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 You're Not Crazy podcast. Before we hop into things, I want to mention something that I haven't spoken about on the podcast, but it's about time that I say something. A couple of weeks ago, perhaps a month or so ago, I made a really, really difficult decision. I decided to close the confident boundaries membership, and it is actually officially closing this week. This is our last week where we're wrapping things up there. I have talked so much about the growth of the membership on this podcast. I have talked so much about my love for that community and how incredible it is slash was. And all of those things are very true. And I just wanted to quickly, in a nutshell, before we hop into the heart of today's episode, let you know why I made that decision. So the really probably the hardest part about the membership was that it was working. It was a great place full of amazing human beings who were cheering each other on and connecting and encouraging one another and finding validation and support and clarity navigating their family dynamic. It was the community that I so wanted to create, and I am so proud of it. So you might be asking, okay, if it was this place that you really enjoyed and it was working, why close it, Tori? And I think that that is a super valid question. When I first started Confident Boundaries, the membership, I had no idea what it really took to create and run and maintain a community like this and grow a community like this. And it really is a full-time job. It's like a full-time job for an entire team of people. And I am not an entire team of people. I am just one little cycle-breaking therapist who is trying to spread education and validation and hope and encouragement to people who have grown up with a narcissist parent or a parent with unmanaged BPD. And despite how passionate I am about that membership community, despite how incredible it is to see people benefit from connecting with each other and growing and learning and developing confidence to navigate their family dynamics in a different way. It had really gotten to the point where I either needed to go all in on the membership and step back from my therapy practice, or I needed to walk away from the membership. And because at my core, I absolutely love being a therapist. It is something that I've always said I intend to do if I'm lucky enough until I'm old and gray. The thought of having to walk away from my practice or cut down my practice into such a tiny practice that I was barely working with anyone just sounded horrible to me. It sounded miserable and it is not something that I want to do. I love doing therapy. I love being a therapist. I love doing this podcast. I loved running the membership community, but I didn't love it to the extent that I wanted to give up my therapy practice for it. And I think sometimes those decisions are the hardest decisions where we are passionate about something and we care and we still know that we have to walk away from it. We have to say goodbye to it. And I think being a mom of a young toddler adds in another layer there. We're definitely in the immunity-building phase in our family and of going to preschool. And when your priority is making sure that you show up for your family, for your child, for your partner, for your friends, for yourself, for your job, for the things that you do. And the reality was that I was just spread way too thin. And that goes against everything that I believe in when it comes to being a cycle breaker. I think that we have to learn how to set boundaries and have balance and create realistic boundaries that support us being a healthy person, a healthy adult. And although I love so many things about the membership, it just was beyond my capacity. And so while that is a long-winded explanation of why I decided to close the membership, I wanted to share it with you guys here on the podcast because you guys have been with me since almost the beginning of when I expanded beyond just my therapy practice. I started that expansion in the beginning of 2024 when I started taking a couple of coaching clients. And then in the summer of 2024, I started this podcast. And don't worry, I'm still going to do the podcast. The greatest thing about this podcast that I love so deeply is that it is incredibly flexible with my schedule. And I am able to record it whenever I have the time to record it. And it just is something that I so love doing, but it also works so well with my other routines and obligations. So don't worry, this little podcast is not going anywhere at all. And if you're new to the podcast and wanting more episodes, the private feed is also not going anywhere either. There are over a hundred episodes of You're Not Crazy available on the private feed. So definitely check that out. But I have been wanting and meaning to say something on here. And I've actually recorded a couple of times previously, but I got a little emotional and tearful. And so, because it is a bittersweet thing, you know, in a different world and a different life with more capacity or at a different phase of my life, it would be something I would totally continue and pursue and lean further into. But right now, it's just not the way that I'm best able to support other people. And ultimately, if I'm not supporting other people in a way that is sustainable to me, then I'm not doing my best job at supporting other people either. So, anyways, thank you for always listening to me ramble and share my thoughts behind the different ways that I'm trying to help support people like us out there and create more access to information and validation and education around growing up in a dysfunctional family, growing up with a narcissist parent or a parent with unmanaged BPD, navigating those relationships as an adult, healing from them, becoming an emotionally healthy version of ourselves. It's all complicated and layered, but it is not as isolating and hopeless as I know that it feels at times. So thank you again for coming on the ride with