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. Hi there and welcome back to this week's episode of the You're Not Crazy Podcast. I, as always, am so excited to be here talking with you guys today. I have really good news. I made the decision, as I was mentioning, I've been thinking a lot about the confident boundaries membership. I made the decision to open it back up for direct enrollment. So I removed the prerequisite of having to take the confident boundaries with toxic parent course, not because I think that that is not important. I think it's a really important course and really important information for everyone who's trying to understand what healthy boundaries with a toxic parent actually looks like and how you go about achieving those successfully because they're so layered and complicated. But because I want to open the community back up to not only people who are actively working on setting boundaries with their toxic, narcissistic parents, but to also open it up to people who are looking for community and support around already being no contact with a parent who has narcissistic traits or diagnosed or undiagnosed borderline or histrionic personality disorder. If you are new to the podcast, this might all sound like word salad to you. Our podcast is about dealing with toxic parent dynamics. But what makes this podcast really unique, what makes the confident boundaries membership that I run for adults with toxic parents really unique is that we really have an emphasis and a focus on dealing with a specific type of toxic parent. Most people, if not all of the people in the confident boundaries membership, have a parent with either diagnosed or suspected narcissistic, borderline, or histrionic personality disorder. I myself grew up with a narcissist mom who had a lot of BPD traits. These are really unique parent-child dynamics. And the amazing thing about our community is that when you have this relationship with a parent, it is such a hard one for people to understand and grasp if they have not lived it and if they are not doing the work to heal from this dynamic. And the amazing thing about our membership community is that everyone in there is doing the work. Everyone in there is going to their own personal therapy. They're trying to educate themselves on complicated, toxic family dynamics. They're showing up in the chat to encourage each other and to share things that have been really helpful for them on their own healing journey. And it's just a really special place full of a lot of people who are really, really amazing human beings who are there to cheer you on and encourage you. And as you know, or as you might not know, but you will now know, I run the membership community in addition to doing this podcast. And we also have our live support, our boundary support QA, coaching calls, our monthly workshop where we talk about things that are relevant to these family dynamics and breaking the cycle and other resources in the members library that are there to help you on your cycle breaking journey. So if you have been thinking that you would really love to have some additional support beyond your relationship with your own therapist, with people who really understand these dynamics. If you're looking for additional education around navigating your complicated family relationship, definitely check out the Confident Boundaries membership. I'll throw the link to sign up in the show notes. And we would be so excited to have you in there. Today I want to talk a bit about my own cycle breaking journey. I want to talk about the progression of this podcast. I want to talk about some things that I feel like I haven't circled back and talked about in a minute. On our group coaching call this week inside the membership, someone asked me about my own personal experience with my mom. And for those of you who have been here since the beginning, you have heard me tell quite a few stories about my own journey growing up with a narcissist mom, who for a long time I thought had unmanaged borderline personality disorder. But as I have gone along my own healing journey, and I've talked about this before on the podcast and other places, I now feel much more confident that my mom most likely had narcissistic personality disorder with a lot of BPD traits. So it's not uncommon either. When you're dealing with our types of parents, it's not like everyone fits into this very clear-cut box of this is a diagnosis. But there are these patterns of behaviors that when we understand them better, we can really put some perspective on why we personally have struggled so much growing up, as an adult, trying to make sense of all of this chaos. And so one of the things I wanted to talk about today is my progression with the language I use when I'm talking about these types of parents. I have felt very conflicted about this for a very long time. As a therapist in my private practice, the overwhelming majority of my clients have a parent who either has diagnosed or suspected narcissistic or borderline personality disorder. That has been my area of focus in my therapy practice for the last five-ish years, give or take. And it's something I really, really enjoy doing. It's a very specific niche. And there's not a ton of us out there. And I think that is one of the major reasons why I haven't shied away from using these terms in the past, is because we are a very specific niche of people. We're a very specific subset of people and our experiences are very specific. They're very unique. And it's not the same thing as just having an emotionally immature parent. It is different. And while there are definitely a lot of overlaps, and while our parents are absolutely emotionally immature, it is more than just emotional immaturity. The interesting thing is that diagnoses are complicated, right? Like the diagnosis itself isn't really that important. And I know I just spent all this time explaining that it is really helpful to use these terms because we're such a specific group of people. And this is the nuance of all of it. It's not the diagnosis itself that allows you to heal from these relationships. It's not the words themselves, these diagnoses, narcissism, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder. These aren't the words that allow you to heal. They're words that can provide some level of clarity. But like I had said, I grew up with a mom who had both narcissistic traits and BPD traits. And when I'm saying I have a narcissistic mom, overwhelmingly, my mom would meet diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder with a bunch of BPD traits. And do I know if she was ever diagnosed with these things while she was alive? For those of you who are new to the podcast, my mom passed away when I was in my early 20s. And I do talk about that on episodes that are now in the You're Not Crazy archive. If you're interested, you can check the show notes for that link as well. So they're on the private