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Hi CA,

In the last year two people have gone no contact with me (she/her).

One is a former colleague (she/her) who has burned many bridges in our professional community. She’s been basically blackballed in our specialty area and had to take a position doing similar but much less exciting work after she was fired from her last job. Around the same time she stopped talking to me because she felt I wasn’t supportive enough about her recent move. This is, at least, my guess based on talking to mutual friends. She never told me she was going no contact, she just dropped out of a group chat and de-friended me.

The other is my husband’s sister (she/her). This is 10,000 times more complicated. She seems to be reacting to a lifetime’s worth of frustration with her parents. This escalated three years ago when her first child was born and the relationship between her and the rest of us deteriorated rapidly. From my perspective there’s a communication mismatch, a generational divide, and 40 years of unresolved issues that I can’t begin to understand. It’s been about a year since she’s talked to her parents. She’s texted twice with my husband over that time with the most recent one very politely but firmly saying she doesn’t want contact with us either.

I know of two instances where SIL has felt hurt by something I directly or indirectly did, so I want to talk it through and fix it. But obviously her relationship with her parents and brother (my husband) is bigger and more important, and I can’t repair my relationship with her until that happens first. In retrospect, I should have responded a lot more intentionally when I became aware of her feelings.

I also feel the need to say that my MIL went no contact with her parents in her 40s, so in many ways my SIL is repeating learned behavior. But maybe I’m being blamey/judgemental/defensive when I bring that up.

Two questions:

(1) I think about my SIL and the hurt I’ve caused her every day. How can I live with her feelings towards me until the day she decides she’s ready to reach out? We have a very small family and her absence is felt.

(2) Does everyone my age (early 40s) have two people who don’t want to talk to them anymore? It feels like a high number.

Thanks,

SIL of the SIL

Dear SIL of the SIL:

In answer to your second question, I mass-blocked literally thousands of rancid TERFs, Nazis, trolls, and other badly behaved strangers flowing into Bluesky from Twitter before breakfast this morning, so I might be the wrong person to ask about whether “two” is a high number. It’s a high number for you, so it counts. Does it represent a troubling pattern where you are the common denominator, or is it just a coincidence of timing? Unclear. More on this later.

In answer to your first question, I don’t know precisely what you did to your SIL and how much of it was intentional, but I can tell you that widely accepted practice for addressing harm done to other people looks something like this:

1. Name the harm in clear, specific terms and be honest with yourself for your role in causing it to the best of your ability.
2. Make a sincere apology where you take accountability.
3. Hear the other person’s side of things out without interrupting to equivocate or explain.
4. Offer restitution to repair or offset any damage you may have caused, and follow through on your promises if the offer is accepted.
5. Leave the ball in their court for how to move forward, without placing further demands on the wronged person to forgive, soothe your feelings, or grant you access to them. [=>YOU ARE APPROXIMATELY HERE<=]
6. Adjust your behavior so you don’t repeat the same problem in the future.

Steps two, three, and four are things you do in concert with other person, but the rest are things you can do for and by yourself. In cases where apologizing or making amends would do more harm by say, overriding the consent of the person you wronged, then ethically you *must* leave your SIL and former friend alone unless they contact you. So my best advice for you is to detach from ever getting a satisfying reason or answer from the people who cut you off and focus on the parts you can do alone.

Sometimes people who have been cut off after a breakup find comfort and peace in rituals, such as:

• Writing a letter with everything you wish you could say to the absent person and what you wish they would say back, and then destroying it.
• Quietly donating money or effort to a cause the person cares about in their honor (but emphatically not in their name if it would subvert a no-contact request).
• Making a conscious choice to redirect whatever grief, unrequited love, or other unresolved feelings and the energy you would spend chasing after the absent person into nurturing your community and people who want to show up in your life.

If this issue with your sister-in-law is preoccupying to a painful degree that distracts you from enjoying life, consider taking the problem to a counselor who can help you work on ways to disengage, forgive yourself, and find closure. If you want to read more about apologies (including ones where the amends must be made in absentia), I recommend Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s excellent On Repentance And Repair: Making Amends In An Unapologetic World.

Now let’s talk about what these two situations have in common, what they don’t, and where that leaves you. Are these people leaving you, specifically, because of something you did wrong, or are they exiting a whole system that you just happen to be part of? And are you missing them, specifically, or are you reacting to the pain of rejection? My read on both situations is that it’s mostly the second thing, but you tell me.

Your former colleague was in the process of leaving one job/career field for another, not entirely of her own volition, and you say that she has a habit of burning bridges. In a time of professional upheaval and crisis, she left the group chat and blocked you at the same time. You have through-the-grapevine information that she found you insufficiently supportive of her choices, though you don’t indicate that she asked you for specific support that you then refused.

Were you close friends who happened to meet through work, or were you part of a loose association of friendly current and former colleagues who mix networking and social chatting? Looking at the last year or two, how big a part of each other’s daily lives were you? When was the last time you spent one on one time together that wasn’t based on shared professional interests or the whole group getting together? What makes you think that this is a deeply personal and specific “fuck off” and not just burning one last bridge between anyone and anything that reminds her of an arena of failure and strife?

