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. I hope you are doing well. Today in the podcast, we're gonna talk about understanding your family dynamics. This is something that's important to me that you know, and I want to break down my perspective on what is important for you to understand if you grew up with a parent with unmanaged borderline personality disorder, or if you grew up with a narcissist parent, or if you grew up with a parent with some kind of combination of these traits. This is something that we haven't touched on in quite a while. And I'm actually gonna go into more detail on it in today's podcast episode. So let's circle back real fast before we break these things down and talk about the beginning of the You're Not Crazy podcast. The beginning of the You're Not Crazy podcast started out as a podcast for the adult children of parents with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. And over the course of the past two years, I've evolved in the language that I use, trying to figure out how to best communicate to the people that I'm talking to that I'm talking to them. The thing is, when you grow up with a narcissist parent, when you grow up with a parent with unmanaged borderline personality disorder, you don't just like know that that's what you're dealing with. And so I've talked about several times on this podcast that terminology is important and it's complicated, it's layered. I've gone back and forth. Do I use the term toxic parents? I don't love that term. It's not, it's not the greatest way to define what I'm talking about. Are there a lot of toxic behaviors in these types of parents? Absolutely. I still don't love the term. I think a lot of people who grew up with a parent with unmanaged BPD or narcissist parent hear the word toxic and they think, well, that's not my parent because my parent sometimes is great or loving or I feel really connected with. And so don't love that. I think using the terms borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder are actually great terms to use. But the problem is that you don't know that that's what it is that you're dealing with until someone has educated you about these terms, until you've somehow stumbled across a book or maybe a blog or a YouTube video, whatever it is, you don't know that that's what you're dealing with. Maybe you're going to your own therapy and your therapist says, This sounds a lot like BPD or narcissistic personality disorder. It is a very complicated thing to figure out what the actual words are that I want to use because of this. It's complicated, it's layered. And although the people that I'm talking to haven't really changed throughout the course of all of this, the terminology sometimes does. So for the time being and for the past several months, I have been shifting back to really using more of the actual diagnostic terms, BPD and narcissistic personality disorder, for clarity purposes, because I'm not just talking about emotionally immature parents. While all of these parents are absolutely emotionally immature, that is much more like an umbrella, right? There are emotionally immature parents, that is an umbrella for lots and lots of parents out there. And then there is a unique experience of growing up with a parent with unmanaged BPD or narcissistic personality disorder or a combination of both. It is not the same thing and not the same thing at all. So today I want to walk you through what is it like to grow up with a parent with unmanaged BPD? Let's talk about the diagnostic criteria a bit. Obviously, I'm not diagnosing your parent. You're not going to go diagnose your parent. That is irrelevant, as I often say, and this is one of the nuances and why this is so complicated and confusing is that the diagnosis does not really matter. I don't care if your parent actually has a diagnosis of BPD or narcissistic personality disorder. I really don't care. I don't care for so many reasons, but ultimately the diagnosis is not important. It is the pattern of behavior here. And so while those two often overlap, there are so many adults who have parents with BPD or narcissistic personality disorder that will never know for sure that their parents have these disorders because either their parent has never been diagnosed, which is extremely common, or their parent may have been diagnosed, but their adult child, you, the listener here listening to me talk, doesn't have access to that information. And so there's absolutely no way for you to know for sure. Your own therapist can say, this really sounds like this, but they're not diagnosing your parent. They haven't been there sitting in a room with them. So the diagnosis is not important. It's the pattern of behavior, it's understanding what is it that you have observed, experienced throughout your life? What is their pattern of behavior and way of interacting with you that is impacting you? What is this? When we go through what BPD and narcissistic personality disorder really look like, you can really start to get more clarity as to whether or not this is the type of parent you have. So again, diagnoses helpful, also not, but here we go talking about them. So let's start off with borderline personality disorder. I often say, although I cannot say it every single time I say the word BPD or borderline personality disorder, I often say unmanaged. And