32. Why you cut people off
“I find it easy to cut people out of my life. I’m not sure why.”
“I have an underlying fear that all of my relationships are temporary.”
“I barely form any relationships. I’m okay with all existing relationships to be cut off anytime.”
These three responses came from different people in my survey - in fact there were many such responses, but for the sake of brevity I’m just sharing these three. They are describing the same pattern from different angles.
If you recognise it in yourself, the pattern looks something like this: a relationship reaches a certain depth, a certain closeness, and something inside you says “time to go.” Maybe you find a reason, or maybe you manufacture one. Maybe you simply stop responding, stop showing up, stop investing - you withdraw before the other person has the chance to withdraw from you.
The instinct is: leave before you are left.
It is a perfectly rational response to your specific history. You were trained by experience, not by theory, that relationships are conditional and can be revoked without warning. Shunning taught your nervous system a lesson it has never forgotten: the people closest to you can disappear overnight, not because of anything you did wrong to them personally, but because of bureaucrats enforcing a policy decision made by people who do not know you.
If that happened with one relationship, it would be traumatic. When it happens with ALL of your relationships simultaneously and is presented as normal, loving, and God’s arrangement, your nervous system draws a conclusion: intimacy is a setup. Closeness is a precursor to loss. The safest way to avoid the pain of being left is to leave first.
“I wish to develop warm bonds with kind hearted people. Then I convince myself that they’d probably hate me and then sabotage any friendship I have because I can’t trust them to not abandon me as my whole family did.”
I want to be careful here, because I am not going to tell you this pattern of being able to distance yourself from people is wrong, it isn’t.
It is a survival response that protected you during a time when protection was genuinely needed. The ability to detach quickly is not a deficiency, and in a context where people could and did vanish from your life without notice, it was adaptive.
The question I always come back to: Does it still serve you? If so, does the benefit outweigh the cost?
Because the cost of pre-emptive abandonment, in a world where not everyone operates on the organisation’s rules, is loneliness. You protect yourself from the pain of being left, and in doing so, you prevent yourself from experiencing the thing that actually heals: sustained, trustworthy connection with people who are choosing you freely.
I am not suggesting you throw the doors open and trust everyone immediately. That would be reckless, and frankly, the hypervigilance you developed inside the system serves you well in some contexts - the governing body are not the only bad actors in the world.
You are probably better than most at reading people, at detecting insincerity, at noticing when something does not add up. Those are real skills, and we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
What I am suggesting is that the next time you feel the urge to withdraw from someone who has given you no genuine reason to, you notice and name it. “That is the old programme.” And then, instead of acting on it, you stay. Just long enough to see what happens when you do not leave.
Not every relationship will be safe, and some people will let you down. That is true for everyone, not just people who left a high-control group. But the pattern of cutting everyone off before they can disappoint you guarantees a specific outcome: isolation. And isolation is exactly what the system trained you for, because it’s one of the most reliable ways to keep people vulnerable.
You deserve better data than the organisation gave you about how relationships work.