Thanks luvindaisy for your post. That's a good way of looking at it! I'm going to have to utilize that tool because I will have to be in some contact to get my stuff back (my dad's ring and also my old harddrive with important documents and pictures, etc that he has). Those items are very important to me. Even if I don't necessarily want to deal with him anytime soon there will have to be some point however far in the future that I will need to talk to him to get these things.
Whether or not that is truly "no contact" or not doesn't really matter to me. I just need to figure out a way to go about this in the least harmful (to myself) way possible. It's not so much an issue of "if" I guess but more about when and how.