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 Are Not Crazy podcast. Thank you for joining me once again to talk about complicated family relationships and healing from them. So today I want to talk about cycle breakers and why we're so good at intellectualizing things, but so bad at sitting with our feelings. When we grow up with narcissist parents, when we grow up with parents with unmanaged BPD, emotions are very tricky in our house. They are often very overwhelming and scary and chaotic and unpredictable and punishing and complicated. What we do not see when we grow up in these types of family dynamics are healthy ways to regulate. We don't see healthy ways to navigate stressful situations. We don't see healthy ways to navigate conflict. We don't see healthy ways to cope with disappointment. We see really intense things that are scary and overwhelming and apply in some situations, but not in others. And the rules change and it's exhausting and it's complicated and scary. And we learn very early on that it is very important to try to predict what is going to upset our parents. It is very important to try to get ahead of bad situations, to try to get ahead of conflict, to anticipate what could be poorly received by them and try to intervene before that happens to the extent that we are able to. It also teaches us that our parents' emotional state is far more important than our own. We grow up being acutely aware that we are far more capable of helping our parent regulate than they are, of helping themselves regulate. And in order to do that as a child, it is really important that you're far more familiar with your parents' emotional experience than you are your own. Your own doesn't really matter because it gets in the way a lot of the times. If we're feeling really happy about something, but our parent is really upset about something, our happiness does not matter to the extent that their anger does, that their frustration, that their disappointment, their whatever matters. That is what has the impact of making life horrible, right? Your happiness is irrelevant in that picture. What is far more important is navigating and managing your parents' anger, frustration, disappointment, their challenging emotions. When you grow up with these types of dynamics, you learn to disconnect from what you're feeling and you learn to be very keyed into other people's emotional experiences. You also learn to create stories around what makes your parent upset or not, right? Because they're not telling you what does. I mean, they might tell you some things, but with parents like this, a lot of the times they're not aware of what their own triggers are. They're not aware of why they do the things that they do. And even when there's some awareness, because they lack emotional maturity, there's not accountability there, right? There's not ownership of the way that they're interacting with you being inappropriate. That when they lash out, oftentimes it's defended, it's minimized by other family members. It is something that gets brushed under the rug, but there's not an actual addressing of their emotional outbursts, and there's not this like accountability and in journey to seek out to support to break that cycle of being emotionally volatile, punishing, etc. So you grow up in this world where it's consistently chronically stressful, where sometimes things are okay, sometimes they're very much not okay, where you're supposed to be able to bounce back very quickly from things not being okay without actually being comforted, without actually being apologized to, without your feelings or the impact on you being actually truly acknowledged, you're supposed to be able to ride this emotional storm. And the way that we do that is by creating these stories. If I can be hyper-vigilant, if I can anticipate my parent getting upset, then I can hopefully prevent it. If I can't prevent it, then I can create a story in my head about how I can navigate this so that I can be safe. If my parent is upset with me, if they're lashing out at me, if they're being punishing towards me, then I can disconnect from internally what that feels like so that I can get to the other side when things don't feel as bad. This is what happens when we're growing up in these types of family dynamics, when we grow up with a parent like this. And it is a straight line from that to being completely disconnected from your own emotions and your own emotional experiences as an adult. And it's a straight line to being a really good problem solver and a really good intellectualizer as an adult. And so that's why so often cycle breakers are the people who come into therapy and they can calmly with a straight face explain an entire picture about what is happening, like where the chaos is, where the stress is. But it's like telling a story without any emotion behind it. When you're a cycle breaker, when you haven't learned how to reconnect with your emotions, when you haven't learned how to identify what it is you're actually feeling, identify where that shows up in your body and build ways to navigate those different feelings coming up for you when you haven't done that work yet, when you haven't had support and guidance and education doing that work. The only way you know how to navigate difficult things in life is by intellectualizing them, is by analyzing them, is by problem solving. You don't have that skill set for feeling your feelings. And so when people say, sit with your feelings, like that means nothing to most cycle breakers. That is like an infuriating thing to hear because it doesn't hold weight, it doesn't hold meaning, it offers no clarity as to how you go about doing that. And the reality is growing up, when we're little kids, we have the ability to feel our feelings. Our intellectualizing of our emotions is something we learned to do in response to chronically stressful situations where it wasn't safe to be in our feelings. This was a learned coping skill that we developed growing up. And it is something that we can unlearn, or if you'd rather relearn how to connect with what it is that we're actually feeling. But I think that there are some key butts here because