feed, which all the archived episodes go into the private feed. But the thing is, it doesn't really matter if she was diagnosed, just like it doesn't really matter if you ever get a clear diagnosis for your parent. What matters when we're talking about the trauma that we experience in these types of family dynamics are the patterns of behaviors. It's about what is actually happening within our family. It's about the pattern of abuse and how insidious it is and how confusing it is and how inappropriate it is. And it's about the secrecy and the shame, and it's about the gaslighting and our parents' emotional volatility and the need to walk on eggshells and the self-doubt that comes with these types of relationships. And it's about other people in our families normalizing things that are very much not normal and not healthy. All of those things are the things that are relevant to what's going on in our family unit, relevant to us being able to set boundaries and navigate these relationships in a healthy way and heal. Identifying those behaviors don't depend on a diagnosis. Diagnoses are complicated, they're very stigmatized. People like to say that it's very harmful to use diagnostic terms. And while I think that that can be true, I also think it's nuanced like most things in life. And I think that for a lot of adults who grow up with one of these types of parents, it can be really relieving to finally hear a term, to hear a description for what they've experienced growing up. And I know as well that for a lot of adults who grow up with these types of parents and in these types of family dynamics, it can be really scary to think about attaching this type of term to your parent. It can feel really overwhelming and there's so much self-doubt that we experience growing up in these toxic family dynamics, where you can really get caught in this mindset of, well, I don't think my parents that bad. I don't know that they're fully that bad. I don't know that this really applies to me. And that's where I think it's really tricky. And that's where I've shifted throughout the past year and a half with directly using the terms narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, unmanaged BPD, histrionic personality disorder. That's where I kind of go back and forth with actually using these terms and just encompassing it as toxic or narcissistic, emotionally immature or otherwise toxic behaviors. These are the terms that I kind of go back and forth between because I don't want to ostracize people who are like, my parent, I don't know that they meet every single diagnostic criteria. That's not what's important here. What's important here is the patterns of behaviors that we experience, the trauma, the abuse that goes into that. It doesn't matter if your parent almost meets criteria for one of these disorders, if these behaviors, if this pattern of behavior continues to show up and continues to impact the way that you're able to navigate not only your relationship with your parent, but just your life in general, because these types of parent relationships are so all-consuming, the impact on you, what you've experienced, that pattern of behavior, those are the important things. That's just one thing that I wanted to touch on in this very first episode of the You're Not Crazy podcast for 2026. But branching off of that, if you are a longtime listener of this podcast, or if you are part of You're Not Crazy, the private feed, and have gone back and listened to the episode since I first started the show in July of last year, then you know a lot about my personal journey with my own narcissistic mom. You also know that when I first started this podcast, I really looked at my mom's behaviors and the toxicity there as being much more aligned with BPD. And I think that there's a lot of validity to that. As I started retelling a lot of my story through this podcast and later on social media and talking with my therapist about all of that, I really started to get some perspective on the fact that I think my mom really ultimately lacked empathy. And a lack of empathy is not something that's reflective of BPD. It's something that's reflective of narcissism. And so just like I can only hypothesize that might be all that you have as well, right? My mom passed away when I was in my early 20s. That was 15 years ago. I'm not going to get answers there on whether or not she clearly met criteria for a personality disorder. But I do know what I've experienced throughout my life. And I do know that the things I've experienced are very consistent with someone who grows up with a parent with narcissistic personality disorder and a lot of BPD traits. And the reason why our membership community has drawn people with parents who have narcissistic personality disorder, unmanaged BPD, histrionic personality disorder is that these are really unique behavior sets for parents. Just like we're a small subset of people, there's not a ton of people in general who focus on supporting adults with these types of parents. It's just not the case. And so it can be really hard to find support from someone who has knowledge or even any knowledge or education or training on identifying these patterns of behaviors and understanding what they look like in real life and how they impact us when we grow up with a parent like this. And that's what our really community is focused around is supporting people like us with these types of really complicated dynamics that most people don't understand. Most people don't understand the complexities around, most people don't get why they're so debilitating. Most people don't see all of the sides of our parent that we struggle with and that we've had to deal with throughout our lives. It's so layered and so complicated, and it is so specific. Moving forward, the terminology that I'll stick to, I'll probably go in waves and sometimes use these terms, these diagnostic terms, sometimes go back to using the term toxic parent because it's a lot quicker to say as well than the mouthful of words that I've been repeating throughout this podcast episode. But for the sake of the rest of our show, I'm just gonna probably use the term toxic because it's going to speed things up a bit. But I think it's just important to talk about every so often because we're not just talking about parents who lack some level of emotional immaturity here. