“Haven’t Spoken In 15 Years”: 50 People Reveal Why They Disowned Their Parents

After 50+ years of crazy, I decided I would prefer to have a peaceful life built on my own terms.

Just because I am their kid doesn't mean I have a lifetime obligation to participate in their insanity.

When my dad said he didn’t blame
my brother at all for trying to stab me… that was the final straw for me…
Going on 18 years of no contact. Don’t see it ever changing.

It was a long process, but it really ended when my mom tried to sue my wife and me for "grandparents' rights." Anything after that would've only helped her to build a case to legally kidnap our son.

Parents got divorced between 12-14. During that period my dad became an evangelical Christian. All of the sudden, everything revolved around god and jesus. This continued until he moved to the US when I was 18 because “America is doing the lords work.” He completely ghosted his 2 teenage children and started a new “Christian family.” 

 He came to visit one time. He never met his 3 grandchildren and died in 2022. It had been 17 years since I had seen him. I did not go to the funeral because, to me, he had been dead a long time. .

It was a long time coming. But the straw that broke the camels back was berating me for not coming to a family function when I told my father that I had something that was completely unskippable at work. I had been abused by my father for years, his way of getting back at me for my mother leaving him I suppose. I just lost it at him and told him what I thought of him. I haven’t spoken to him or his family that all took his side every single time in 15 years.

Dad pulled a loaded gun on me, haven’t talked to him since. I’ve heard he’s died since then and could care less.

Constantly trying to get me to divorce my wife whom Ive been with for 15 years.  She (my wife) has BPD, and is recovering from a very traumatic childhood.  I understand this, and support her even on the tough days.  My parents think she's "a psycho", and not worth my time, despite the fact that Im happiest around her, and we work very hard on our relationship despite our personal problems/flaws.  Parents see it as, "she's broken, dump her".  Which is horrible.  Im proud of how far my wife has come in the years we've been together, and when my parents gave me a "her or us" choice, I stopped talking to them.

For me, it was a respect issue. I was pregnant with my first, and I know that miscarriages happen more frequently than people know, and I told my mom to not tell anyone. Not even her family, no one. I couldn’t have stressed that enough, and I told her my reasons. Well, she disrespected that and told literally everyone. That was it for me, it was just the last straw and I had enough.

When they threatened to ruin my job and prevent my employment by lying and staged an intervention to coerce me into corroborating their BS. No contact going on 7 years and it’s never been better.

After going no contact several times, it was finally when my dad died and I had to fly across the country and I left my kids with my mother she told them I abandoned them and then kidnapped my oldest and left her in another state with another family member. Haven’t spoken to her in almost 3 years, it’s very nice.

Generational trauma and religious trauma are two of the largest factors why I had a poor relationship with my parents, with constantly having to keep up appearances/facades and never feeling like I'm enough for them coming in at a close second, not to mention the clear lack of respect for my time and space over and over again. Me coming out released quite the backlash from them ("you have brought great dishonor to your family and made a nightmare for your mother..." and so on), messaging me once a week or so to berate me for it, so once this happened, I changed my legal name, changed all my documents, dropped off my old phone wiped at their house, and noped out.

I caught them extorting money from my handicapped aunt. 3 months into becoming a new father I had to also become the legal guardian of my aunt because my parents had successfully bled a third of her life savings and were going for the rest. It took that really horrible act for me to finally admit how evil they were and pull the plug.

My father, he physically and verbally abused my sister and I when we were kids. We got taken away and put into foster care finally our mom was found and we went with her.

For a couple of years after I wanted nothing to do with my father but around 10 years old I was like why not, i had gone into therapy and I started to talk to him again. For the next 20 years I did everything I could to have him be a part of my life. I was always calling, emailing, sending messages arranging for us to see each other( he was military moved around a lot) and he probably reached out first less than five times. If I didn't message/ call him first we could go months without communicating.

