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. My sweet angel daughter got sick basically January 1st or 2nd and proceeded to give said illness to my husband, who then gave it to me. So our entire household has been down for the first half of this month. If you can hear it in my voice, I apologize. I am feeling a lot better than I was, but I'm still a bit nasally and run down. So I apologize if that is coming across in this week's recording, but so is life, and we shall do our best and power through. A few quick notes before we hop in to this episode. If you have newly found the podcast and you are enjoying it and you are looking for additional episodes to listen to, make sure to check out the private feed. You can click the link in the show notes to learn more about it. But that is the private feed where I put archive episodes going all the way back to last July. I do two bonus podcast episodes every month. And you get these new episodes of the podcast ad-free. So if you click the link in the show notes, you can sign up for that and then get access to our entire back catalog of episodes. If you are new here, thank you. I am so excited that you found our little show that could. And I welcome you to the You're Not Crazy podcast. I'm also so excited to say that we had four new members come into the Confident Boundaries membership last week when I announced that it is now open for direct enrollment. You no longer have to take the course Confident Boundaries with Toxic Parents as a prerequisite. You can join the membership directly. But I have had a few questions come in about the membership. So I just wanted to clarify a few things before we hop into today's show. The membership is a great fit for someone who is in therapy or who has previously done trauma processing and therapy and is looking for community more education and guidance or coaching around dealing with their toxic family dynamics. Most, if not all, of the members in the confident boundaries membership have a parent who has either diagnosed or suspected borderline narcissistic or histrionic personality disorder. If that is you, if you are in therapy, but you're looking for more support and guidance and education and community to be able to connect with other people who actually understand what it's like to grow up in this type of family, definitely check out the membership. I know that I have said it before a million times. I know I say it on the website and everything, but I want to make it clear it is not therapy. It is a supplement to therapy. There are so few people out there who specialize in this very specific topic. And this is intended to help bridge that gap. So that if you are doing therapy with a wonderful therapist, but that therapist doesn't necessarily have the detailed background in this area, this could be a really great option for you to help fill that gap. Also, if you are doing therapy and your therapist does have a background in this area, that is fantastic and wonderful. And I'm so happy for you. If you are looking to connect with other people who are also doing healing work on their own personal journey and to just be able to connect with other people who really get it and are diving in and doing the work to improve their own emotional intelligence and connect with each other and cheer each other on and share things that have worked well for them and ask for feedback, then this membership is a great option for you too. In there, I do a live educational workshop once a month. In the past, I've done workshops on things like gaslighting and guilt tripping and dealing with flying monkeys. I also do two boundary support slash QA coaching calls every month so you can have an opportunity to come in and listen to me coach other people through what they're going through. You can come in and ask questions yourself. It's meant to be an educational, encouraging, and supportive environment. Hopefully that helps clarify a couple of things. If you were thinking about the membership or curious about what that really entails, I hope that gives you a bit more insight into it. Let's hop into today's episode. Today I want to talk about self-doubt when it comes to being raised by a toxic parent. Self-doubt is something that most, if not all, cycle breakers struggle with. And there are a couple of reasons for that. It's really worth chatting about here because self-doubt makes it really hard for us to move forward. And self-doubt oftentimes is a really big driving factor when we feel really stuck. And so let's talk about what self-doubt actually looks like in these types of family dynamics and what you can do about dealing with self-doubt when you notice it's coming up for you. I often refer to self-doubt as self-gaslighting. Part of growing up with a parent like this is there's a lot of gaslighting and there's a lot of that didn't happen. You're being so dramatic. It wasn't that big of a deal. Why do you take everything so seriously? And those things make us doubt our reality. That's essentially what gaslighting is in a nutshell. It is really minimizing or dismissing what's actually happened so that someone questions their own reality and starts to doubt their ability to trust themselves. And this is super problematic for so many reasons and bleeds into all of these other issues and symptoms and barriers and hurdles that we have to overcome as an adult. One of the things that happens when you are repeatedly gaslit by your family growing up is that you learn that you can't trust yourself. You learn that you're not a reliable narrator. If you recall something, but someone else that you're talking to feels differently or expresses that you're wrong, instead of standing firm in what you know to be true, your brain automatically starts to go into self-doubting mode and questioning yourself and wondering: well, did I misinterpret that? Did I read the situation wrong? Was that what really happened? Can I really trust my recollection here? This is so common when you're trying to break the cycle because we are making changes. We are doing things differently, and different is hard before it gets easier. It is very hard to work on making healthy changes as a cycle breaker in your own life by doing things like setting boundaries, being more clear in your communication, being more assertive in what you're saying. And assertive and aggressive, two separate things. So we can talk about that a different day. But if you're like, I don't want to be assertive, yes, you do. You don't want to be aggressive, but you want to be assertive. Assertive is healthy. Being more assertive, being more clear about what you want and need. All of these things are really hard to do when you grow up in our types of families because those were not things that benefited you to do growing up. Those were not things that were appreciated, those were not things that were rewarded, those were not things that made your life easier. So as an adult, by doing those things, there's a lot of rocking the boat in your family, right? When you decide to be more assertive, when you decide to set boundaries in your family, that's going to mix things up, and that's not necessarily going to be well received by the other people in your family. This is why self-doubt is so hard and complicated