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 episode of the Air Not Crazy Podcast. Thank you for joining me for another week of talking about growing up with, dealing with, navigating our relationships with parents who have borderline or narcissistic traits, borderline or narcissistic personality disorder, just overall very complicated, very messy family dynamics. I am excited to share with you that the Cyclebreakers Vault is now officially live. The section of the Cyclebreakers Vault called Understanding Your Family Dynamics is free. It's part of the sneak peek preview, and there is a very intentional reason that I chose to do that. I don't want anyone purchasing the Cyclebreakers Vault who it isn't made for. And if you go through the Understanding Your Family Dynamics section of the course, you can very clearly see if yours is the type of family that this course applies to. I explain what it looks like to have a parent who has narcissistic traits, BPD traits. I talk about how it's not just your parent, it's an entire family systems issue and what that means and looks like. I talk about the connection between being a cycle breaker and the family scapegoat, how most of us cycle breakers start out as our family scapegoat. And even if we don't start out that way, because anyone can be a cycle breaker if they do the work to break the cycle, even if we don't start out as a scapegoat, when we start pressing back on some of the really unhealthy and toxic and abusive dynamics within our family, we most often, if not all of the time, become the family scapegoat. So talk about all of those things and break it down because I want to be very clear about who that course is for. And if that is not something that you identify with, that is not who the course is for. And so I want to make that very clear from the get-go. But I also talk about it in the beginning of the section because there are so many subtle nuances that show up in our types of families that it is really easy to have blind spots when you grow up in a family like this. And there's not a roadmap to breaking the cycle. I mean, the cycle breakers vault is what I tried to create to be as close to that roadmap, at least foundationally, as possible. But there's not like a roadmap someone hands you when you decide that you're gonna break this cycle, that you're gonna learn how to be an emotionally healthy adult. You don't just get this pamphlet that says, do this, unfortunately, and don't do this. It is messy, it is complicated, it is unclear. As I often think about in my own life, just because you know that you don't want to repeat a pattern does not mean that you know how to break that pattern. And what I mean by that is that a lot of us grow up seeing examples of things that we don't want to replicate. We experience cruelty, we experience really scary dysregulation from our parents. We see them handling anger in really scary and threatening and upsetting ways. We see them navigating their relationships in really toxic ways. And we think, I don't want to be like that. But thinking, I don't want to be like that doesn't actually give you information on how to be the healthy person that you want to be. And I think that this is honestly something that's not talked about nearly enough. Knowing what you don't want to do leaves a void. It doesn't give you a roadmap to getting to where you want to be. And that is a big problem for us cycle breakers, because we don't learn how to regulate our emotions. We don't even usually learn how to identify our own emotions. We know that we feel good or bad, things feel okay or not okay, but we don't know the nuance of it all. Because in order to function and survive in our chaotic family system growing up, we had to override those things and go into anticipating and planning and responding to the chaos. And so we get so disconnected from ourselves and from what we're experiencing and our feelings. And we just never learn how to be an emotionally healthy adult because we don't see it growing up. And even when we see it, it's usually in like glimpses of people from a distance. Because the reality is when you grow up in an emotionally unhealthy family, chances are you don't have a bunch of emotionally healthy families around you. Typically, when people are unsafe, emotionally unsafe people, emotionally immature people, emotionally dysregulated people, they don't have a bunch of emotionally intelligent, emotionally healthy friendships that are long-term and surrounding them. Emotional instability tends to attract emotional instability. And a huge reason for that is because when people are emotionally healthy, when they are emotionally intelligent adults, when they are emotionally mature, when they are people who know how to operate in relationships in a healthy way and take responsibility for their own emotions and allow other adults to take responsibility for their emotions, they don't get sucked into the dysfunction. They tend to see red flags and take some distance and be at least an armed distance away from the dysfunction. But when you grow up with a narcissist parent or a parent with unmanaged BPD, they often attract people who are also struggling with their ability to regulate effectively. You might have a really passive parent. You might have seen your parent with really passive friends. They might attract other people with BPD traits or narcissistic traits into their lives. There's often a cycle of dysfunctional relationships and adults who are also struggling with their own stuff that you see around you. Those are the adults that you tend to have close proximity to when you're growing up in these types of families. And so you don't see the healthy adulting skills modeled. You see a bunch of examples of what you don't want to do, or sometimes even more confusingly, you see adults who seem and appear healthy. And that might be because they have a lot of empathy, but they often too are struggling in their own way. And so while you might feel connected and lean more towards certain adults that you're around, oftentimes those aren't the best examples of how to be an emotionally healthy adult either. Because the reason why they are in close proximity to your family relationships is because they have their own struggles going on. And so it is so confusing, it is so complicated, it is so nuanced, it is so layered. And the reality is not only do we have to learn these skills of how to be an emotionally healthy adult, but we have to somehow figure out what it is that we don't know. And when you don't know something, it is oftentimes hard to identify what is this gap that I have. I know I don't want to be an angry person. I don't want to be a scary person to be around. But what does that mean? What skills do I need to learn to fill that gap? Oftentimes it is perplexing, it is confusing, it is crazy making, it is frustrating, it is all of these things because we know so desperately that we just want to be happy and healthy and peaceful and have calmness in our lives and just live a normal life where it's not so stressful and chaotic all the time, but we don't know how to bridge that gap. And so today I'm going to tell you what my thoughts are, my recommendations are