What finally did it for me was when I became a mom. I would do anything for them, protect them, I could never imagine hurting my children. It really got me thinking about my relationship with my father and I realized I how s****y he is, yes I forgave him for everything but did he do anything to deserve that? Big f*****g no!

I wrote him a long a*s message told him how I felt and he responded but it was all b******t. It's been two years now since we have talked and I wish I had done it sooner.

There truly wasn’t one. It just was so much, for so long that I just stopped. My mom was too proud ever to call me because in her head, she deserved to be called. My father chose to cut me out of his life when my wife asked him not to wear shoes in the house.

We told my mom she needed to address her behavior and offer a sincere apology. I knew she was going to try to sweep her behavior under the rug by "having a medical emergency" and going to the hospital. She texted my husband one night and told him she thought she broke her foot and asked for a ride to the hospital (she was fine). I warned him that she was trying to manipulate us and told him to be on guard. She tried to give a half-assed apology and he cut her off and told her it wasn't an appropriate time, that she could apologize when it wasn't late at night and they weren't going to the hospital. The next day she texted my husband something like, "I apologized, can I see my grandkids now?" He reiterated that she needed to offer a sincere apology and addres her behavior. An hour and a half later, a police officer knocked on our door because she called the cops for a wellness check on our kids. Nope. Not putting up with that, we were done.

It's been two and a half years since then and they have been the most peaceful years of my life.

Also, everyone acted like I was psychic when I predicted that the next thing that she would do was go to the hospital for no reason. It doesn't take a psychic to predict that someone who regularly used going to the hospital as a way to get attention was going to continue that trend.

He went through my stuff without asking then continued to s**t talk me to my mom, who proceeded to not stand up for me.

As for the contents of my stuff, it was a bunch of religious books he really did NOT like as a devout Catholic. I was just beginning my anthropology studies.

But today I'm an anthropologist :).

It was more of a long haul. As I matured as a person I began to realise that I couldn't let my mother keep affecting my mental health with her narcissistic abuse. It was hard to walk away but would have been much harder to keep putting up with her abuse.

My mom had an affair behind my dad's back and they divorced. I tried to be there for both until my mom started talking about living with her permanently, meeting her new man and pretty much cutting my dad off. That wasn't gonna happen but I still tried to be around. I found out she was doing coke a little while after that. Okay, whatever. I can forgive that. She started asking me, a 14 year old at the time for money I didn't have. Soon it became less about actually giving a s**t about me and more about the child support checks she'd receive if I took her side. I walked in on my dad, drunk as hell, loaded gun on the table sobbing after I came home from my mom's one weekend. After seeing that and how badly it tore my dad apart and how little my mom gave a f**k I decided to cut her off right there. It's been almost 15 years since I've talked to her. I don't regret my decision.

My father abandoned my mom and I when I was 2. Divorced her long distance when I was 6. When I was 30 I found him and we began talking, he told me about a brother I had and made it seem like I was part of a family, when we talked on the phone he was always telling me stories about my brother. After about 6 months I realized he had never let me actually meet or talk to my brother and I suspected he never talked to my sibling about me. He got mad and said that was hurtful but eventually admitted it to be true. My sibling had grown to his early 20s without knowing I existed and father gets mad at me. He had hidden his entire first marriage and kid from his second family their whole life. Eventually I met them and we have a good relationship but he never spoke to me again because calling him out on his lies was “ the most venomous thing he ever experienced “. He was a life long educator and when he died I wasn’t even named in the obituary BUT it does say how he spent his whole life “helping kids”… you know, except his own kid.

My "dad" and I were already arguing (via messenger)after he said "answer me!" regarding a question he asked about my mom that was none of his business. Long story shortish: During our argument I somehow ended up bringing up how he picked on me mercilessly when I was a teen and forced me to hide my face any time I watched TV with the family so he wouldn't have to see me twitch because I have tourette syndrome. His only response was that I do not have tourettes. That was one of the worst times of my life and it really made me ask why the fk I should even bother keeping in contact with him, so now I don't. Apologies for the run on sentences.