This is one of the most agonizing questions a person can sit with, and one of the least well-supported. There is no shortage of content telling you that cutting off a parent is either always justified (your peace comes first) or never acceptable (family is everything). Neither of those is actually helpful when you're the one who has to live with the decision.
What most people in this position need isn't permission or prohibition. It's a way of thinking through something that is genuinely complex, that involves real competing considerations, and that will have real consequences regardless of what you decide.
This post isn't going to tell you what to do. It's going to offer a framework for thinking it through more clearly.
First: What Does "Cutting Off" Actually Mean?
One thing that makes this decision harder is that it tends to get framed as all or nothing, when in reality there's a wide range of what reduced or ended contact can look like.
There's a difference between ending all contact permanently and indefinitely, taking a temporary break, significantly reducing the frequency of contact, limiting the nature of contact (surface-level only, no visits, no unannounced calls), and setting specific conditions under which contact continues.
Many people who are trying to decide whether to "cut off" a parent are actually trying to figure out what level and kind of contact, if any, is sustainable for them right now. That's a different question than a permanent, final severance, and it may produce a different answer.
Being clear about what you're actually considering matters, both for your own thinking and for how you communicate it.
Questions Worth Sitting With
These aren't meant to produce a score or a clear answer. They're meant to slow down a decision that often gets made in one of two states: either in the heat of a significant rupture, or at the end of a long exhaustion. Neither is the ideal moment.
What is the contact currently costing you?
Not in the abstract, but concretely: what happens to you in the days before you see this person, during contact, and in the days after? What does regular contact require you to manage, suppress, or recover from? The cost of the relationship is real information, and it belongs in this decision.
What have you already tried?
Have you set limits that weren't respected? Have you had direct conversations about what you need from the relationship? Have you reduced contact temporarily and found it made no difference, or made things worse? The history of what you've already attempted is relevant. A decision to end contact means something different when it follows years of trying than when it's a first response to a significant conflict.
What are you hoping will happen?
Some people hope that ending contact will bring the parent to their senses, will produce an apology or a change, will force a reckoning. That outcome is possible but not common, particularly with parents who have narcissistic or emotionally immature patterns. It's worth being honest with yourself about what you're hoping for, because if the decision is partly based on hoping the parent will change, that hope deserves to be examined separately from the question of what's right for you regardless of how they respond.
What would full contact feel like if nothing changed?
If this relationship stays exactly as it is, with no change from either of you, what does maintaining contact look like over the next five years? The next twenty? Sometimes projecting forward makes the unsustainability of continuing clearer than any analysis of the present.
What would ending contact actually change?
This is a question people often skip. Ending contact ends the active relationship but doesn't automatically end what the relationship produced: the inner critic, the self-doubt, the patterns, the grief. Those tend to require their own work regardless of contact status. If part of the hope is that distance will produce relief or healing, it's worth knowing that the internal work usually needs to happen in its own right.
What does your nervous system tell you?
Not the guilty voice, not the voice that rehearses what you owe this person, not the voice that catalogues the worst things they've done. The quieter voice underneath: what do you actually need? What would feel like something you could live with?
The Guilt Is Not Evidence That You're Wrong
This deserves its own section because it is one of the most consistent barriers to people making a clear decision: the guilt is so intense that it functions as evidence. It feels like proof that the decision is wrong, you're being selfish, or you will regret this.
Guilt is a normal response to doing something that violates a deeply held value or a deeply conditioned expectation. It doesn't always mean you're doing the wrong thing. The guilt of setting limits with a parent who was harmful is not the same as the guilt of doing something genuinely unethical. It is often the guilt of finally choosing yourself in a relationship where you were conditioned to believe that was not allowed.
The guilt is also frequently not yours alone. Many parents, particularly those with narcissistic patterns, are skilled at inducing guilt, at framing their child's limit-setting as abandonment, ingratitude, or cruelty. Feeling guilty in the aftermath of a difficult decision about contact does not mean you made the wrong choice. It often means you made a real one.
What Other People Think Is Not the Right Metric
You will likely encounter people who have strong opinions about what you should do, including people who love you and want what's best for you. Siblings who made a different choice. Extended family members who don't understand. Friends who would never consider this with their own parents. A partner who has their own complicated feelings about family loyalty.
Their opinions matter to the extent that they know your situation well and have your best interests at heart. They do not get a vote in a decision that you will live with and they won't.
This is also true of cultural and religious frameworks that speak to family obligation. Those frameworks deserve respect, and they are not designed to require people to maintain relationships that are actively causing harm. Most frameworks that value family also value the wellbeing of the people in it.
There Is No Perfect Decision
The hardest thing about this is that both options have real costs. Maintaining contact with a parent who is consistently harmful costs something: your peace, your self-trust, your energy, sometimes your other relationships. Ending or reducing contact also costs something: the relationship itself, the grief of a door closing, the family members who react, the cultural and sometimes familial judgment.
There is no option that costs nothing. The question is which costs are more bearable, which are more consistent with who you are and who you want to be, and which you can live with over time.
As the author and researcher Harriet Lerner has written: "The only relationships that are truly healthy are those in which both people are allowed to be who they are."
If you're working through this decision and want a space to think it through without pressure, therapy for a difficult relationship with parents provides exactly that.
Dr. Kayla Sykes is a licensed psychologist in California specializing in childhood trauma, attachment, and women's mental health. She provides online therapy throughout California.
