Welcome to You're Not Crazy, a podcast for the adult children of parents with narcissistic and unmanaged borderline personality disorder. I'm your host, Tori Wicksell, a therapist with over a decade of experience in the mental health field. I also happen to grow up with a narcissist mom who had a lot of BPD traits, and I know a thing or two about how crazy making these types of relationships can be. I'm so excited to show you what it actually means to break the cycle of dysfunction that we grew up in and help you see the light at the end of the tunnel. Thanks for joining me. Now let's jump into the show. Welcome back to this week's episode of the You're Not Crazy Podcast. You may have noticed, but we have new cover art for the podcast, and I'm really excited about it. So I hope you like it. It's something that I've been wanting to do for a while, but just like life gets busy, and there are so many other things that end up having to take priority. I was very excited that I have recently had a moment or created a moment, however you want to phrase it, to spend a small amount of time working on some rebranding under the confident boundaries umbrella. And that simply is everything that I do outside of therapy is under the confident boundaries umbrella, including this podcast. So very exciting. I am thrilled to finally update our colors and all of that good stuff. That's that. I want to acknowledge one more time the elephant in the room. This is the week leading up to Mother's Day. And I know that can be extremely complicated and layered for everyone here. I imagine everyone with any sort of dysfunctional and complicated and layered family dynamics. It is a complicated time of year. There are tons of emails coming in, text messages wherever you go. I'm sure that you see some reference to Mother's Day shopping or whatever it is. So it's a lot. It can be really overwhelming. If you haven't already listened to last week's episode of the podcast, I'd encourage you to go back and circle back to that. But today we're gonna transition a bit to our new topic for this week. And that is a very well-intentioned mistake that so many cycle breakers make. So a few weeks ago, I was listening to someone speak, and they were talking about the complicated layers of being a cycle breaker and being a parent themselves. And that is a very true experience. It is very complicated and layered and hard to parent when you personally grew up in a dysfunctional family dynamic, and you very much want to break that cycle moving forward. So, long story short, this person was talking about hitting a wall as a parent and being very overwhelmed and raising their voice towards their children and feeling so much immense shame about that and making this promise to themselves that they would never ever get to that point again. And when I heard them say that, I clenched all the muscles in my body because I know how desperately every cycle breaker means that when they make that promise to themselves. This is the promise that basically every cycle breaker has maken to the made to themselves at one point in time. It's this promise that I've seen this version of myself that I don't like. This is so real because growing up in a dysfunctional family system, I know I've said it a million times before, but I need to say it a million more times. You grow up knowing what you don't want to repeat, but that gives you no information, no like actionable information about how to be a healthy adult. It doesn't give you any sort of direction or guidance. It's just don't do this. But that doesn't give you the tools and the skill set to do the thing that you want to do, which is be an emotionally healthy, safe adult. So what happens is we grow up in these family dynamics. We know we don't want to be an angry adult. We don't want to be a cruel adult. We don't want to be an unsafe adult. We don't want to be a manipulative adult. We know all of these versions of adults that we don't want to be ourselves, but we lack the skill set to be the person, the version of ourselves that we want to be. And so what so often happens is that you develop this really high tolerance for being mistreated. You develop this really high tolerance for being on the receiving end of a lot of dysfunction and toxic behaviors. And you tolerate a lot and you tolerate, and this is true not just within your family, this is true like in life a lot of times, like in your friendships, in romantic relationships, at work, in all of these different facets of your life you tolerate. And then you hit a wall because you're a human being and you snap and you say something mean, you raise your voice, you do something. Like the person I was listening to speak the other day. You hit that wall and you have this behavior that reminds you of that person that you don't want to be, that version of an adult that scares you growing up. It reminds you of this human that you at your core have tried so hard not to become, who you desperately do not want to become. And then there is immense shame and fear around that. And so just like this person speaking, the reaction so often is to promise yourself, I'm never going to do that again. I'm never going to snap. I'm never going to raise my voice. I'm never going to freak out. I'm never going to be this angry, unsafe person who I don't want to be again. And that makes so much sense that you would make that promise to yourself because that is truly what you want. And yet, listening to that, I clenched every muscle in my body just thinking, no, no, don't do that. You're setting yourself up. This is not how healing works. What happens when we do that is that we are engaging with the shame in a way that sets us up to repeat this cycle and feel more shame. When we make this promise, it is really our response to saying, I am so afraid of the behaviors that I've seen within myself. I feel so out of control. I feel like this was never supposed to happen. I have to muster up all of the willpower inside me to make sure that I never allow this to