Welcome to You're Not Crazy, a podcast for adults with narcissistic, emotionally immature, and otherwise toxic parents. I'm your host, Tori Wicksell, a therapist and boundaries coach with over a decade of experience in the mental health field. I also happen to grow up with a narcissist mom and know a thing or two about how crazy-making these relationships can be. I'm so excited to show you the light at the end of the tunnel and what it actually means to break the cycle of dysfunction that we grew up in. Now, let's jump into the show. Welcome back to this episode of the You're Not Crazy Podcast. Thank you for joining me once again to talk about breaking the cycle and healing from very complicated family dynamics. We have been fighting off another bug in our household. We are definitely in the preschool immunity-building phase of life right now with my sweet angel daughter. And who have been listening to the podcast for at least the last two months? You know that in January we were down with the flu for most of the month. And in February, coming into March, we went down with another illness. And so it has been quite a doozy just navigating those challenges. So, anyways, we are all feeling healthy now. So I'm thrilled to be talking with you from a place where I'm feeling healthy and everyone in my household is as well. Today I want to talk about over-explaining. Now, if there were an Olympic medal in over-explaining yourself, I think that I would be a sharp contender for the gold. I have worked on this quite a bit, and yet it is still something that I struggle with, especially when I am spread really thin or overwhelmed. And the reason I brought up us being dealing with these cyclical illnesses or repeated occurrences of different ailments in our household is because when you are sick, when you are tired, when you are physically depleted, when you are emotionally stressed and overwhelmed, you are so much more vulnerable to struggle with your mental health and to struggle with things that you've even done a lot of work on in the past, historically in therapy, personally, whatever it is. You just are. That's being a human being, myself included. And when I am even more sleep deprived than normal, and when I'm not feeling well, when I've got too many things going on, I still struggle with overexplaining myself. I at my core have this belief system from growing up with a narcissist mom that I'm not only going to be misunderstood, but that other people are going to think that I'm a horrible person. And that is something that although I've done a ton of work on, and that's not something that affects me nearly as much as it has in the past. And that is not something that drives 99% of my decision making when I am really stressed, when I am really depleted, when I am spread far too thin, when I am basically white knuckling it through my day, like I have been with the flu last month and with this last illness. It is something that is really hard for me to manage. And I think that it's a really important thing to talk about because it's something that it sounds so silly, right? Like overexplaining. Okay, it's not that big of a deal. It's not the end of the world. You're an over-explainer, whatever. But it really is life interfering in a lot of regards. And when you're already stressed out, overwhelmed, depleted, and then on top of that, you're really concerned that you're not going to explain yourself well. You're not going to articulate things in the right way or choose the right words, or that people are going to think you don't care about what you're saying or what you're doing or how you're interacting with them. It is very challenging to go through the day. This is something that comes up for so many of us because when you grow up with a parent who has an unmanaged personality disorder, that parent is not really seeing you for who you are. They're not seeing you for the person that you are. They're seeing this idea of who they think you should be. And you constantly, as a kid in that environment, feel really misunderstood because you are misunderstood. The idea that your parent has of who you are is never consistent with who you actually are internally. So for those of you who are new here, something that I talk about on the podcast sometimes is my own experience growing up with a narcissist mom. And if you're a longtime listener, you know that even when I started this podcast for the majority of my life, I thought that my mom actually had unmanaged BPD. And after many years of my own personal therapy and after starting to talk about some of these stories on the podcast, I was talking to my own personal therapist about it more and more. And we both came to the conclusion that it's actually far more likely that my mom had narcissistic personality disorder with a lot of BPD traits, just based on the reality of our relationship and how my mom interacted with the world and all of those things. But circling back to where I was just a minute ago, a really interesting thing that about my mom and myself was that we looked very similar. When we were little kids, if you put our pictures next to each other, we looked identical, other than my mom had blonde hair and blue eyes, and I had brown hair and hazel eyes. And other than that, it was like night and day. And as I got older, I started to look a bit different, but we really looked quite similar for a good portion of our lives. And I definitely look more like her than I do look like my dad, which is really interesting because I think that really played into our dynamic as well and the projections that she had on me. I think when you're dealing with a narcissist, they are not