Family
It's been months or years and the not-speaking has its own weight separate from whatever caused it.
You haven’t talked in months, or years. The original event that prompted it is now in the background. The not-speaking has been doing its own work for a long time. Family events are awkward. Birthdays come and you don’t know whether to send a card. People ask after her and you don’t know what to say. Sometimes you wonder if you should reach out. Sometimes you can’t believe you ever considered it.
The estrangement isn’t undecided. It’s its own state. You’ve been living in it without choosing it directly.
The relationship is in suspended animation.
You very likely came up needing something from her that she couldn’t give, and you spent years either trying to extract it or accepting that you wouldn’t. The estrangement was the result of running out of strategies. You may have grown up watching your mother model a particular kind of difficulty, and you absorbed the lesson that being her daughter or son required either complying with that difficulty or losing access to her. You may have absorbed from your culture that mothers are owed a relationship regardless of what they do, and the cultural framing has made the no-contact feel like a verdict on you rather than on the situation. You may have lived through one specific event that made the relationship untenable, and the silence since then has been protective rather than chosen.
The estrangement protects you from the relationship. It doesn’t address the relationship. As long as it sits, it can be neither repaired nor mourned. You’re in a state of half-loss with no closure on either direction.
Reaching out without a plan tends to repeat the original pattern. So you don’t reach out. The position becomes permanent without ever being decided.
If she’s narcissistic specifically, see My mother is narcissistic . If you’re feeling guilty about the no-contact, see I went no-contact and I feel guilty .
The no-contact has been functional. It’s also been keeping you from making a real decision about what you want.
Strategic therapy ends the suspended animation. We change what you’ve been doing that has kept the relationship in half-loss, neither repaired nor mourned, because the suspension itself has been performing a job. With that job interrupted, you get to decide what you want with her. Reach out with a real plan, stay out clearly, or land somewhere defined in between.
You’ll know what you want. The relationship becomes something instead of nothing.
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