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 Are Not Crazy podcast. Yes, I still sound very nasally. It's because I am still trying to get over this flu. And I yes, I have been in contact with my medical providers. I am on the mend, but it really has been a doozy. So if you two are down with the flu or have been down with the flu, I hope that you are on the mend and have a speedy recovery because it truly is no joke. So that out of the way, over the weekend, I was doing some housekeeping stuff, and I happened to come across the fact that between episodes of You're Not Crazy on the public feed that we're listening to right now and the private feed, there have been 92 episodes total of the podcast as of today. Like I said, after this one is published, that'll be 93, which is just like mind-boggling. It really blows my mind that we're getting close to 100 episodes of the podcast. Truly, when I started the podcast on a whim, I never imagined that we would get to the point that it would still be going strong, even stronger over a year and a half later, and that we would be coming up on 100 episodes. But that was really cool. And in case you're curious, I was looking at some of the earliest episodes. The very first episode of the podcast, which is currently available on the private feed if you haven't listened to it, is called, I don't believe parents who are quote unquote completely blindsided when their child goes no contact. And I have to say that my stance on that really hasn't changed in the past year and a half. That's good to know. I'm sure my stance on some other things might have slightly shifted or adjusted, but I think overwhelmingly I could say my stance on that remains quite consistent to where it was back then. For today's episode of the podcast, I wanted to talk a bit about something that I haven't spoken much on in a while. And that is the concept of us growing up with a toxic parent, us knowing what we don't want to copy, what we don't want to emulate as an adult doesn't give us a roadmap or information for how to be an emotionally healthy adult. And I know you're probably thinking, duh, obviously. It's very clear. But in translation, in real lived experience, this creates a lot of problems for us cycle breakers. When we're a cycle breaker, when we've grown up in a dysfunctional family, when we are trying to be an emotionally healthy adult, but we were raised by emotionally immature adults. It is a journey. And all cycle breakers start out as emotionally immature adults before they learn how to be emotionally mature adults. Unless, let's say, the majority of us do. There are probably a select few people who are cycle breakers who had enough intervention as they were growing up that they maybe didn't struggle to the extent that most of us do. But most cycle breakers really do struggle as adults to be the emotionally healthy adults that they want to be. And this is a really interesting thing because I know firsthand from my own personal experience, that has always been all I've ever wanted was to be an emotionally healthy adult, to be the safe person, to be the person with healthy, stable relationships and who was emotionally responsible for myself and for my own actions and my own happiness. And yet, and yet I really struggled. I've talked about that a lot on previous episodes, struggling, being in abusive relationships, very unhealthy relationship dynamics outside of my family. These things are not abnormal for those of us that grew up with a toxic parent. These things are not uncommon. And I also struggled a lot in just being a healthy adult, learning how to set healthy boundaries, period. Forget our families for a second, but I didn't know how to set healthy boundaries. I didn't even know what healthy boundaries looked like, period, because I was so used to overextending myself in order to try to prove my value, my worth, to get people to see that I wasn't a bad person to show up in a way that people would appreciate me and want to be around me and want to love me. These are all things that are a byproduct from growing up in a really dysfunctional family dynamic. And the problem with these things is that I so desperately wanted to be a healthy adult, an emotionally healthy adult, but I didn't know what that actually felt like and looked like on a day-to-day level. Like big picture, sure. Big picture, I could identify back then what are healthy and unhealthy things, what are healthy and unhealthy relationships. But big picture is not what gets us to the place that we're an emotionally healthy adult. What makes us an emotionally healthy adult or an emotionally healthy-ish adult or emotionally healthy enough adult is that we're dealing with life on a day-to-day level, a minute to minute, hour to hour level, using emotionally healthy coping skills and relationship skills and setting really healthy boundaries for ourselves. And we're adjusting and we're adapting and we're learning as we go along. But when you grow up with a toxic parent, the idea of you being an emotionally unhealthy, an emotionally immature person is so scary. It is like worst case scenario, right? The idea of being this angry, dysregulated, punishing