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 week's episode of the You're Not Crazy podcast. Most weeks I approach the episode of You're Not Crazy from a space where I talk about my clinical perspective or my personal lens of what it means to grow up with and to heal from a toxic parent and a dysfunctional family dynamic. And this week, I want to talk about what it's like to navigate these things, not only as a cycle breaker, but as a cycle breaker who's living in America right now, where the same things that we experience in our dysfunctional family systems, the gaslighting, the lying, the deflection, the abuse are happening here in our world. Most weeks that I record this podcast, I'm recording from a pretty zen state of mind. I happen to be a sensitive person. I happen to be an emotional person. And I am also someone who has developed a lot of healthy emotional regulation skills and an ability to sit with and tolerate some pretty hard emotions. And right now, I'm not coming to you from that same place. I'm coming to you from the place of what it's like to exist in a world where it's not safe to be a human being in America. American citizens are getting murdered in the middle of the day in public places. The blaming, the rewriting the narrative to fit a script that's not reflective of reality. I'm recording this podcast after spending this weekend worrying about the safety of my child and myself and the people I care about and grieving the loss of strangers who died unnecessarily. I'm recording this from a very honest place of what it's like to experience additional unnecessary ongoing trauma as someone who is a cycle breaker who has worked so hard to process and heal my past trauma. There is no distance here. This is happening right now. This is real. This is ongoing. The gaslighting is ongoing. The hateful rhetoric is ongoing. The lies are ongoing. All of this is ongoing. And when you have people who, just like our enabling family members, are unwilling to acknowledge reality and are either co-signing on stories that fit a narrative that isn't true, or are making up their own versions of reality in order to not have to deal with the scary and unacceptable and horrifying reality which is unfolding here. It is profoundly upsetting. That is a normal reaction to what's happening right now. It would be very abnormal for me to hop on here and say, I'm not phased or affected whatsoever by the murder of Renee Good. I'm not phased or affected whatsoever about the murder of Alex Predi. I'm not concerned about the children, the young children, like Liam Kaneho Ramos, who was five, and taken by ice after coming home from preschool. These things are terrifying. They're not okay. They make me feel unsafe. They should make me feel unsafe. On some level, I am unsafe. We all are existing here in this country right now. And to hear this dialogue going on where some people are defending these things, these acts of cruelty, these inhumane actions that are so unnecessary and so horrifyingly awful to hear the rhetoric from people who are defending it is just so upsetting. It's so dark. It's so ugly. The cycle of abuse is the cycle of abuse. So how do you break the cycle? How do you how do you move through this? How do you exist? How do you deal with a toxic parent while you're dealing with a toxic world around you? I think the reality is it's really hard. And I think that as human beings, we have a limited capacity. We just are not endless vessels that can continue to take on more and have no response or reaction to that. That's not how human beings work. That's not how our emotional health exists. That's not what these things look like. The reality is when we're dealing with an intense and overwhelming stressor, that can take precedent over some of the other things that are going on in our life. If you're fearful for your physical safety when you're just trying to go about your day, how are you going to exert time and energy and effort to working on setting healthy boundaries with your toxic parent? You're not. You're not going to have the capacity to do not in addition to being a human being who has relationships, who has a career, who perhaps is a parent, who has responsibilities outside of these things. It doesn't stop our day-to-day. And that's what makes it even harder. Just like when you're dealing with your toxic parent, when you're dealing with your dysfunctional family, the rest of the world doesn't stop to allow you more capacity and more time and energy to focus on this thing. If anything, it feels like we have to do it all. And right now, I think it can feel so overwhelming to want to do something, to want to help, to want to fix this, to want to do anything that matters, that makes a difference, and to feel so helpless at the same time, and to feel so overwhelmed. These are all things that are so common for us cycle breakers to feel with our family dynamics. And then you add on the reality of living in a world that feels extremely unsafe because, in reality, there are a lot of things right now that make it very unsafe. I think it's crazy making. The reality is there are things that are out of our control here, and that feels bad. That does not feel good, that feels scary, and that feels upsetting, and that feels overwhelming, and that does not feel good at all. And then there are things that are within our control here. There are things that we can do that while they are not a magic pill and will not miraculously make everything okay tomorrow or today, they matter. It's really hard to say when I am feeling traumatized by this because this is traumatizing. When I am feeling at a loss for what I quote unquote should be doing right now, when I know that I need to do something, but don't know what that something is. What does it actually look like to make that shift from being paralyzed in stress and fear and overwhelm? That same paralyzation that often comes up when it feels too impossible or too heavy or too hard to confront the situation with our toxic family, to set the healthy boundary, to enforce it, to really look at the reality of our situation. It's that same stress response, it's that same trauma response that's happening right now. Something that is really helpful in these moments is to write down a list of all of the things that it feels like you should