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 another episode of the You're Not Crazy podcast. Today I want to talk about parents who say they have to walk on eggshells around their adult children because this is just one of many examples of toxic parents, emotionally immature parents, parents with narcissistic and borderline traits, twist reality in order to paint this there are two sides type of narrative that they have. And this is just very much not the reality of the situation. So, as I'm sure you can imagine, I've got lots of thoughts about parents who say they have to walk on eggshells around their children. But before we hop into it, I want to remind you that this Thursday at 12 o'clock Pacific time, we have our boundary support and QA call inside the Confident Boundaries membership. What is that, you might ask? The Confident Boundaries Membership is the online community that I run for cycle breakers with parents who have suspected or diagnosed narcissistic and borderline personality disorder. It's jam-packed with educational resources. It has an amazing community of other cycle breakers who are there cheering each other on. It is just an incredibly special place. And inside the membership, I do two live 90-minute calls every month. These are calls where you can come and get support and feedback and guidance on navigating your relationship with a toxic parent, navigating boundaries, talking through your current approach, what's working, what's not, talking through decision making around navigating complicated family situations. You can come, you can ask me questions, you can listen to other people in the membership as they ask questions and get feedback. They are just two really cool opportunities to come together with other people who are in a really similar situation, who are also working incredibly hard to break the toxic cycle that they grew up in. And you get a chance to get direct feedback from me too. So if you would like support, guidance, encouragement, and to pick my brain on your complicated family situation, definitely check the show notes or go to confidentboundaries.com/slash membership. Okay, so shifting back to our topic of today, which is parents who say they have to walk on eggshells around their adult child. This is something that gets commented on my social media posts all the time. It is just wild. Like at least a couple of times a week, I'll find a comment from clearly a toxic parent or allegedly a toxic parent who says, Well, it goes both ways. What if I have to walk on eggshells around my adult child? Some variation of that. And every time I like am looking at my phone and I see that, I kind of roll my eyes. And then I usually block the person because obviously they're not there for there. That's not the person I'm talking to on my accounts. And it's obviously unhelpful for them to be following me. So I just opt them out of having to make that choice for themselves. But it is so interesting because it's not the same thing, right? It's just not the same thing at all. And when I whenever I talk about the inequality and the power imbalance in relationships between adults and their parents, I always go back to the starting point of that relationship. And the starting point of that relationship was when the parent, who was hopefully an adult when they had the child, became a parent. That is a power imbalance. When a baby is born, and the only other person in that parent-child relationship with them is an adult for the first 18 years of their life. That completely distorts the power in that relationship. Throughout the length of that relationship, even after that child becomes an adult, children are not just tiny adults. Babies are not just like miniature adults. Children's brains have to grow and develop as they're growing up. There are so many factors in why there is such an extreme power imbalance in these relationships. Parents are responsible for making sure their children are fed, clothed, sheltered, that they are safe, that they have their needs met. Parents are the only one that is supposed to be responsible in that relationship for their child's well-being for those first 18 years. That is who the responsibility lies in. Now, when we're dealing with a toxic parent, do they always meet all of those needs? Do they always rise and fulfill that role how they should? No, absolutely not. But that's their responsibility, right? The child is not supposed to be parenting the parent. The parent is supposed to be taking care of anticipating and providing for the needs of their child for the first 18 years. And we're dealing with toxic parents when we're dealing with parents who love to say, but I have to walk on eggshells around my adult child. These parents want to brush over that and they want to say, Well, they're an adult now, as if that suddenly erases the foundation of this relationship and the power dynamic there. But it doesn't. Some of these parents have said that to their child throughout their child's entire life. There are parents out there who say that they have to walk on eggshells around their minor child. That is something that happens. That is something that gets said. And what that tells me when someone says that about a child is that they that parent is not equipped to support their child emotionally. They don't have the skill set, they don't have the ability, they may not have the desire to give their child what that child needs. But it tells me that they are uncomfortable with their role and the dynamic. That's what it tells me because children are complicated. Children are nuanced, children are challenging to support at times because they have a lot of needs. When you have a child, when that child is growing up, especially a young child, but an adolescent who's going through puberty, a teenager, children have challenging needs. They're not little robots. They don't just do what we program them to do. That's not what happens here. When kids are growing up, it can be very challenging to be emotionally present, to support your child, when they're having emotions that are really uncomfortable to be around. When your child says, I hate you, when your child has a tantrum or a meltdown, when your child is really struggling in some way. That is a really hard thing to deal with as a parent. It's a really distressing thing. It can be a really overwhelming thing to deal with as a parent. This is all normal and natural. These are things that I emotionally experience when