I am always talking about unmanaged BPD, even if I don't say the word unmanaged. This is because BPD is a disorder that can be managed, and it can be managed very effectively through a type of therapy called DBT. This is a type of therapy that I'm a huge fan of, and I think DBT, a lot of the skills building in DBT, is really helpful for those of us who are adults that grow up with a parent like this. BPD can be managed. Unfortunately, those of you listening to this podcast likely have parents with unmanaged BPD. The DSM says that BPD is a pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image, and marked impulsivity. I'm not going to go through every single aspect of the diagnosis because, again, we're not diagnosing. This is just to get a better idea of what it is that we're talking about and the behavioral patterns. So, some of the diagnostic criteria, people who have BPD frequently struggle with frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships. These are often characterized by extreme idolization and devaluation. So, what we mean by that is that people with BPD often have really intense relationships where they're really close, they have these like really intense bonds, and then they have these like really dramatic fallouts. So a lot of relationship instability, not just in romantic relationships, but like in friendships, work relationships too. And there's often this putting people on a pedestal and then turning on people and knocking them off that pedestal. So people with BPD oftentimes hold other people in really high regard, and then they will have very intense negative feelings towards the exact same person. And this is a pattern, not just like a one-off. People with BPD often struggle with their sense of self and self-image. And oftentimes they will be like chameleons and they will adapt to the people or the groups that they're around, and their personality will seem to change. Their interests, their passions, their value system will seem to change based on the person that they're dating or in relationships with. People with BPD often struggle with impulsivity. So that could be spending, sex, using substances. People with BPD often struggle with recurrent suicidal behaviors. It is a feature of many people with BPD to engage in suicidal threats, suicidal gestures, self-harming behaviors. People with BPD may have multiple suicide attempts. This is a very big and very scary symptom of BPD. Another defining feature of BPD is really intense mood swings. So these typically last a couple of hours, maybe a day or so, not several weeks on end. People with BPD have these really explosive emotional outbursts when they're triggered. That is very common in BPD. Leading us to our next criteria, which is inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger. That is pretty self-explanatory. People with BPD often experience chronic feelings of emptiness and they might experience paranoia when they're stressed or dissociative symptoms. So that is BPD. Again, we are not diagnosing your parent, but this is to inform you of what we're talking about when we're talking about someone with borderline personality disorder. When you have a parent like this growing up, it is very scary for obvious reasons. They frequently struggle to regulate their moods. They frequently have inappropriate, intense anger that is poorly managed. So they might throw things, they might harm themselves, they might threaten to harm themselves, they struggle with fear of abandonment. And so if they feel like a relationship is going to end, if they feel emotionally abandoned in some way, that can escalate their behaviors. Being the child of someone with unmanaged BPD is very scary because it is so emotionally volatile, it is so dangerous at times, it feels very unstable because it is very unstable. There are a lot of inconsistent relationships. So your parent may have had people coming in and out of your life, really close, intimate relationships with people, and then those people would just disappear. It's really traumatic to grow up with a parent like this. And I think likely for so many understandable and obvious reasons. Now, let's talk about a parent with narcissistic personality disorder. And a question I get a lot is can my parent have both? Can they have a combination of both? And the answer is yes. Yes, they can. Yes, they can have a combination of borderline traits and narcissistic traits. And again, the diagnosis is not important. I cannot emphasize that enough. It is the pattern of behaviors and how those impact us and how those impact our relationship with our parents, how those impact us emotionally, all those things. The reason why I talk about both of these groups of parents is because there is a lot of overlap there. And there aren't a lot of people talking about these relationships, and these types of relationships are very unique relationships. And oftentimes the way that we approach someone with unmanaged BPD uses a lot of the same skill set as the way we approach someone with narcissistic personality disorder. Although I do differentiate between these two things and the approaches at times, because in some ways they are very different as well. So, narcissistic personality disorder, big picture idea of diagnostic criteria, a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy. When you hear me talk