be doing right now and to go back and look at realistically how do you prioritize the things that need to be priorities? And how do you exist in a world where things that you really want and need to focus on get ignored and neglected for a little bit because that's the reality here. The reality is you don't get to be a super high-functioning person and also have the amount of energy that you need to respond to high stress, conflict, and trauma. Those things don't coexist. A life that you have and a day-to-day that you have when you feel emotionally safe and physically safe looks very different than a day where you don't feel those things, where your safety and stability are not promised or guaranteed or they feel non-existent, those worlds don't look the same. They can't look the same. A huge thing right now is really being realistic with yourself, making sure to go back to the basics. Are you eating throughout the day? Are you sleeping enough? Are you getting outside to take a breath to move your body? Are you doing things that take care of your basic needs? Are you drinking water? Are you talking to a friend or a therapist? Are you journaling? Are you saying some of these things out loud? Sometimes it feels like we can't do anything unless we can solve the problem. And that keeps us stuck in situations like this. Because the reality is I can't solve this problem. And if I do nothing, then I don't move forward at all. If I do nothing, I am in this hamster wheel where I feel completely helpless and hopeless. But if I do something, I start to get unstuck. If I show up to work as a therapist and hold space for my clients right now, I'm doing something. If I take care of myself and feed myself and make sure to shower and hit those basic needs, I'm doing something. If I show up for my child right now to the extent that I can, instead of the extent that I would like to, but the extent that I can right now, that is doing something. If I talk to my husband about my feelings of helplessness around this, that is doing something. All of these things are doing something. If I call my senators and my congress person, that is doing something. Doing anything is far more important than feeling like you can't do anything until you do it perfectly. We're not going to be perfect, but perfect keeps us trapped. That idea of perfection and being the perfect helper, the perfect healer, the perfect cycle breaker keeps us trapped. It is not real and it is not helpful. What is helpful and what is real is making sure that we are being honest with how we are impacted right now, how it's affecting us, how it's affecting our capacity to create opportunities to take care of ourselves. For a lot of people, there needs to be an intentional effort right now to meet your basic needs to take care of yourself. Do not get caught up in this idea of perfectionism right now, because it's not gonna help you and it's not gonna help anyone. And I want to say one more thing before I wrap up this week's podcast episode, because I think this is an important thing to talk about. Despite the fact that there are a lot of people who are well-intentioned online right now, that doesn't make them perfect either. And while you may like following someone, even me, there is not a single person online right now who has the distance from what is currently happening to give you a perspective that has the benefit of hindsight and looking back and reflecting on this. We're all moving through it right now in real time. This is something that is actively happening, and this is not something that someone has healed from already. That's impossible. This is something that is ongoing. When a trauma is ongoing, you can't heal it. You can address it and you can respond to it and you can acknowledge it and you can deal with it, but you can't heal from a trauma that is ongoing. Just like when you are continuously exposed to abuse in a relationship with your toxic parent, you can't get over abuse that is ongoing. You can't get to this point where you're not reactive to it because you've processed the trauma when it's still occurring. You can get to a point where you're desensitized to it, where you're not as reactive, where you've normalized it. Those are things that are possible, but you can't process a trauma until that trauma has resolved, until you feel safe, until you are safe. And so when you are looking at the quote unquote experts online right now, I think that it's really important to keep in mind that we have tools and education that we can share. We can validate your experiences and share and disclose that we too are struggling right now. But there is no helper or healer out there who can tell you that they have all the answers right now, as if that is a healthy response right now, because it wouldn't be. That would be a very unhealthy response to what's happening right now. That would be a response that is rooted in dissociation or minimization or normalization. It would not be a response that is rooted in emotionally healthy coping and processing. And so if you're following people who claim to have all the answers right now, be very mindful as to how following in taking in their content is making you feel. And just know that you're not alone here. You're not going through this alone. And just know that it is completely appropriate to have intense feelings right now. It doesn't make you a scary or unsafe or dangerous person to feel hard emotions. It makes you a human being. Remember to take care of yourself. Remember that there are things that you can do to take care of yourself on a day-to-day, minute-to-minute level. Remember that you don't have the capacity to do everything that you normally would to the level that you would normally do it. Remember that there is not a perfect person right now. There are just people who are dealing with the reality of what's happening. And there are people who are not. There are people who are responding in a way that is trying to help and create hope. And there are people who are responding in a way that is enabling and encouraging violence and abuse. And so I think keeping those things in mind is incredibly important right now. Always, but especially right now. Take care of yourself, keep moving forward, and I will see you next week. 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.