able to see their children for their own individual selves at all. But then you have a narcissist who has a child that looks identical to them in so many ways. And I think that really complicated things. I think when you have a narcissist parent, your parent often sees you as an extension of them. Like you are a part of them, you belong to them, you are who they believe you should be. And I think that was amplified based on the way that I looked. But going back to being a kid, I remember so many interactions with my mom, where she's constantly telling me who I am and who I'm not. She used to tell me, you're not an animal person. My mom considered herself a big animal person. You're not an animal person. What a wild thing to say to your kid, right? Truly. That's just like an unhinged thing to say to a child. You're not an animal person. Well, we have all of these pets and everything in our home, but that was her thing. That wasn't my thing. I wasn't the person that had this special connection with animals. Just truly crazy and so unnecessary and so unhinged. But that was the story of my life growing up. Like I was constantly told who I was and who I was not, and who I was allowed to be and who I was not. And it was so wild because even now, saying it as an adult, I can remember back to being a kid and just constantly feeling unseen and trying to explain who I was and like respond by saying, but I love our animals and I love our pets and being shot down and just being told, nope, you don't. That's not your thing. That's not who you are. That's not who you're allowed to be. And when you grow up in that type of environment where you're told this is who you are, this is what you think, this is what you feel, this is what you do all the time, no matter what you say, no matter what you truly feel, no matter who you truly are internally, it totally makes sense that you develop a pattern of over-explaining yourself, that you develop this pattern of trying to get people to really see you for who you are, to say, Hey, that's not me. This is who I am in here. It's like feeling the best way I could describe it is like feeling trapped, like you're trapped inside your body, and your body's going around the world, interacting with your parent and the world, and people have this idea of what they're seeing, but like the real you is trapped inside and it's not able to get out. And that is such a bizarre and frustrating experience, and it's compounded by the fact that you have this parent that's telling you that who you are is bad, who you are is wrong, who you are is like not good enough, or it's not as good as them. It's so dark and confusing and complicated. And so I think it makes a ton of sense that even after doing work and therapy and getting really connected to who I actually am as a person and really confident in the fact that I am who I am, despite what other people think or perceive, doesn't change who I am. I think despite all that, it makes so much sense that in those moments where my capacity is lower, that I have this innate fear kick in that I'm going to be misunderstood because I think when my capacity is lowered, and this is true for any human being, period, when our capacity is lowered, we're not showing up as our best selves, right? That's just impossible. If I sleep 30 minutes one night and I have some mild cold symptoms, I'm not going to be the version of myself that I'm gonna be. If I sleep eight hours and I'm well rested and fed and thinking and feeling with the clarity that I normally feel, that's it, they're just different. And I think when you're not showing up as that version of yourself that you know yourself to be, because we have those times where we're really overwhelmed and stressed out and tired and sick, whatever it is, we're feeling just not our best version of ourselves. And we know that we're not showing up as authentically who we are most of the time. I think it makes so much sense that voice comes back in where it's see, you're not that version of yourself that you think you are, right? Like you're dropping the ball, you're not showing up as this version. It's all of that negative talk. And when you grow up with a narcissist parent, when you grow up with a parent who is really punishing and who says really cruel things to you, which can be true when you grow up with a parent with unmanaged BPD as well, that voice creeps in to kick us when we're already down, when we're already struggling. It is something that is so awful and it's so nasty and it's so unhelpful. And I think that a huge part of healing is recognizing that as a human being, there are still going to be moments that are really hard. There are still going to be moments that are really hard. But some things that really help me get through those moments at this point in my life are the fact that I have way more awareness now around what's going on. When I have that feeling like I need to explain this more, I need to explain this better. Do I still overexplain myself sometimes? Yeah, I sure do. Sure do. I sure sometimes do deliver a novel when I probably could have sent a sentence or two. I sure do. But I'm much more aware when I'm doing it. Sometimes I just don't have the capacity to like condense that down in those moments where I'm not feeling well, in those moments where I'm depleted. Like sometimes I do send the novel instead. And that's okay because I'm imperfect and because that is real. That is real healing, right? That is real healing that sometimes I still overexplain. Now I would say most of the time I do much better with that, and I don't spend the time and energy and resources that are unnecessary to spend on my