We’ve been no contact with my parents for nearly two years now. My parents did severe damage to my family, resulting in both of my daughters being hospitalized and later on trauma therapy and SSRIs. I don’t want to give my parents any more energy than they’ve already taken up, but my wife seems to use any small reminder of them to enter into yet another painful conversation about them with our teenaged kids and I.

Recently, she found a photo album from a trip my parents had taken the kids on. One of the kids had blacked out my parents’ faces. She brought me the album and asked what I wanted to do about it. I dropped the book into a nearby trash can and repeated that the book was only a reminder of bad memories, and I didn’t want to give my parents any more time, attention, and energy than what they’d already taken from us. She got upset about that, dug out the album, and proceeded to have yet another discussion with our kids about it.

I regularly check in with the kids individually to see if they need to process what happened, but they all invariably say they don’t want to talk about it any more than they already have. “Do we have to talk about them again?” they say.

How much processing is too much? I’ve reached my limit, and I think the kids have, too. My wife wants to continue to talk about it with the kids, and resents me for wanting to let it go.