me on this podcast. And I hope it was also a really magical and helpful and healing place for you too. Okay, so let's shift gears and jump into the heart of today's podcast episode. I want to talk about forgiveness. It has been a long time since we've talked about forgiveness on here, and I think it is time we circle back because forgiveness is one of those things that I think gets equated with being a good person. If you're someone who forgives your parent for their flaws, for the way that they've hurt you, for the emotional abuse or emotional neglect that you've experienced in your relationship with them, that makes you a good person. And it means you get to move on with your life and to heal. And in my perspective, I think that's a fallacy. I think that forgiveness is super overrated. I think that it's not something that we choose a lot of the times. We could want to forgive someone, and in our heart, we could still not be at a place where we forgive someone. That is fine. Forgiveness and healing are two separate things. You don't have to forgive someone in order to heal from the experiences that you've had. You don't ever have to forgive someone to be a healed person. And I know people will say, Well, I forgive for me, not for them. And I still think that forgiveness is something that gets really misunderstood. It gets really misused. It is just not that important when it comes to healing. And I'm not telling you not to forgive someone because honestly, I think it's really in so many respects outside of our control either way, right? I think you might forgive them, you might not. I don't think you really have a ton of control over which road you go down. I think that sometimes we do, sometimes we don't, sometimes we forgive certain elements of what we've experienced, sometimes we don't forgive other elements of what we've experienced. I think that that is normal and natural and healthy. And just because you don't forgive someone doesn't mean that you're like vengeful towards them. It doesn't mean that you're on a mission to like inflict pain on them or hurt on them, right? These are the things that get conflated when we're talking about forgiveness, as if like if you don't forgive someone, you can't move forward with your life. But that's not true. What is true is that acceptance is key to healing. So while we don't have to forgive someone that has hurt us, while we don't have to forgive our parents, while we don't have to forgive siblings who have hurt us, while we don't have to get forgive people who have enabled the dysfunction that we've experienced, the abuse that we've experienced. We don't have to forgive any of those people in order to heal, but we do have to accept the reality of our situation. That's the key right there. And I think sometimes when you forgive, that acceptance is underlying the forgiveness. It's I accept that this is my reality and I forgive this person for the fact that they had their own trauma and abuse. Whatever, that's fine. If that is the boat that you are in, I fully support you being in that boat, and that is great if that's where you are right now in your healing journey. Also, if you're not, it's fine. Like you're allowed to say, I accept the reality of my situation. I accept that my parent grew up with their own trauma. I accept that these people within my family have enabled the abuse. They've refused to really look at the things that I've brought to their attention. They've contributed to the pain and trauma that I'm experiencing rather than help be part of a solution or help work with me towards developing healthier ways of interacting. Acceptance is what really allows you to heal and move forward. Now, don't get me wrong, acceptance is hard. I don't think acceptance is either more or less challenging than forgiveness. I don't think that it's an either-or thing. Like I'm saying, I don't think one's easier than the other. I think one is within our control and one is out of our control largely. And I think forgiveness is largely out of our control. So it's oftentimes very unhelpful to focus on it. And when you want to forgive someone, when you want to get to that place in your healing journey, but you just can't seem to get there, it can be even more defeating. And it can be one of those moments where we start to beat ourselves up and blame ourselves for not being healed enough or compassionate enough or whatever. And so I think so often forgiveness does more harm than good when it is the focus. But acceptance is a choice. Acceptance is a skill that we can work on practicing. Acceptance does not come naturally to us when we grow up in these types of family dynamics at all. When I learned about the term radical acceptance, I must have been in my 20s. I was definitely a therapist. I learned so many life-changing things when I had already become a therapist. When I was doing trainings and when I had supervision and was gaining experience, learning how to apply different modalities of therapy, I learned so much about what it means to be an emotionally healthy adult. It seems like those are things that I should have learned prior to becoming a therapist. And I agree, that would be wonderful if I was able to learn these things prior to becoming a therapist. But like I so often talk about on this podcast, when you don't grow up with role models that are emotionally healthy, emotionally mature parents, it is really hard to piece together what it actually looks like to be an emotionally healthy adult and what that means and how to live these things on a day-to-day basis. It wasn't for lack of effort or trying on my end. It is just really hard to learn what that means in its totality. And so, yes, before becoming a therapist, I had done years of my own therapy. Before becoming a therapist, I had read lots of books. I had done lots of education myself on different things. But after becoming a therapist, I still learned so much by learning these different modalities of therapy, the different ways of helping people heal and navigate conflict and adversity and