communication. And most of the time I'm pretty aware when I'm communicating with people, who the people are that really know me that I don't have to give a novel to ever, right? My husband, my friends, the people that I'm really close to. I don't have to go into this entire backstory. Most of the time I can shrink down what I want to say into what is necessary to say. And still, some of the times it is something I struggle with, but I'm far more aware of it when it is happening. And I feel like I have way more control over how I want to respond to that. Again, sometimes I still overexplain, but I know that I could choose something else. I could do something else, right? Like I could make a different choice. I just don't all the time because I'm an imperfect human. Having awareness is huge. Understanding where these things come from is huge. It helps me separate this from a personal deficit or this voice that is actually evaluating the type of person I am to like this really annoying, nagging, unhelpful voice that's like trying to beat me when I'm down, trying to make my life harder when I'm already having a hard day. And I think being able to reframe it in the sense of, wow, that's so shitty. That like when I'm already struggling, I've got this little annoying voice in my head that pops up that says, you're bad, you're wrong, you're not doing this right, you need to do more, you need to do better. That really sucks. And that's definitely not helpful because I'm able to connect those dots, because I have the ability to run that story through and understand where it's coming from and know that even though those moments are really hard, even though I am an imperfect person, even though I struggle still in those moments and I don't like it and it doesn't feel good, I know that this is not a forever thing. I know that it will end. I know that it is not an evaluation on who I am or how much healing work that I've done. I know that it is a moment in time that I am struggling and that this struggle feels harder and it feels real and it is real and and it will get better and it will pass. And I have evidence of that because the majority of the time I don't feel that same intensity of that struggle. And the reason I am saying all of this to you today is because I want you to know if this is something that you also resonate with, is if this is also a struggle that you have personally. There's so much progress that can be had, right? Where you're not constantly planning out entire conversations in your head before you even think about opening your mouth or sending a text because that used to be my life. I used to overanalyze every, basically every single interaction that I would have on the face of the earth. And that's not something I do anymore. It would be impossible for me to do at this point with the amount of talking that I do, the amount of content that I put out here on the podcast, on social media, the amount of talking I do in my practice professionally, in my personal life. Like it just, I would never be able to do all of that if I was constantly going through the cycle. It can get so much better. And this isn't a finish line that we're getting to, right? Where we never have these struggles pop up in our heads anymore. That would not be real. We don't heal by completely erasing what's happened in our life, by completely just wiping it out. We heal by understanding ourselves better, understanding the trauma and abuse that we've experienced, understanding the impact of that, building skills to navigate these things more effectively, building confidence in ourselves and our ability to navigate the world as an adult and the healthy adult that we want to be. Healing looks so much differently than we often think it does because we grow up in that black and white world that our parents live in. And so often we inadvertently apply that black and white logic, that black and white thinking to our healing journey. And we think if we're struggling, that means we're not healed. If you know we're great and fantastic and wonderful and going through life without any struggles, then that's a healed person. But that's not real. Those are like the fake gurus out there who I always say, beware, beware of the people who are perfect and have all the answers and have it all together and have no worries or struggles ever, because that's not real. That's fake. Real is being able to recover faster when you have a hard day. Real is knowing what's going on with you. Real is being able to make an active choice in your life. Real is knowing when you need to seek out more support and who are the safe people in your life to go to for that support. Real is so different than we often think it is. And real healing from growing up with a narcissist parent does not mean that you never overexplain yourself ever again. It means that you don't go through your day-to-day life overexplaining yourself and you have far more compassion for yourself in those moments where you are really struggling and you do write the novel or say the novel versus the one sentence that you could have gotten away with. So, on that note, I hope you guys have a great rest of your week. I hope that you can offer yourself a bit of kindness and compassion in those moments where you are imperfect as we all are. And if you are liking this podcast, I would love for you to share it with a friend. I would love for you to take a second and rate it five stars and leave a positive comment. It helps so much. It helps cycle breakers like us find the show. And I am so appreciative for that always. Thank you guys. Have a great rest of your week 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.