I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It

As I became older, I started noticing a pattern in my relationships. It appeared that I tended to walk away from relationships when things became complicated. I absolutely did this with the men I dated, but I also did this with friends and family members. I had my reasons in the moment. My boyfriend dropped out of school without telling me for months, so I broke up with him. A friend changed after working for corporate America and I stopped answering her calls. I couldn’t handle a family member’s addiction, so I pretended they ceased to exist.

  I handled difficulty in my relationships for nearly a decade by simply cutting people off. I told myself that life what too short to deal with toxic people. I did not have time for drama. I didn’t owe anybody anything. I stopped answering calls, texts, and emails. I blocked and deleted phone numbers and accounts on social media platforms. Many times, the person I was trying to avoid had no idea I was trying to avoid them. Their confusion would ultimately lead to confrontation, which I was very bad at responding to, hence the reason I was cutting them off! The irony.

I cut people off to protect myself. I knew that before becoming a counselor in training. However, I did not know why I responded to conflict with cutoff and other people did not. I also never thought about how damaging that behavior is. Emotional cutoff is when one reduces or completely removes emotional contact with another as a way of coping with unresolved emotional issues.

For one of my assignments, I was asked to make a genogram. A genogram is a lot like a family tree, except special attention is given to patterns in a family system. When I observed my family’s relational patterns, I was surprised. I was not the first person in the history of my family to handle conflict with cutoff. In fact, every generation on one side of my family had a cutoff between parent and child for an extended period. Emotional cutoff does not resolve problems within relationships, it simply leaves them dormant. Eventually, they will rear their ugly head again, perhaps in another relationship.

The ways we relate to the world are often rooted in the ways our families have related to the world. There is good in these patterns and there is bad in these patterns. You are not responsible for the behavior of generations before you. However, you are responsible for your own behavior.

If you would like to speak to a professional counselor or psychologist about this and are in the Chicago area, please feel free to contact Olive Branch Counseling Associates, Inc. at 708-633-8000. We are located at 6819 West 167^th Street in Tinley Park, Illinois 60477.

Hillary R.,

Masters Level Intern, 2023

Sources

Emotional Cutoff. The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family. (n.d.). https://www.thebowencenter.org/emotional-cutoff#:~:text=The%20concept%20of%20emotional%20cutoff,off%20emotional%20contact%20with%20them.