challenges that they were having and stressors. And radical acceptance was one of those really impactful, life-changing things that I learned as a therapist, not only to support my clients, but actually making such a huge difference on just the way I approach life and how I approach my relationships and growing up in my family dynamic. Radical acceptance is this idea that we can accept the reality of how things are right now without having to give our approval, without having to say, I like it, I'm okay with it. So often, acceptance, when we say, when we use it in conversation, like I accept this, it seems like we're putting a stamp of approval on it, like we're co-signing it, right? But that's not what radical acceptance means. Radical acceptance means I can acknowledge the reality of my situation. I can acknowledge exactly how things are today in this moment. And I am better for it when I do, because then I can make active intentional decisions about how I want to respond and proceed, given the reality of my situation. Whereas when we grow up with a narcissist parent, a parent with unmanaged BPD, traits of both, emotionally immature, however you would like to conceptualize or frame it, when we grow up in these types of family dynamics, we often live in the what if, in the hope, right? In the this is unjust. Things should be this way. I don't want to think about my parent being a narcissist, right? Who does? No one wants that. I don't want to think my parent isn't willing to put in the work to work on our relationship, to work on themselves, to be an emotionally healthy person so that they don't traumatize me. I don't want that to be my reality. And so I'm going to cling to these things that give me hope that maybe it's not, maybe it doesn't have to be. But in that process, I completely skip over how things actually are right now, right? I'm living so much in the world of maybe things are different. Maybe, maybe I'm misevaluating the situation. Maybe things aren't as bad as I think they are. Maybe the situation isn't as horrible. Maybe they're a better person. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. And when we're living in that world, we're often self-blaming. We're oftentimes spiraling. We're oftentimes living in a world where we're not making active decisions that will actually impact how we're feeling, that will actually help us be less stressed out, manage our own emotions better, make progress towards having sustainable boundaries in our relationships. We're living in this world of, I wish things were this other way. I hope things really aren't as dire as they seem. I hope they're not as bad as they feel. And that is a crazy-making world to live in. It is a world where it is very hard, if not impossible, for us to heal because we're not looking at the reality of our situation. We're really emotionally invested in wanting things to be different than they are. That is emotionally draining. It is physically draining. It is emotionally exhausting. It is when our brain continues to not shut up, where it just goes and goes and goes and goes and goes. These things contribute to so much anxiety and distress and depression. Really accepting the reality of our situation for what it is can change so much of that. It can really shift things to the extent that we can start to move forward. We can start to get unstuck. We can start to grieve because so much of that resistance to accept the reality for what it is is this desire to avoid the sadness around what it actually feels like to have a parent who is so consumed with their own stuff, with their own trauma, with their own emotions, with their own black and white thinking, that they won't do the work to show up for us, that they won't self-reflect, that they won't meet us halfway, they won't even give us an inch at all, that they would rather hurt us than look inward. Those things are incredibly painful to sit with. And there's so much emotion built up in our bodies, just not wanting that to be true. And when we accept reality for what it is, when we practice radical acceptance, we let that emotion come to the surface. We allow ourselves the opportunity to grieve, to feel the ick physically inside our bodies, to cry, to scream, to move through all of that stuff that just has been built up within us that we've been carrying around that makes it feel like we constantly have to detach from our physical bodies, from the emotions that we're experiencing. When we practice acceptance, we really get an opportunity to start learning how to allow some of these challenging emotions to come through. And it's not like you practice radical acceptance and then you feel an intensely overwhelming feeling for like a day and then you move on and you're healed. Obviously, that is not the case at all. But these things all build on each other. And when we practice acceptance, we really allow and create space to start understanding and regulating and learning how to tolerate our own emotions. So that's my two cents on why forgiveness is so overrated when it comes to your own personal healing, but acceptance is the key to being an emotionally healthy adult and really getting unstuck in so many respects from our complicated family dynamics. I hope that is helpful to you. I know it is complicated, as everything we talk about, it is. Layered and I so appreciate you allowing me for another week to share my thoughts with you. If you're liking the show, I so appreciate you sharing it with a friend, taking a second to leave a five-star review, leave a kind comment. It really does help so much. And I'm always so touched when people reach out via social media and share something that they're really appreciating about the show. It is not lost on me that there are only so many hours in the day, and you choosing to show up and listen to me talk about these things every week is something that is really special and I do not take lightly. And I am so glad that it helps. So thank you again for joining me and I'll see you 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.