Four years after my dear friend cut off contact, I was reading my eight-year-old a bedtime story—Batman, I think—and doing my best to blink back tears.

After a while, my daughter said, "Why are you sad, Mama?"

I said, "Because my friend is mad at me and will never speak to me again."

She said, "I feel sad for her. And you."

When my friend cut off contact with me, few in my social circle acknowledged the pain I was going through. They shrugged it off with a joke or a quick “that’s sucks” and changed the subject. Sometimes, they said my pain was unreasonable; I just needed to learn from my mistakes and do better. Sometimes they lectured me: “People have a right to choose who they have in their lives," as if I’d said they didn’t. Sometimes, they said nothing. I find it telling that one of the few who accepted my pain—who accepted the sadness of the situation—was a child. She had not yet learned to ignore the obvious: feeling thrown away by someone you love wounds you.

Relationship cutoffs are defined by disconnection: disconnection between the cuttee and cutter, often disconnection between the cuttee and cutter’s whole social circle. But perhaps the most damaging disconnect is between the reality and social narrative, the disconnect that occurs when you are cut to your core and others say nothing much happened.

That’s the disconnect that kept me crying four years later.

...

The crucible of this cutoff has been so unlike anything else I have experienced that it became a revelation, a death and a rebirth. I am not an exception. Being cut off by a loved one is an intensely traumatic experience for many people. Cutoffs can protect people from untenable situations, and we cannot and should not eliminate them, but as a culture we can do much better in supporting all people in ways that minimize relationship breakdown and trauma. Honestly examining how cutoffs work is one piece of that cultural healing.

Cutoffs matter. They have psychological weight; they do psychological damage. They are also often the best choice. I have personally been on both sides of this chasm.

I have cut someone off too, another dear friend, in 2007. I, too, had my reasons, and if I were in exactly the same place, I would probably do it again. That cutoff—first by my choice and then, for a brief time, by his—lasted until 2014. Indeed, it was my later experience of being cut off myself that led me to reach out to him in 2014, and with grace, he allowed me to reconnect. That story is part of this book as well.

Both these stories hurt. Now multiply that by millions of people worldwide who go through events like this. For personal relationships to end in absolute severance is very common. It isn’t always traumatic, but it is traumatic far more often and deeply than our society recognizes. The aims of this book are twofold: first, to validate the psychological weight of cutoffs. Second, to propose a different kind of cultural awareness to mitigate the harm associated with cutoffs. Although this book includes some self-help suggestions, it is not a self-help book; it’s more a help-each-other book, an invitation to reinvest in relationship with others.