Welcome to You're Not Crazy, a podcast for adults with narcissistic, emotionally immature, and otherwise toxic parents. I'm your host, Tori Wixel, 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 another episode of the You're Not Crazy podcast. Today I want to dive into a topic that is super uncomfortable for so many cycle breakers, and that is the concept of guilt. Guilt is one of those emotions that is super tricky and very, very uncomfortable for most people, but especially when you have grown up in a complicated family situation and are dealing with an emotionally dysregulated or punishing parent. Guilt is really, really, really tricky. And so today I want to dive into the way guilt shows up not only in our family dynamics, but also how it impacts how we navigate challenging emotions in general. Guilt, or rather, the desire to avoid feeling guilty, is a huge motivator for so many cycle breakers in their decision making. When you're a cycle breaker and you are thinking about making a decision as far as do I call my parent back? Do I return their text? Do I go to the family function? Do I set a boundary? Do I take a break? Do I, do I, do I? When you are questioning things that have to do with navigating your family relationships, and those relationships are very complicated. And a big part of why they are so complicated is because you are dealing with a lot of dysfunctional dynamics within your family unit. There is oftentimes a strong desire to avoid the situation completely, avoid thinking about it, or make the decision that feels like it will eliminate or alleviate as much guilt as humanly possible. This is often times when people tell themselves it's just easier to comply, it's just easier to go along with the flow. I'll do it later. I don't have the time or the energy to deal with that level of guilt now. And while while all those things may very, very well be true, those are also things that play into this cycle and keep us really stuck in the dysfunction and the stress and the current loop. So guilt is a hugely powerful emotion and it is so powerful in our types of families because guilt is associated with us being a bad person. If I'm feeling guilty, it's because I've done something wrong. And if I've done something wrong, now I have to make sense of what that means for me. And when you grow up with a narcissistic parent, an emotionally immature parent, a parent who lacks the ability to regulate their own emotions, that parent is oftentimes conflating their discomfort with the hard parts of parenting, with you being bad. They're conflating their discomfort with having to do hard things and navigate their own hard emotions with being a bad person, being a bad child. There's oftentimes this very black and white view of good kids don't upset their parents. Good kids make good decisions that don't upset their parents. Therefore, if your parent is upset, it must be because you not only made a bad decision, but because you're being a bad kid. And this is kind of the narrative that shows up. And then you take that into adulthood, and what happens is you have a really hard time differentiating between your actions and who you are as a person. It's really hard as an adult to see that you've made a choice that maybe doesn't align with your value system and to separate that from who you are as a person. That's the nuance. The nuance is being able to say, I'm a good person. And sometimes I make decisions that don't align with my own value system. Sometimes I make decisions that I'm not proud of. Sometimes I make decisions that aren't in my best interest, that I regret later, because we all do, because we're human. That is part of the nuance. When you grow up in a dysfunctional family dynamic, though, and when you're dealing with a punishing, narcissistic, emotionally mature parent or emotionally dysregulated parent, what happens is that these parents see the world and through such a black and white lens that there is no nuance there for them either. The underlying tone is that you're bad. And then it's even more complicated and confusing as an adult who's grown up in this type of dynamic because guilt also comes up when you've just made a choice that doesn't align with the choice that your parent would make for you. It doesn't align with the family norms. It is different. It is a choice that aligns with you and your capacity and your wants and your needs and your personal value system, but it differentiates from those of your families or your parents. And when that happens, when you have that divide there where you are making a choice that aligns with your value system, but it is different than the choice your parent or your family wants you to make. Guilt comes up massively because growing up in these types of family dynamics, you're frequently taught both by overt statements and the way that the family functions, that what is the right choice is the one that prevents your parent from being upset. The right choice is the one that prevents them from freaking out, from exploding. The right choice is the one that makes them happy, that keeps them emotionally regulated. That is the decision maker here. That's the factor that actually matters. And so if your choice doesn't align with the choice that makes them emotionally regulated or keeps them emotionally regulated, then it's the wrong choice, even though it's not the wrong choice. But to your family, it is. And therefore that elicits that feeling of guilt because they are putting pressure on you to make the choice that maintains the status quo. And there is this implication or this overt naming of you being a selfish person, a bad person, whatever fill-in-the-blank word you want to use there, if you don't change your mind and make the quote unquote right decision. Guilt is so complicated when you grow up in this type of family dynamic because not only is it uncomfortable to feel guilt in our bodies, it's one of those challenging emotions. But we struggle with am I a bad person? What does it mean for me to make a decision that my family disagrees with that seems to cause my family hurt or pain? What does it mean? What does it say about me as a human if I'm not prioritizing other people that I care about over my own wants, needs, or capacity? It gets into these really complicated questions and these really complicated dynamics, and it makes us challenge, really challenge the way that we were taught to view the world. And all of that is heavy, all of that is exhausting, all of that is complicated, and it's something that has to be really intentionally confronted. Because the reality is with guilt, when you grow up in this type of family dynamic, a lot of the guilt that you feel is really manipulative guilt. It's to it's guilt that comes up because other people are expecting you to put your own needs aside in order to make them comfortable. And that's not an appropriate reason to make decisions. I mean, unless you're making decisions as a parent of like a minor child, putting your needs aside at times to prioritize your child's needs or comfort is sometimes appropriate, oftentimes appropriate in those situations. But that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about are those adult