for how you go about doing it. These are the things that I put inside the cycle breakers vault, and I put them there for a reason. And I want you to know that they're not there just for fluff or because I thought it would be fun to have you go through them. There are really intentional reasons behind what's inside the cycle breakers vault and what's not inside there. And the reality is you can learn these things by going through the cycle breakers vault, or you could learn these things by going to therapy. You can learn these things by talking with your own therapist. You know, I don't sell the cycle breakers vault to my therapy clients. I do therapy with them, and they can learn these things through therapy too, right? This is intended to be a resource for you, and it is one avenue that you can go through to learn these things. But like everything I do and say, I am not a magician, and I want you to know the secret sauce behind why I say the things that I do so that you can make informed decisions for yourself about whether or not to take my advice and my feedback and all of the things. No guru talk here. This is what is inside the cycle breakers vault because this is what I feel like is really important for you to understand. So we talked about understanding your family dynamics, understanding what it really looks like to have a parent with narcissistic or borderline traits, the family system stuff, being the family scapegoat. After that, it's learning how to set healthy boundaries that actually are effective with these types of families. So the second section is all about how to effectively set boundaries, what to do, what not to do, and why. Because you need to know the why in order to make an informed decision about if you want to utilize these things in your own life. What else goes into setting effective and healthy boundaries that work? Radical acceptance. We cannot set boundaries that work if we are not setting boundaries that are based on the reality of our situation. If we set boundaries based on the relationship we wish we had with our parent versus the one that we do have right now, if we set boundaries based on the version of our parent that we deserve to have show up for us versus the one that consistently shows up for us, we are going to really struggle with setting boundaries. Radical acceptance is huge when you want to navigate your family dynamics, when you want to break the cycle, when you want to set boundaries that really work with them. That is huge. In this section, also is clarifying your own value system. When we grow up in these types of family dynamics, we're told what we should think and feel. And that does not always align with what we do care about. We're told these are the things that should be important to you, but that does not always align with what is important to you. And so that part of the section goes into how you can really break down and explore that for yourself because it is really important to understand what is important to us when we are making choices that have some backlash from the people that we care about, from the people that are around us. We want to make value-based decisions because that makes it worth it to tolerate that discomfort that inevitably comes up when we set boundaries with our dysfunctional families. And I say dysfunctional families because oftentimes we're setting boundaries with more than just our narcissistic parent or our parent with unmanaged BPD. The next section is a shorter section on handling when your parent pushes back on the boundaries because they almost always will. And I include one of my favorite worksheets that I've ever made in there. It's really short and easy. It's called the circle exercise worksheet, but it is very impactful when you are struggling to enforce the boundary. Then I talk about responding to manipulation, guilt tripping, gaslighting, dealing with the flying monkeys, the relatives, the friends who come and try to argue your parents' perspective to you. How do you navigate that? How do you deal with it? Then understanding yourself and your own patterns, getting in touch with your emotions, anger feels scary. Let's talk about that. Let's break that down. Tools for calming down when you're emotionally flooded, reconnecting with your intuition. And then finally, handling difficult conversations and situations. I include a really simple tool for making tough decisions about your family relationships because pro and con lists are oftentimes ineffective for us. We are oftentimes making decisions from a bunch of choices that suck or that are very undesirable or uncomfortable. There isn't always a good option in our family dynamics, right? When you're thinking about do I go to this family function? Do I not go? There's not always a great option. Do I call my parent? Do I not call them? Do I do what they want me to do? Do I not do that? Do I set more boundaries? Do I go low contact with them? Do I go no contact with them? These are nuanced, complicated layers, layered decisions. And so this is a tool for helping you walk through how to do that effectively. In here, there is a chapter on the many layers of grief: grieving the parent you never got, grieving the parent you deserve, grieving when you're in contact with your parent, grieving when you go no contact if you do, grieving when your parent dies. As you know, my narcissist mom passed away in my early 20s. It is all complicated and it is all very unique to those of us who grow up with these types of parents. I included a little video about what I say when people ask me about my family because that is an uncomfy question for a lot of people. And then finally, ditching the drama, how to stop getting sucked into your parents' dramas. That's what's inside the cycle breakers vault. If you go to the sneak preview, you can go through the understanding your family dynamics part. You can see the breakdown for everything that I just walked you through. This is a resource that is as close to a roadmap as I can give you. If you want this broken down in a way that you can go through it starting right now at your own pace, where you can come back to it, where you can actually target all of these things that are super important to know, to understand, to implement, to grasp all of these things that I feel like are really imperative to breaking the cycle. If you want that in a very easily digestible roadmap, this is it. This is where you're gonna find it. But if you want to pursue this information on your own, you can do that too. And so I encourage you, whether you're going through the cycle breakers vault or not, to look at these things, to learn these things, to work on these things for your own sanity and for your own healing, because they're so important when you're working on breaking the cycle. I'm gonna drop the link to the cyclebreakers vault where you can get that free sneak peek and go through the understanding your family dynamics section of the course in the show notes. I'm also gonna drop the coupon code Vault50 because that's the code you can use to get $50 off the entire cyclebreakers vault before this Thursday, April 9th. So you've got a couple more days to grab that deal. I'll see you next week. Bye.