28/11/2025
I watched Oprah’s podcast on ‘the rising Trend of going No Contact with your family’ last night. I thought it was a fair, respectful open discussion all round given the vastness of the topic and the limits of a 75 minute broadcast.
I really empathised with the people who were asked their reason for going No Contact with their parents. How do you condense multiple decades of invisible control and degradation into one sentence? The hospice nurse captured it powerfully by answering “it was a million cuts that bled me dry”.
The discussion concluded that the world is a very different place now. The era of unquestioned obedience, of ‘honour thy mother and father’ at any cost, and of allowing abuse to slide in the name of family is over. This echoes precisely what I wrote about in my article last week, ‘Time’s Up on Parents Who Abuse’.
There was no mention of the family scapegoat, and no open discussion of high-control abusive family systems that target one member. That’s the piece mainstream society is not quite ready to face, but we’re getting closer.
And in the near future, the mainstream will have no choice but to come out of denial about what is happening behind the closed doors of the family home: gang bullying, daily humiliation, smear campaigns, forced exile and how this obliterates a person’s sense of self.