I'm trying to support my own child through her big feelings and emotions. It can be really overwhelming. It can be really hard, especially if I'm really tired or if I'm stressed out or if I don't really understand what's happening. It can be a lot. And I know that it's still my responsibility as the adult to figure out how to navigate that situation, right? I know I'm still the one that holds the power. Even if sometimes it doesn't feel like that in the moment when she's really upset. I know that I am. And I know that I'm the one who has the ability to go educate myself on how to fill in the gaps. Things that I don't necessarily know because I didn't see growing up, things that I'm not confident responding to, that I just need more help or education or reassurance or guidance around. I know that that is still the power that I hold. My little sweet toddler child is not going to go join good inside. She's not going to go learn from someone like Dr. Becky how to be a good parent. That's not her job. It's not her role. Her job is having big feelings sometimes and navigating those as she can and trying so hard to learn her job is. My job is to be that support for her, to be that safe person, to be that consistent person, to be that person who is taking on those adult responsibilities and roles. And so when I hear from parents that they feel like they have to walk on eggshells around their child, it's this way of them blaming their child for their struggle parenting their child. And I don't think that every parent who says this does it maliciously. I think a lot of the times it's out of overwhelm and it's from a lack of skills. And I think there are a lot of reasons why people say this and they feel that way. But the reality is it's still the parent's responsibility to learn how to navigate that and to learn how to manage that. It has very little, basically nothing to do with the child and everything to do with the parent and them needing to educate themselves on what they need to confidently and empathetically parent their child. That's what that says. Now, as that child grows up and becomes an adult, and you have a parent saying this about their adult child, that they have to walk on eggshells around them. Where I overwhelmingly see this being said is when those adult children start going to therapy and start pushing back on some of the family norms. This is where I see this happening a lot. And that's probably because the focus of my therapy practice, the focus of this podcast, my social media, the membership is supporting adults with very complicated family dynamics, right? Supporting adults with parents who have suspected or diagnosed borderline or narcissistic personality disorder. That is where I spend a lot of my time and energy. And so it makes sense that when I see this, and I see it a lot, but when I see this, it is when a child who has been relatively compliant with maintaining their role in the dysfunctional family dynamic goes to college and starts realizing that their family situation is a lot less normal than they even thought it was, is a lot more toxic than they thought it was. It happens when an adult goes to therapy and they start to recognize that a lot of what they experienced growing up was traumatic. It happens when adults go out and they start their career, when they form romantic relationships and they realize that they're struggling in these parts of their life in ways that they didn't expect to. And a lot of that is tied back to the coping skills that they had to develop growing up. When adults hit these phases of life, that is often the aha moment when they go back to their family and they start to push back and they start to say, This isn't okay. You're hurting me, you're upsetting me. They start setting boundaries, they start saying no, they start calling out and naming the dysfunction. This doesn't go well. This isn't well received in these types of families. It's true. So when parents say they have to walk on eggshells around their adult children, what they are often saying is that their adult child is not as easy as they were, that they're now being called out and held accountable for their behaviors, that their adult child isn't falling in line and they're not playing the role that they were assigned to play. They're not being compliant with the family rules and the way things have always been. They're choosing themselves and their emotional health and well-being over making sure that their toxic parent isn't upset or frustrated or irritated or embarrassed. These things are very uncomfortable for emotionally immature parents. These things are really uncomfortable for parents who have had people walking on eggshells around them their entire lives. These things are undesirable. And so when I hear parents say, I have to walk on eggshells around my child too, I think you just don't get it. You don't get it, you don't want to get it. And you're screaming to the world how much you don't understand your role in this relationship. You are broadcasting out there publicly by posting, by commenting on my post that you very much do not understand the role that you took on when you chose to become a parent. Because your child has had to accommodate you all of this time. And when they stopped walking on eggshells around you, you suddenly think that you have to walk on eggshells around them. It's not the same thing at all. So, anyways, this is one that comes up like all the time, but I happened to see it when I was trying to think of what I wanted to talk about on this week's podcast episode. And I thought, you know what? I really feel like just addressing this quite clearly on the podcast this week that it is not the same thing. And there are actually reasons why these things are so different. It's not the same thing at all. It's essentially a form of gaslighting. It's pointing back at you and saying you're doing the thing to them that they're doing to you. It's crazy making. Hopefully, after listening to today's episode, you see that these are very, very different things. Just a reminder, I would love for you to join me inside the confident boundaries membership for this week's boundary support and QA call. If you want to pick my brain, if you are in a place where you know you need a bit more support, understanding and navigating your complicated family situation, check the link in the show notes and I'll see you over there on Thursday. 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. Bye.