relationships. And as an adult, it's not appropriate for you to sacrifice your own needs in order to maintain the status quo in your family, it's not appropriate for you to sacrifice your own needs in order to prevent your parent from ever becoming uncomfortable. Those aren't great decision-making strategies. They just aren't. Because that's what's happening, is it's a constant suppressing your own needs, emotions, and boundaries and capacity to appease other people. And so rather deal with all of this and how uncomfortable it is and the complicated feelings that come up around am I a bad person? Is this the wrong decision? What could happen if I make the wrong decision? What does this say about me? What does this say about our relationships? Going down that spiral rather than doing that. So often there is this strong urge to avoid or comply. Avoid, I'll deal with that later. I'm just not gonna think about it because it's too complicated and hard. And on one hand, I know that me just going along with the status quo isn't healthy, but it's also too hard to do something different. I don't want to do that mental gymnastics, so I'm just gonna procrastinate making a decision as long as I can. Or it's being this person who walks on eggshells around their parent, who makes decisions that aren't reflective of what they actually think and want and need, but instead prioritizes their parents' comfort over their own. These are the types of things that cycle breakers often find themselves falling into and really struggling with and getting stuck in. And I think the other element here is with any challenging emotion, guilt being one of them, but there are many, physically in our body, it is very uncomfortable to sit with that emotion. It is very distressing when you feel guilty. If you check in with yourself, if you pause, if you take a moment and take a breath and you think about how that guilt is being carried in your body physically, how it's showing up in your head, how it's showing up in your jaw, how it's showing up in your chest, in your breathing, in your stomach, in your arms, in your legs. If you take a moment to like really check in with yourself and sit with that, you notice that it's really uncomfortable, that guilt is one of those emotions that feels like it's urgent to make it go away because it's so uncomfortable to have these feelings in our body that are unpleasant. And growing up, we learn in our types of family dynamics that we have to make it go away. That when there is an uncomfortable emotion coming up for us, that means something is wrong or something is potentially wrong. And we need to make that feeling go away by doing something, by physically acting, by doing something to fix the situation, to address it, to prevent catastrophe. And that's where we start skipping over our emotions, right? We register them on some level, but then we say, no time for that. Gotta make that go away, gotta fix the problem. And this is something we have to do growing up because we don't have a lot of options available to us. As kids, we only have so many ways of coping with tough situations. We don't have the option of just packing our suitcase and say, hey, I'm moving out and getting my own apartment. See you folks later. That's not available to us. So we cope in the way that we know how with the massive limitations that we have. And as an adult, that doesn't serve us because we end up making all of these decisions largely because we don't know how to sit with those challenging emotions and let them ride out their course in our body. We don't know how to be in a hard decision and just be present in it, to feel that and to not do the thing to make it go away. Guilt is so tricky because it is so reflective of how, as cycle breakers, we often learn how to dissociate. We often learn how to intellectualize, how to get skilled at solving problems, at acting, at anticipating catastrophe and intervening before it has an opportunity to rear its ugly head. We get so skilled at these things because we have to out of survival. But that has limitations. It only goes so far. And until we learn how to bring our attention back into what's really happening here, and how until we learn how to build our confidence so that we can get more skilled at navigating these types of emotions, we're gonna find ourselves in this same cycle of being really stuck and making decisions that are largely fueled by an avoidance of having to sit with those hard emotions. And so with today's podcast episode, I want you to know that if you find yourself getting stuck in that guilt cycle, you're not alone. This is so common, so common for cycle breakers. And it's not a hopeless thing. Your family doesn't have to suddenly wake up one day and get on the same page as you as wanting to do the healing work and go to therapy and break the cycle in order for this to get better. That's not what has to happen. You can break through this cycle by learning how to sit with those difficult emotions, by learning how to really understand the way guilt is showing up and why, to learn how to increase your ability to tolerate those difficult emotions in your body without having to mentally go somewhere else or get past them and skip on to the next action step. You can learn how to break this cycle by learning skills that are learnable. These are things that everyone can learn. And ideally, we learn them as children. Ideally, we learn them growing up. But in our types of families, we don't learn them as kids. We don't learn them growing up. We don't learn them as adolescents, we don't learn them as teens. We unfortunately have to learn them as adults when we've realized that our current coping strategies are only going to get us so far and are creating havoc and wreaking havoc in our life in certain areas. And so it is not hopeless. You are not doomed to live out a life of avoiding guilt or making decisions that are purely fueled by guilt. But with that said, in order to break that cycle, you do have to learn how to increase your ability to tolerate some of those more uncomfortable emotions in your body. And therapy can be great for that. Finding the right therapist can be excellent with that. It can be super helpful. There are also programs online, there are DBT skills courses that you can go through. DBK DBT is an excellent resource for those of us who grow up with emotionally immature parents because there are tons of skills in DBT that teach us how to be emotionally healthy adults. Doing a DBT skills program is a great idea for a cycle breaker who is struggling to understand their own emotions and navigate those a bit more effectively. It is a great, great, great option. So there are definitely ways that you can go about learning these things. It is not hopeless, it is not helpless, and I promise you it can get better. So thank you so much for joining me for another week of the You're Not Crazy podcast. If you are enjoying the show, I would love for you to share it with a friend. I would love for you to rate it five stars and leave a review. It helps other people find us, and I am always so appreciative of you sharing the podcast. Thanks again, and I'll talk to 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.