this is one of those things that we can't really reconnect with our emotions until it's safe enough for us to do so. When we are still coping by intellectualizing things, when we're still coping by problem solving, because we are still being re-traumatized on a day-to-day basis. It is like not realistic to try to learn to connect with our emotions and sit with those emotions. It is very hard to do the healing work that we need to do to be a cycle breaker until we have some emotional physical distance from the things and the people who have traumatized us. Now, that does not mean you have to be no contact, but what it does mean is it is really hard to convince your brain and body that they are safe enough to do things that are scary and uncomfortable, which identifying what you're feeling, sitting with the way that that physically shows up in your body, those things are uncomfortable and scary when you have survived your entire life by disconnecting from those things. It is very hard, if not impossible, to convince your brain and body that it is okay for you to reconnect to your emotions, to sit with them, that it is safe for you to do so, that it is a good thing to do so. If you are still living in your family dynamic, right? If you are financially dependent on your parents, you're emotionally dependent on them. We have to, as adults, create some levels of independence and safety before it is realistic for us to be able to process some of this really heavy stuff that we've experienced. It is really, really, really important to recognize that it takes a lot of foundational work to get to the place that you can process the trauma that you've experienced. Healing from growing up in this type of family dynamic is really complicated and really hard. And it takes a really long time because we have to create a world that feels safe enough to be vulnerable in in order to process some of the stuff that we've experienced growing up, in order to reconnect to skills that felt far too dangerous for us to connect with growing up. We have to have some level of stability and safety in our living environment. We have to have some level of safety and stability in our relationships. We have to have some level of safety and stability in our financial situation. We have to have some level of safety and stability in our lives, in our ability to function on a day-to-day basis in order to look at this thing that really kept us safe for so long, but is exhausting us as adults. And that is intellectualizing things. That is disconnecting from the way that we feel, that is analyzing things, that is skipping over the emotion of it all. That kept us safe for so long in order to really work on bridging that gap and reconnecting with our emotional experiences and learning how to sit with more challenging emotions and feel them in our bodies. We have to really have some level of safety. Now, does that mean that your life has to be perfect in order for you to process trauma? No, absolutely not. Your life does not need to be perfect for you to begin to process your trauma. Your life does not have to be perfect for you to reconnect with your emotions. But I think it's really important to recognize if you are struggling to go there, if you're struggling to tap into what it is that you're feeling, how that physically shows up in your body, it might not be like a lack of desire to do so. It might not be a lack of motivation to do so. It might be because there are elements of your life where it just doesn't feel safe enough for you to do so. And that is so valid. And that is something that can be looked at, and that is something that can be addressed so that you can get closer to the place where you feel like you are capable of being brave and tapping into those things. Healing from these types of family dynamics as an adult is so complicated and layered because it's not just like one thing, right? It's not just navigating the relationship with our parent. It's everything. It's all of it. You know, when they say cycle breaker, I feel like on some level it is validating and makes sense of the situation. But on a lot of levels, that term is not nearly as impactful as what it actually means to be a cycle breaker. You're breaking the cycle in so many regards. It's not just your family, it's the way that you're choosing to interact with other people in the world. It's the way that you're choosing to approach life, how you're managing your day-to-day, how you go through the world differently. Breaking the cycle is so layered and so complicated. And you really have to build a foundation for your own healing before you can get into the nitty-gritty of processing a lot of the trauma that you've experienced. And so if you are someone who is an excellent intellectualizer and you feel like you are very stuck when you try to bridge that gap, there are ways that you can go about doing that. Therapy is incredibly helpful with this. EMDR therapy can be great at accessing these things kind of through like a back door, if you will. At the same time, it is not a magic pill. There is no, if there was a magic pill, I would send it your way. There's not, right? There are a lot of things that can be really helpful. But if you're feeling really, really stuck despite trying these other things, sometimes it is because that foundation where you feel the minimum amount of safety and stability that you need to feel to open this up just isn't quite there yet. But the good thing about recognizing that is that you can work towards creating that for yourself so that you can get to the place where you do start to feel more capable of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and accessing some of the ways that your emotions are showing up for you and how those are physically feeling for you and your body. So on that note, I will leave you once again for another week. If you are liking the podcast, I would love for you to share with a friend. I would love for you to leave a five-star review. Thank you so much to everyone who already has, and I'll see you next week. Bye. Thanks so much for joining me for another episode of the You're 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.