about narcissistic personality disorder, you will hear me talk about lack of empathy. That is a major defining feature of someone who is a narcissist. Do not forget that because we're going to circle back to this in just a second. So, symptoms of someone that has narcissistic personality disorder, they don't have to have all of these in order to qualify for the disorder, but that is irrelevant because we are not diagnosing, we're just trying to understand. The first is a grandiose sense of self-importance. So they may exaggerate their achievements or their talents. People with narcissistic personality disorder are often preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love. They may believe that they are special and unique and can only be understood by or should only associate with other special or high status people or institutions. People with narcissistic personality disorder often require excessive admiration. They may have a sense of entitlement, they oftentimes do. So they have unreasonable expectations of being treated favorably or people complying with their expectations. Another huge feature of narcissistic personality disorder, they are interpersonally exploitative. So they take advantage of other people willingly in order to achieve their own goals or meet their own needs. I talk about this a lot. When you have a narcissistic parent, they will intentionally manipulate you and use information that you have shared with them in order to get you to do what they want you to do or to punish you in some way. They will willfully take advantage of you and harm you in some way. This is super common with a narcissist parent. Narcissists also lack empathy. Like I said, that is a defining feature of narcissistic personality disorder. They don't care how their actions impact you. In fact, they feel entitled to hurt you and manipulate you when it meets their needs to do so. This is why we cannot be emotionally vulnerable with a parent who has narcissistic personality disorder or who we suspect does, because giving them more information about what hurts us, what we care about, our deeply sensitive parts of ourselves is not something that expands their ability to show compassion to us. It is something that makes them more skilled at harming and manipulating us. People with narcissistic personality disorder are often also envious of other people or believe that people are frequently envious of them and they may show arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes. So that is in a nutshell, BPD and narcissistic personality disorder. Now let's talk a bit more about these two types of parents. If you're a longtime listener of the podcast, or if you're a member of the private feed and have circled back to some of the beginning episodes that I recorded in summer of 2024, you likely remember that when I started the podcast and for much of my life, I thought that my mom had borderline personality disorder. I was actually quite confident in that. And that is because my mom had a lot of BPD traits. If you're new to the show, my mom passed away when I was in my early 20s, but I had a very complicated relationship with her up until then. My mom had many, many BPD traits. She had a ton of unstable relationships, best friends, and then they would have some huge falling out and never speak again. That was something that happened repeatedly throughout my mom's life. In my perspective, my mom had a really unstable sense of self. She frequently changed her passions in defining features. But something very interesting about that, which I think actually was far better explained by some of her narcissism, was actually as I grew up, she would take ownership of my passions and interests. So when I was in high school, I started listening to country music. I didn't have any friends that listened to country music. I just stumbled across it. Our family never listened to country music. I stumbled across it. I liked it. I developed a passion for listening to country music. My mom grabbed onto that and that became her identity. It wasn't just like a shared interest. It wasn't like, oh, this is great. I really enjoy listening to this with you. She took ownership. It became her thing and it wasn't allowed to be my thing anymore. This was now her thing. That is not normal. That is not appropriate. And that is not something that most people experience whatsoever. But when you have a narcissist parent, that is not uncommon for them to decide who you are allowed to be and who you are not allowed to be. They are happy and willing to tell you that that is not who you are. That is not a part of you. With BPD, the way that this looks is often more chameleon-like. So it's more when I date this person, I take on these interests. I don't really know who I am at my core. And therefore, I evolve to adapt to the people that I care about because I want to be loved. It goes a lot into that fear of abandonment. The suicidal ideation, self-harming behavior, suicidal behaviors and attempts part is really scary. My mom was so intense. And she had some self-harming behaviors that I'm not going to get into on this podcast, but there was also a lot of veiled suicidal threats going on. And that was something that really controlled the temperament of a lot of things growing up. And it got worse and scarier as I got older. And that is a big, big