because in your actual family, when you start to make changes, when you try to break the cycle by setting boundaries, by no longer justifying your decisions or defending yourself, your family is likely going to default into what they've always done, which is to try to get you to back down, to try to get you to doubt yourself, to question yourself, to be able to point at you and say, see, you're so dramatic, you're so sensitive, you're crazy, hence the name of our podcast. And those are the gaslighting things that make you doubt yourself and make you question yourself and make you wonder, are my boundaries valid? Is this reasonable? Am I being extreme? What should I do? Those self-doubting thoughts oftentimes lead us to worry that we're making the wrong decision. And that can lead us to backtrack on our boundaries. That is a major way that self-doubt shows up when we're working on making changes within our own family. But as an adult separate from our family, being a cycle breaker also means learning the skills that every adult needs in order to be an emotionally healthy adult. And when you start doing things differently as an emotionally healthy adult, you have to start making active decisions about your life. You have to start making decisions about your other relationships, about what you actually want from life, what you care about, what you're passionate about, where you want to spend your time and energy and financial resources. Being an adult requires a lot of decision making. And when you've been taught growing up that you don't make the greatest decisions, that you can't trust your recall, that you don't read situations well, it's going to be that much harder to feel confident in the decisions that you're making. This is also where self-doubt really creeps in as a cycle breaker. It is not only in doing things like trying to set boundaries within our own families, but it's also something that creeps in and makes it really hard to start implementing healthy adulting skills. It's really, really tricky. And we often default back to this idea of doing the right thing, making the right decision. Most things are nuanced and gray and complicated. And so when we are trying to apply this very black and white perspective on decision making, like there is a right decision, there's a wrong decision, there's a good decision, there's a bad decision to make, it really amps up our self-doubt. It really amps up the indecision and the paralysis that can often accompany that indecision because making the wrong decision is scary. Making the wrong decision is something that we've been criticized for, mocked for, made fun of, made to feel stupid for by our families. That's all part of that dysfunctional cycle that goes on. And so if we're trying to live this healthy adult life and we've invested so much time and emotional energy and financial resources in trying to work on ourselves and become this healthy adult version of ourselves, that's something that we so badly want, right? We want to be that healthy person. We want to be that person that's different from our toxic parent, this person that is a safe adult, a person that feels aligned with who we really are. We want that so badly. And the idea of making the wrong decision or choosing the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing can feel so overwhelming that it leaves us frozen. This is where self-doubt has a lot of influence on our healing journey. It is a really, really, really powerful driver for us backtracking, for us not doing anything, because the idea of having to make a good decision or the right decision feels too much and it feels impossible to take on. Self-doubt is so tricky because it really is this cult-like programming that we experience where even after we have some distance from that conversation happening within our family, it still has permeated the way that we think and the way that we approach life and view the world. It really adds additional barriers that we have to overcome and deal with. And I think the biggest thing with self-doubt that is really helpful when you are in this cycle and when this is something that you're really struggling with is to recognize that this is a normal part of breaking the cycle. As a cycle breaker in our family, we're often the first person to stand up and say, Hey, this isn't okay. This isn't right, this isn't healthy. And as a dysfunctional family, the only way that our dysfunctional family can continue to operate is by silencing that voice, by making it seem like that is an outlandish thought, that that is inappropriate. And so there is this quick reaction to quiet that voice that is calling out the dysfunction. And that unfortunately happens to be our voice a lot of the time. Even after people go no contact with their parents, they can still really struggle with this voice coming up. It is a very common struggle. And I think having awareness and understanding that this isn't a personal flaw, this is a byproduct of this type of family unit. And growing up in this type of family unit can be really helpful because it shifts the problem from a you problem to an oh yeah, this is what happens when you grow up in a family like mind problem. And awareness is huge here because when you're aware of that and when you recognize that this makes a lot of sense given the life that I've lived and the interactions that I've had with my family, that can allow you to see this voice for what it is, which is that byproduct, it's that echo, it's the internalization of the gaslighting that you've experienced. It is the self-gaslighting, if you will. It is not something that requires you to engage with it. It's not a thought that is a helpful thought, it's not a thought that should influence your decision making. It is simply a byproduct of growing up, being taught to doubt yourself. You can still use healthy decision-making skills to make active choices in your own life, but even when you aren't feeling incredibly competent, these are things that you can learn, and it is very much a situation where two seemingly opposing things can coexist. Two things can be true here. You can have these thoughts where you're questioning yourself, where you're doubting yourself, and you can still use healthy decision-making skills to make active decisions based on the things that you care about, that you want, that you feel in your own life. It's these very insidious ways that the abuse shows up in our cycle-breaking journey that so often make us feel so stuck because they are just so normalized in our experience. And it's really, really important to have education and awareness around these cycles so that you can understand that these things aren't a reflection of you being a bad person or not wanting to break the cycle, but these are things that most, if not all, cycle breakers struggle with on their own healing journeys. So on that note, thank you for bearing with me as my flu or whatever it is is resolving. I apologize if this was a bit more nasally. As I mentioned before, if you're looking for more education, connection, and community on your own cycle breaking journey, check out the Confident Boundaries membership. I'll throw that in the show notes. And I'll see you next week. 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.