person is like worst case fear. And when you grow up with that as your worst case fear, anything that doesn't seem to be the polar opposite, that isn't perfect, that isn't perfectly emotionally healthy, feels dangerous and it feels like a failure. And it feels like you might be replicating the same decisions, the same behaviors that your scary parent demonstrated throughout your life. This is where it gets so tricky trying to be an emotionally healthy adult because there's so much shame in the imperfectness of how we go through life when we lack the knowledge of what it means to be emotionally healthy. When you all you saw was your parent exploding or giving you the silent treatment or being punishing or being unpredictable, you work really hard to not be someone who is dangerous or scary or volatile, but you often do so by trying to suppress your emotions, by intellectualizing, by trying to be easy breezy in relationships. You try to navigate life in a way that you think is going to result in you being an emotionally healthy person, but in reality, just leads to these overwhelming emotions and this buildup where it feels like you're out of control. It is so common for cycle breakers with toxic parents as adults to struggle to know how to identify their own emotions, how to recognize what it is that they're actually feeling. It is so common for cycle breakers to lack real understanding of how different emotions feel in their body to recognize how frustration feels differently from anger and how irritation feels differently from disdain. There are so many levels and types of different emotional experiences that we can be having. But when you grow up with a toxic parent, everything feels very black and white. It feels like it's dangerous or it's safe. It is healthy or it's not healthy. And so the idea of connecting with these really difficult emotions is not only scary, but it feels very inaccessible and it feels very confusing and unclear. And forget the idea of like actually just allowing these emotions to exist in our bodies. When people say sit with difficult emotions, and when they talk about that, I think as a cycle breaker, it is often like a question mark of okay, and what does that mean? All of these things are things that we have to learn how to do in order to be emotionally healthy adults because the reality is we're all gonna experience anger. Anger isn't the problem. And in fact, anger can be a really healthy, useful emotion to have. It can motivate us, it could tell us when something is very wrong, when we need to take action. It is not a bad emotion, although it can be a really scary emotion for those of us that grew up in these dysfunctional families. But we don't talk about how hard it is to be an emotionally healthy adult when we're cycle breakers because there's so much shame associated with that. It feels like we can't be both things at the same time, right? We can't be a cycle breaker and be someone who struggles with their emotions. We can't be a cycle breaker and be someone who sometimes says mean things or doesn't handle their anger in a way that they're proud of. We can't be a cycle breaker and constantly feel overwhelmed and stressed out and anxious and like we're spiraling or out of control. We can't be a cycle breaker and have unhealthy relationships or conflict in our relationships that feels unmanageable. We're not supposed to have those things in our life because we so desperately want that life that we imagine, that we envision for ourselves. And I think the reality of how we get to the point where we are emotionally healthy adults or healthy-ish or healthy enough because no one's perfect, but emo emotionally healthy-ish adults with healthy relationships, healthy enough relationships with imperfect but healthy partners who also take accountability for themselves in healthy-ish friendships, healthy enough friendships. And the way that we get to that place in our life is through the mess, through the muck. It's by doing it wrong and seeking out information to educate ourselves, not just intellectually, but to help our bodies understand what it actually feels like to approach life in a different way, in one that actually supports us being able to manage our emotions productively in a way that actually supports realistic, healthy relationships and resolving conflict and repairing relationships when we make mistakes, because we all do. That gray, messy area when we're trying to figure out how to be an emotionally healthy adult, I think is one of the hardest things as a cycle breaker because of the shame around it. Because it feels like we shouldn't talk about it. We don't want people to see that version of ourselves. We don't want to be lumped in with our parent. But what I want to tell you today is this. I want to tell you that there are some major differences between you and your toxic parent when it comes to the struggles that you're having as you learn how to be an emotionally healthy adult. And part of that is your willingness to seek support and to be honest and accountable to yourself that things aren't going how you would like them to go. When we're talking about our toxic parents, we refer to them as