happen again. But that's not accompanied by any tools. It's not accompanied by insight or understanding of how this came to be in the first place. What's happening is we scare ourselves and we get so freaked out, understandably, because we see these behaviors that we don't like. And without understanding what will actually help, we make this promise to ourselves that we can't keep not because we don't want to keep it, but because we still lack the tools that allow us to process our difficult emotions better. We lack the understanding and the awareness and the tools that allow us to process anger in a productive way. We lack the understanding and the tools and the knowledge that are required to allow us to manage our anxiety and our fear and our stress and our overwhelm. And the list can go on and on. But we can't will ourselves into being an emotionally safe adult. That is not how it works. It's just not. If we could, we would, and we wouldn't be in this miserable cycle of hitting that wall and feeling so much immense shame and white knuckling it through until we eventually hit that wall again. That is the cycle that feels horrible to be in. And it is the inevitable cycle that we are in until we learn how to actually effectively manage life as an adult, difficult emotions, stress, boundaries, relationships, all of these things. And so what I wish I could have told that person speaking that day is that it is so scary when you desperately want to be an emotionally safe human and you see behaviors within yourself that don't align with that. It is so scary and it feels like a failure, and it can carry so much shame with it. And this is part of breaking the cycle. That honesty around, I saw this version of my behavior that I don't like. That's how we make meaningful change. That is so hard to acknowledge. And once we acknowledge it, once we are honest with ourselves that I don't like this cycle, I see this cycle, I don't like this cycle, then we can start to work on filling in those gaps of knowledge. We can start wondering what is contributing to the cycle? What are the things that we're tolerating that maybe we could deal with, that we could maybe confront and approach differently? What are the things that we're avoiding, that we're ignoring? What are the things that we feel ill-equipped to navigate? And how can we access support and education to help ourselves become more skillful at dealing with those things? When we can acknowledge the ickiness of this cycle and how defeating it feels to hit that wall, we can start to really access the support and resources that we need to fill in those gaps. And we can start to do the work to build those skills where we learn how to address conflict in a healthy way before we're rageful, where we learn how to be boundaried in our life and to reset when we've bitten off more than we can chew, as every human does at times. When we are able to be curious, we're able to get into the details and into the weeds and start to look at our own patterns and our own cycles and where we are struggling to navigate things. And then we're able to get support with the specifics of our own journey and the things where we feel stuck and where we feel ill-equipped to navigate life in the way that we want to, in a way that aligns with who we see ourselves as, the version of ourselves that we want to be. We stop having to white knuckle it and we start building a skill set that serves us, not just in these isolated moments, but big picture overall. Because this is a cycle. So if you notice you're in that cycle of struggling, of tolerating a lot and hitting that wall and feeling shame and promising yourself that you will never allow that to happen again. And somehow it does. I would love for you to walk away from this episode and try to be curious with yourself as to what are your patterns? Where are these gaps in navigating life as an adult? Because it's complicated. Adulting is hard. It truly is. It's complicated, it's layered. And if you can be curious and honest with yourself as to what else is coming up around these patterns, where are you tolerating things beyond your capacity? Where are opportunities for you to address some of the stress when it feels more manageable before you hit that wall? Being curious with your own patterns, being curious with your own journey. And then also acknowledging for yourself that this isn't a personal failure. This isn't because you didn't want to be a healthy adult enough. This isn't because you're an unsafe person. This is a skill deficit and this is something that you can work on. This is a cycle you are capable of breaking, but you can't will it to be true and you can't white knuckle your way through it. Being a cycle breaker is layered. It's complicated, it's hard, it's the many reasons why after almost two years of doing this podcast every week, I continue to have things to talk about. It is very layered and complicated, and there is so much there. It is also something that we are far more capable of than sometimes it feels like we are. So on that note, we'll wrap things up for this week. Just a reminder: if you haven't already listened to the Mother's Day episode and you're feeling like you need a little more support as we continue to head into Mother's Day weekend, I highly encourage you to check that one out. And if you do nothing else this week, remember to be kind and gentle with yourself because just like that person I was listening to talk, all of us cycle breakers are trying so hard. And it's messy and it's complicated. And we do it poorly before we do it better, and then we do it better and we do it poorly again because we are learning as we go. So be kind to yourself, be gentle with yourself, and until next week, bye. Thanks so much for joining me for another episode of the Your Not Crazy podcast. If you like the show, please leave a five star review to help other cycle breakers find it. And make sure to check the show notes for other ways I can help. Thanks again for joining me. I'll see you next week.