Some therapists have this absurd theory that everything can be hashed out. You can't hash out a personality disorder. You can't change other people, you can only change yourself. It's not "running away" from a problem, it's leaving an abusive relationship. If your abusive parent was your spouse, they'd be all for you cutting them off.

I have no contact with my father -- he was my abuser. I have a relationship with my mother (she's divorced from my dad, they don't speak) and my older brother (who has little to no contact with dad). I don't have contact with any of my father's other relatives, but that happened organically. We were never close; it's a loose knit clan of walking personality disorders.

It's hard to find anything on the web that supports cutting off the family. My father is a narcissistic sociopath. So when I learned Peg Streep (author of Mean Mothers, she also blogs on Psychology Today) cut off her mother when she had her first child, I finally followed my gut and did the same. It was extremely difficult. My emotions fought me on it every day. It's because I was taught to ignore my feelings and put my father's first. I was taught to be dutiful and sacrifice self for the needs of other (mainly him). He's controlled me my whole life, so much so that I lived in denial of having been sexually abused. Cutting things off felt much like breaking up with someone (where it's obvious to me it's been over for years, but he doesn't get it because he takes responsibility for nothing he's ever done).

I still have to remind myself of why I went no-contact. Some innocuous memory will pop into my head and I'll think about my dad for a minute, then I have to pull the sheep's clothing off and say: "There. There's the monster." I have to remember that wherever he is right now, he is emotionally abusing and controlling someone. If he was here, he'd be doing it to me.

I learned to accept the fact that if I ever come up, he certainly says terrible things about me and accuses me of using him/abandoning him/being ungrateful. The truth is no one in the entire world has ever hurt me or treated me as poorly as my father and having a relationship with me is a privilege. Not a right.

An excerpt from Mean Mothers:

Therapists, it should be said, generally also adhere to seeing maternal cut-off as the choice of last resort. Many therapists believe that resolution or healthy attachment needs to be accomplished within the mother-daughter relationship, not outside of it. While some therapists will advise their patients to go on a temporary break, few will ever initiate the recommendation that a patient break with her mother. Even self-help books tend to advocate that daughters be "fair" in their assessment of their mothers; as one writer puts it," The danger lies in tipping too far, either toward blaming the mother or toward dismissing the daughter's suffering. An important task of a wounded daughter is to see the mother-child relationship from both sides."