If I gave you four buckets and 10 tokens, and told you that nobody else on earth would ever see or judge what you did with them, how many tokens would you put in each bucket?

• Bucket 1: I Miss Her So Much & Find Myself Texting Her Almost Every Day
• Bucket 2: I Feel Both Sad And Relieved At Possibly No Longer Having To Deal With Her Constant Ups & Downs
• Bucket 3: I Feel Guilt About The Aforementioned Relief
• Bucket 4: I Feel Hurt & Angry About Being Rejected Without Explanation

Your sister-in-law broke up with her entire family over “a lifetime’s worth of frustration with her parents” and “a communication mismatch, a generational divide, and 40 years of unresolved issues that I can’t begin to understand.” You say that your MIL had to take a similar road with her own parents, and you also say “We have a very small family and her absence is felt.” Interesting.

Were you and your sister-in-law friends? Did you spend one-on-one time together hanging out and have interests & hobbies in common that were not centered on the rest of the family, or did you encounter her mostly on holidays and events where the others were present? Would you be friends if you met under different circumstances? Have you ever shared something she told you in confidence with her folks, even if your intentions were good? (If so, I have exactly one guess about why she stopped talking to you). Before the current rift, were she and your husband friends as adults? Did they hang out together just for fun sometimes without their parents? Is your husband someone she trusted to confide in and ask for help? Did they have keys to each other’s places? Does he think of her as a reliable narrator*? (*I have no indication that she isn’t one, but if either of you don’t think she is, it also neatly solves the mystery of why she lumped you in with the parents).

Six new buckets, fifteen new tokens, and same deal as before where you are completely honest with yourself and nobody will ever tell:

• Bucket 5: I Miss Her All The Time & Feel Like Husband/I Lost His/My/Our Best Friend/Only Ally In The Family
• Bucket 6: Lumping Me In With The Rest Of These Dysfunctional Assholes Just Because I Made A Few Mistakes Really Hurts My Feelings
• Bucket 7: I Resent How Much Her Absence Has Increased Pressure On Me To Play Dutiful Daughter (& Pick Up Holiday Slack)
• Bucket 8: Surely There Is Some Solution If Only Everyone Would Just Talk To Each Other Like Adults (The Middle Child’s Lament)
• Bucket 9: Come On, SIL, You’ve Made Your Point, But Doesn’t Your Kid Deserve Grandparents? They Won’t Be Around Forever!
• Bucket 10: What If There Is Something Deeply Awful Buried Under Euphemisms About “Generational Divides” and “A Lifetime Of Frustration”? Something So Bad That I Might Have To Run Away, Too?

I’m guessing wildly here, so it would make total sense if not all the buckets get tokens. But an inbox full of concerned wives who are trying to single-handedly fix the dysfunction in their husband’s families in time for Festivus makes me a relatively *educated* guesser, so I’ll wager that it will be highly revealing for you to contemplate which buckets got the most tokens and why.

As for what you do with the information, may I humbly suggest: Nothing?

Do literally nothing about it, except take the steps outlined earlier in the post to create your own closure without looking for ways around their consent. You can’t fix your husband’s family of origin, not that anyone asked you to. You couldn’t have fixed your former friend’s cascade of career corrections, even if she asked you to. There is no work you can do about these relationships that will make them different than they are. All you can do is take care of yourself, and that most likely means detaching. Wish your former friend well in your mind and then do something nice for yourself or somebody who welcomes your company. Let your husband and his family be upset about his sister this holiday season without climbing into her shoes or undermining her choices. If you get opportunities for a do-over about the mistakes you so regret, you can make a different choice next time. In the meantime, stop doing work about people who are not working at you.

If we value consent, then we have to accept the possibility that people will decide to leave and not come back. We must be allowed to leave relationships and situations that harm us or no longer serve us, and therefore we must allow others the same freedom to weigh whatever they’ll gain in peace against what they might lose in connection and then do what they think is best for themselves. If they are being unfair or making an error in leaving, that’s still their mistake to make, and it’s up to them to come back and correct it. We get to decide if we’re willing to leave a door open and hear them out someday, because everybody gets to set conditions around who is allowed in their lives. But once someone goes, there is nothing we can do to hasten their return. So do nothing.

People left behind often interpret being cut off as a punishment, and I’ve read enough letters from the people who leave that I can’t say 100% that it isn’t intended that way, at least at first. A good sign that leaving was meant to teach a lesson is if they keep popping back up to see if you’ve learned yours yet. But if somebody goes away and stays gone? The simplest and best explanation is that they wanted freedom more than they wanted anything else. Freedom from you, from the institutions you might represent, from the situation that brought them to that point, from painful reminders, from a flurry of minor annoyances, from a lack of enjoyment or pleasure, from pressure or obligation to make the situation be any different. Freedom goes both ways, so when somebody hits that block button or tells you outright not to contact them anymore, they are telling you that there is nothing whatsoever you can do to fix whatever this is, and now you get to be free of it. Breaking up means that you don’t have to work on the relationship anymore. It’s done. Your work here is done.

Grieve for what you lost. Then? Be free.

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