factor in also why I really thought my mom had borderline personality disorder, which again, she's got a lot of BPD traits. So I wasn't completely off base here. But that is something that is really scary. And something I want to emphasize to you if you're dealing with a parent with unmanaged BPD and they too have suicidal threats, they have maybe self-harming behaviors. You are fearful for your safety or their safety, how they might act out if you are to set a boundary or do something different. I cannot encourage you enough to talk to a licensed therapist near you. And if you already have a therapist, start having conversations with them about these safety concerns. Those concerns are so scary being the child of a parent like this. It is so traumatic. It is so, so scary. And there are very real safety factors that have to be talked about and considered when you are dealing with this, when you are trying to heal from this, if you are putting more distance between yourself and your parent, I cannot emphasize enough to please consult with a licensed therapist near you. Now, if you have a therapist, fantastic. Start having these conversations with them around safety. Make sure that if you need to have some sort of safety plan in place, that you and your therapist have talked through that. I know therapy can be very inaccessible because of the cost of therapy. That is not something that I am oblivious to at all. If you go to openpathcollective.org, you can find a low fee therapist in private practice who reserves a couple of spots in their practice for seeing therapy clients at an extremely low rate. When I first Opened my private practice, and up until a couple of years ago, I used Open Path Collective to fill a handful of really low-fee spots in my private practice. It's something I did for years and years and years because I think that therapy should be far more accessible than it is. And I know we are working within a broken system. However, you go about finding a therapist, I think that it is really, really important to find a therapist if you are dealing with a parent who you are afraid of the way that they're going to handle their anger if you set a boundary, if you do something different in your relationship with them. It is really, really important to talk to a therapist about your unique situation and coming up with a plan to help keep you safe. With BPD, really intense outbursts of emotion are super common. Your parent may be triggered by something, and it's like any intense emotion is just like outwardly expressed. There's no internal buffer there. If they're angry, they become irate. They may lash out by saying really cruel things, by screaming, by making threats, they might throw things, they might lock themselves in their room in a really intense and scary way. That saying, walking on eggshells, comes from, well, I don't know if it like actually comes, but it's what has been said for a very long time when we were describing what it is like to be in a close relationship with someone with unmanaged BPD. It feels like you are walking on eggshells because you don't know what's going to trigger them. And when they get triggered, it is very explosive and scary and upsetting to be around. Now, there is so much overlap here with so many parents between narcissistic personality disorder and BPD. A big, big, big thing that is very different is that parents with unmanaged BPD do not lack empathy. However, their own emotional experience is so intense that they are incapable at times of caring how their actions impact those around them. I actually want to say this differently. It is more so that when someone with unmanaged BPD has intense emotions, their emotions are so extreme that they truly believe that no one else in the world could feel pain as deeply as they are feeling it in that moment. And so there is like a lashing out that happens because it is like this desire to inflict pain on to other people. It's like this outward acting out of that intense emotion, that intense anger. Very inappropriate. When someone has unmanaged BPD, it is often that they interpret that you have caused them pain. So then they want to cause you pain as well. That is often the cycle that is happening there, which is different from a parent with narcissistic personality disorder who does not care how their actions impact you. They will freely cause you pain and they will feel very entitled to do so and they will feel like it is completely acceptable for them to cause you pain and they do not care about the fact that they've caused you pain. But the motivating factor is a bit different there. So, both situations, it is not safe to be emotionally vulnerable with a parent like this. This is why it is really important to practice radical acceptance around who our parents really are when we have parents that exhibit these repeated patterns of behavior. It is really, really important to accept that this is a part of who they are. This is a part of them. This is how they interact with the world. This is how they interact with us. If we don't accept that, we cannot set up the boundaries that we need to set up to protect ourselves. And I go into that in a lot more detail inside the radical acceptance workshop, inside the cycle breakers vault, too. Going back to the parent with narcissistic personality disorder, these parents believe