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about big picture. Something else much deeper is going on. There's abuse, there's psychological, emotional abuse, there's some level of neglect that's happening there. There are very complicated layers there. And there's a lot of trauma that happens growing up in this type of dynamic and being an adult trying to navigate it. In the membership group coaching call this week, someone asked me a really interesting question prior to my mom's passing. Did I ever feel like I didn't love her? And I think this is a really interesting question. And it's a really good question because when my mom passed away, I had already been in therapy for about five years. Started therapy when I was 18, maybe closer to four years. But I had already been doing trauma work. The relationship with my mom didn't lead me into therapy. I got into therapy from other trauma that I had experienced. And going to therapy for other things led me to realizations about how truly dysfunctional and toxic my relationship with my mom was. And it started to put together pieces of a puzzle around how I continued to end up in really toxic relationships in every facet of my life, my romantic relationships, my friendships. It gave a lot of clarity and insight into what was happening here and why I was this common denominator that kept finding myself in these really chaotic and complicated situations. And so when my mom passed away, I had very conflicting feelings about my relationship with her. It was very complicated. But the best way I can explain it is that growing up with this type of parent dynamic, it's like growing up in multiple realities. I grew up in a reality where I so badly had pick me energy. I wanted my mom to choose me. I wanted to be her best friend. When she liked me, when she gave me positive attention, I felt like I was special and on top of the world. And when that was not the case, and when her volatile, punishing, cruel sides showed up, that was equally as real. I knew both the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde versions of my mom that not everyone saw both of those realities I grew up in. And it's a really unique experience growing up with this type of parent because I think a lot of people that grow up with this type of parent understand what I'm saying. And I think it's really hard to explain to people who don't. I think that when you look back, when I look back on my life, when I look back on my childhood, I see both the scary mom and I see both the mom that I wanted to love me, that I wanted to show up for me. I see the version of my mom that was the kindergarten teacher, my Girl Scout troop leader, teacher of the year. I see that version of her. And I also see the totality of who she was. I see the person she was behind the scenes. I see the lack of empathy that she had towards me and people in general. I see all of it. And that's a very complicated thing for your brain to make sense of. It's really layered and it's complicated. And so when my mom passed away, I was devastated. It was very traumatic. And I also felt some level of relief. And I was really angry about when she knew she was dying, what she did and what she didn't do with that time, and what that said about her ability to actually love and be concerned for both myself and my sibling. I think it's really layered. I don't think it's a black or white or an either-or answer. I think that if you ask me today, did I love my mom, do I love my mom? I think what I would honestly say is that love was very complicated. And I don't know that I could say that I didn't love her because I think that I loved everyone that I've loved in my life. I've loved a lot of people who have treated me pretty poorly, pretty awfully. I was very invested in this relationship because biologically that is normal and appropriate. And I was dependent on her. And this was my mom. This was my reality. And I was told by the outside world that she was the perfect mom and she was the greatest thing ever, and she loved me more than anything in the world. And yet, the behaviors and the pattern of behavior that I grew up in says something very differently. The person who was my mom didn't love me because someone who loves you doesn't abuse you. And someone who loves you is sad when they know that they have harmed you in some way. We all deserve to be loved by our parents unconditionally. And I think it's Normal and natural to want to look for that in our relationship with our parent. And I also think that when you are repeatedly mistreated by your parent, when you're repeatedly treated with a lack of empathy, when you're repeatedly treated poorly, when you're psychologically, emotionally abused by your parent, when your parent demonstrates no remorse for their actions or extremely minimal remorse for their actions that have negatively impacted you. When you're on the receiving end of that from a parent, it is normal and natural to look for parts of your relationship where they have shown up for you in the way that you deserve them to. And I think that's really complicated because when we do that, when we give someone who is abusive towards us the benefit of the doubt and say, I know that they really love me. They're not a perfect person. I know they have these flaws. I know that they mistreat me at times, but I know deep down they really love me. I think when we focus on that, when we tell ourselves that story, that narrative, it paves the way for us to tolerate abuse in other areas of our life because it creates this story in which people can care deeply about us and they can repeatedly abuse us. And that is a very tricky and a very complicated and a very toxic way of looking at relationships. I also think it's a really common way for those of us that have grown up in these types of parent dynamics to look at relationships. And so by no means am I telling you that there is a simple solution here or there is a one-size-fits-all way of looking at your relationship with your toxic parent. But what I do hope to do in this episode is to offer you some perspective around ways we often minimize what we've experienced or attribute more positivity and more empathy and kindness to an abusive parent than is reality-based, and how that can really negatively impact our own mental health, our emotional health, the way that we navigate the world, the way that we view ourselves, our own self-esteem, all of those things. And so that's my two cents on that today. So, anyways, so yeah, so it's complicated, it's layered, it is complicated. Our family complicated dynamics are unique. And yet, when you grow up in these types of families, they are very consistent. When you interact with other adults who grow up with narcissistic parents, it is very similar. When you interact with other adults who grow up with a parent with unmanaged borderline personality disorder, it is very similar. I know I haven't talked much today about growing up with parents with histrionic personality disorder. That is a very unique experience in and of itself that I should probably devote a future episode of the podcast. So thanks again for hanging out with me for this week's episode of the You're Not Crazy podcast. I hope after listening today, you feel a little less crazy in your own journey. And like I mentioned before, I'll drop links to You're Not Crazy the Private Feed and the Confident Foundaries membership in the show notes if you want to check either of those out. And on that note, I'll 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.