side. If you beat yourself up, let the thoughts rattle round and round your head, opt out of your day to day life, and don’t treat yourself with the love, care, trust and respect that you deserve, it will take longer.