that they are special, right? They have this grandiose, inflated view of themselves. This was something that I experienced with my mom a lot, talking to me about other people throughout my life. My mom had a very forward-facing personality, the personality and version of her that went out into the world. And that person was lovely a lot of the times and very intentional with the way they presented themselves. And there was the person who narrated her real view of the world to me growing up as a child and as a teenager and as a young adult. And the reality was that my mom felt very much like she was better than other people. She felt like she was smarter. She frequently and repeatedly and willfully taught me how to manipulate people. This is what you do. This is how you manipulate other people to get what you want out of life. These were all life lessons that I was lovingly taught by my mother growing up to how to lie, how to deceive, how to manipulate people in order to bend the system to what you want it to be. And again, those aren't normal things for your parent to teach you. That's not what normal childhood looks like. Most parents don't educate their children on how to be deceptive and how to present an image that is one way while being a very different way behind closed doors. But that is absolutely what my mother taught me growing up. And then when I chose not to be deceptive, when I chose not to engage in those behaviors, my mother would shame me and say things like, I thought I taught you better than that. So that's very common with a narcissist parent. That is not very common with just an emotionally immature parent in general. These are different, these types of parents are very unique. And it is very wild to grow up in this type of family. There's a lot of entitlement, believing people should do what you want them to do. That kind of goes into what I just described, feeling like people need to comply with what you think they should be doing and how they should be behaving. The envy thing is really interesting with narcissism. You know, my mom thought she was better, most people, if not everyone else in the world, her family, her friends, her colleagues, every just everyone in general. And she also was incredibly envious of other people. She was envious of what people had, of what she didn't. There was a lot of envy and motivation to try to get what she felt like she was entitled to. And it is just a very wild thing to experience growing up to just look at how your parent views people as very disposable and how they feel very entitled to have what they want to have, but not actually taking action in a way that would align with them achieving those things. It's wild. But in a nutshell, my mom had many narcissistic traits, many traits of BPD, some combination of both. Like so many of you listening, I'll never know for certain, especially now that my mom has been deceased for about 15 years or so. I'll never know for certain what actual diagnosis my mom had, but her behaviors, the things that I experienced growing up over the two decades of life that I had while she was alive align far more with narcissism, although still many BPD traits. And the reason why I think it's so important to talk about these things is because it is a very unique experience. People talk about emotional immaturity a lot. There are great books on it. If you grow up with a narcissist parent, if you grow up with a parent with unmanaged BPD, I highly encourage you to read those books. They're fantastic. It is important to understand because our parents are in fact very emotionally immature, but it is not just emotional immaturity. It is more than that. It is far more complicated, it is far scarier, it is far more confusing and crazy making and unsettling. And I think that while it is great that we're talking more about emotional immaturity, I think that a lot of the information that I see around it online is misunderstood, misapplied, and really minimizes when you have a parent who isn't just emotionally immature. They are experiencing something that is much bigger than that. It can be really invalidating to see people talk about emotionally immature parents. Like these things that we've experienced growing up are common when they're not. And they don't fully paint the picture of what it is to grow up in a family like ours. I hope that if you are someone who grew up with a parent with unmanaged BPD or narcissistic personality disorder, that this helps shed some light and insight into your own experience and helps you see that there really are things going on here that are making life feel so hard, that are so confusing, that are so traumatic. Hope is not lost. There are things that we can do, there are things we can learn, there are skills and tools that we can implement to make our own lives not only easier, but far more healthy. And those are the things that I go over inside the cycle breakers vault. We'll pick up here next week, and I'm gonna talk a bit more about family systems and what it is like to grow up in this type of family system because, like I say inside the cycle breakers vault, it's not just about your parent, it is about your entire family system. So stay tuned. We'll cover that next week. Thanks again for hanging out with me, and I'll see you guys then. 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.