If you’ve chosen to step away or distance yourself from a family relationship, you may have asked yourself this question more than once:
“Am I wrong for doing this?”
You might feel certain about your decision one day, only to question it the next.
You might feel relief and sadness.
Anger and guilt.
Certainty and doubt.
You may even miss the person you’ve chosen not to have contact with.
None of that necessarily means you’ve made the wrong decision.
Estrangement is rarely as straightforward as it can look from the outside.
When everyone seems to have an opinion
Family estrangement can come with a lot of outside opinions.
You may hear things like:
“But they’re your family.”
“You’ll regret it one day.”
“Why can’t you just forgive them?”
Or perhaps people around you simply don’t understand why you have chosen no contact or low contact.
When you’re already questioning yourself, these comments can make things even harder.
You may find yourself trying to explain or justify your decision, even when the reality is much more complicated than a simple explanation can capture.
You don’t have to convince everyone else that your decision was right before you can begin to understand what it means for you.
You can miss someone and still need distance
One of the most difficult things about estrangement is that two things can be true at the same time.
You can love someone and not want contact with them.
You can miss someone and still believe that distance is necessary.
You can feel relieved that you have stepped away and still grieve what you’ve lost.
You can care about someone without wanting the relationship to continue in the same way.
These contradictions can be uncomfortable, but they don’t necessarily mean you are confused.
Sometimes they are simply part of the reality of estrangement.
What if I change my mind?
You may also worry that choosing no contact or low contact means you’ve made a decision you can never change.
But you don’t have to know what you will want forever.
What feels necessary now may change over time.
You may decide to maintain no contact.
You may decide that low contact feels more manageable.
You may eventually want to explore whether the relationship could change.
Or you may decide that you don’t want to revisit it at all.
There isn’t one right outcome.
What matters is having the space to understand what is right for you, rather than making a decision because you feel pressured, guilty or afraid of what other people might think.
What matters to you now?
It can be helpful to look beneath the surface story and ask yourself some different questions.
What happens to me when I have contact with this person?
What happens when I don’t?
What do I need from a relationship for it to feel safe and manageable?
Are my boundaries being respected?
What am I hoping will change?
And perhaps most importantly:
What do I want for myself now?
You don’t have to work out the entire history of the relationship before you can begin answering those questions.
You don’t have to be completely certain
Choosing no contact or low contact doesn’t mean you will never have doubts.
It doesn’t mean you won’t grieve.
And it doesn’t mean you have to stop caring.
Sometimes moving forward starts with allowing yourself to hold all those feelings without immediately turning them into a judgement about whether you’ve made the right decision.
You don’t have to decide today whether this is forever.
You don’t have to prove that you are right.
And you don’t have to decide who is to blame.
You can simply begin by trying to understand what this relationship, and the distance from it, means for you.
Sometimes that is where clarity begins.
Hello, I’m Sarah Swain, an accredited therapist and coach working online across London, South East, Kent and the whole of the UK. I’ve worked as a therapist across the NHS, charities and Employee Assistance Programmes for over 15 years. I am trained in integrative therapy, coaching and EMDR and I support adults navigating estrangement.