toxic parents because they don't do that work. They don't take accountability for the way that their behaviors affect other people. They don't seek guidance and information and do the hard work to make changes so that they don't continue to harm other people. They don't work on trying to regulate their emotions more appropriately. That is the difference there. The difference is that you are capable and willing to do that work, to learn how to fill those gaps in knowledge, to learn how to be that emotionally healthy adult. And I know that you are because you're listening to this podcast. And I can't imagine anyone who wasn't, unless they just wanted to like dislike me and think about that for however long I've been talking. But I would imagine most people listening to this podcast right now are out there doing that work. You're trying to figure out how to be this version of yourself that you know that you are inside, that you want to be, that you see yourself as, and that you feel like you're just not hitting or not hitting consistently. And the way that we do that is that we find safe spaces, whether that is in therapy, whether that is with safe, emotionally healthy friendships, relationships. We find safe spaces where we can be honest about our flaws and where we can work on practicing new skills because really being an emotionally healthy adult has a lot to do with learning skills. It really does. It's a skill that can be learned to identify your emotions. It's a skill that can be learned to regulate your emotions. It's a skill that can be learned to tolerate really tough emotions. It's a skill that can be learned to have healthy relationships and to ask for what you need and to be assertive and honest and clear and direct and to hold boundaries. These are all skills that people can learn if they are willing to put in the work to learn them because it does take time and energy. And it's hard. It's hard to be bad at something before you're good at something, especially when you really want that outcome of being an emotionally healthy adult, it's hard to not be there and for the practice and implication or application, not implication, the application of these new skills to be messy at first and to be messy for a while. Those things are really hard. But I want you to know that if you are in that place where you are struggling in aspects of your adult life and you are beating yourself up because you feel a lot of shame over those struggles. I want you to know that you are not alone and that struggle is not a defining feature in your life. What is the defining feature is what you do about it. You have this awareness that this isn't how bigger picture you want things to be for yourself, that you want to be able to navigate your emotions more effectively in a more of a healthy manner. You want to be able to navigate your relationships differently. Are you going to seek education about that? Are you going to work on implementing new skills to try to manage these things? Are you going to break the cycle by investing in the time and energy that it takes to learn what it means to be an emotionally healthy adult? My guess is, yeah, of course you are. That doesn't mean you need to be doing this 24-7. I don't think that you need to be doing this all the time, every day for the rest of your life. I think that overall these are a series of choices that we make. And part of that is going to therapy. Part of it is on a day-to-day basis, making an effort to be aware of how we're feeling, making more intentional choices, breaking up our normal impulsive reactions and reacting more intentionally. There are a lot of things that go into being an emotionally healthy adult, but I think the biggest thing that gets in our way of truly being an emotionally healthy adult is the black and white thinking, the perfectionism, the shame around not just knowing how to be there and not being able to just magically somehow implement skills that we never saw modeled and we were never taught. And so hopefully you walk away from this episode feeling a little more capable of doing that work to fill in the gaps. And hopefully you walk away from this episode feeling a little less shame around the fact that it is very messy until we learn how to be that version of ourselves that we want to be. And oftentimes as we're doing the work, that version of ourselves shifts a little bit. Like when I started doing this work, I definitely thought that version of myself was a very black and white version of perfect, making all the perfect decisions at all the right times. And now being so far into my own healing journey, I see that version of myself as someone who is well-intentioned, who is kind, who works really hard, who is very invested in being the healthiest version of myself that I can be, and is very imperfect and makes mistakes and tries to take accountability and tries to learn and repair and move forward. And yeah, so on that note, I guess I will leave you guys here for today. And as always, if you're interested in connecting, make sure to check the show notes for more ways that I can help. Until next week, I'll see you then. 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.