Welcome to You're Not Crazy, a podcast for the adult children of parents with narcissistic and unmanaged borderline personality disorder. I'm your host, Torie Wiksell, a therapist with over a decade of experience in the mental health field. I also happened to grow up with a narcissist mom who had a lot of BPD traits, and I know a thing or two about how crazy-making these types of relationships can be. I'm so excited to show you what it actually means to break the cycle of dysfunction that we grew up in and help you see the light at the end of the tunnel. Thanks for joining me. Now, let's jump into the show. welcome back to the You're Not Crazy Podcast. I am so excited to be talking with you again this week about all things dysfunctional family dynamics. I am very hopeful that this episode landed neatly where it should in your podcast feed. I recently decided to transition away from the network that I was hosting the podcast on, and that transition ended up being a little more technically complicated than I anticipated. But I am hopeful that this episode landed where it should, and if not, hopefully it finds you soon. Today, I wanna talk about the emotional impact of getting through a really tricky day, a really tricky weekend, like Mother's Day weekend, when you have a complicated relationship with your own mom. I know a couple of weeks ago we talked about the lead up to Mother's Day and things that you could do and just looking at really common struggles and difficulties people have leading up to this day and this weekend. We're on the other side of it now, And regardless how that went for you, it's really normal to have a bunch of different emotions and experiences come up, and so I wanted to talk through some of those with you today. Something that is so common when you're a cycle breaker is to go into that day, go into Mother's Day weekend, with the best intentions and trying to be really boundaried and just really hopeful that things will go okay. And at some point in the day, finding yourself really emotional or triggered or having said something where you feel like your words were twisted or misunderstood, or perhaps you hit a wall and said something mean or lashed out a bit. All of these things are so common when you are the cycle breaker in your family and you're still in contact with your family and having interactions with them, especially around these more stressful days like Mother's Day And if that was your experience, I want you to know that if you're feeling a lot of shame and guilt around how you handled things on Mother's Day, you're absolutely not alone. There are so many people out there right now who are having a really hard week this week after having a really hard day on Mother's Day or a really hard couple of days over Mother's Day weekend. And it's really important that you know that you're not the only one in that boat, and that doesn't mean that you're a bad person. It doesn't mean that you're bad at this whole cycle-breaking thing. It means that very likely you stepped into a very dysfunctional dynamic, one that you're working really hard to get some distance from, to shift the way that you engage with, that you're just putting a lot of energy and effort into trying to figure out and trying to navigate. And that's complicated, and it's stressful, and it can be upsetting at times. And you're an imperfect human because we all are, and imperfect people mess up. That means all of us mess up, myself included. We all do. And we all reach our breaking point at times, and we don't always handle reaching that breaking point in the healthiest of ways. And when you're dealing with a dysfunctional family, when you're interacting with your own dysfunctional family system, it's immensely harder than when you're interacting with the rest of the world because there's so much history there, and there's trauma there, and there is just a lot there. And although you're working on yourself, that doesn't mean that anyone else in your family is necessarily working on themselves. And it is so complicated, and it is so layered. And you could try and try and still hit your breaking point and do or say something where you feel misunderstood or let down or embarrassed or shame about the way that you engaged. All of those things are not uncommon. And so if you had a bad day this weekend, if you had a bad Mother's Day, if you are finding that you're being really hard on yourself this week, if you find that you're carrying a lot of shame or a lot of guilt, if you find that you're beating yourself up a ton this week, I want you to know that not only are you not alone, but your job right now is to take care of yourself. Your job when you're struggling is to take care of yourself. Your job is to make sure that you're meeting your basic needs, making sure that you're showering, that you're eating, that you're drinking water throughout the day, that you're not isolating, that you're trying to move your body. Your job right now, if you are feeling at a low, is not to reflect on and process all of the challenges of your life. It's not to dive deep and have these profound introspections. Your job is simply to take care of yourself and to try to be kind to yourself. And a great way to start being kind to yourself is by focusing and prioritizing on meeting your basic needs. And as you get more distance from Mother's Day and you feel less intensely in your emotions, then you can process and try to make sense of everything. But when you have that emotional heaviness weighing over you, it is oftentimes not a productive time to do that self-reflection and introspection, and especially when you're beating yourself up and being so mean to yourself around what you didn't do, what you could have done, all of these things. All of these things are so common when You have those challenging family interactions, and it's not the time to dig deeper. It's the time to step back and take care of yourself and get yourself to a place where you are feeling mentally and physically equipped to do a bit of reflecting and to just re-engage with your life. Because this experience of interacting with your family, this experience of getting through Mother's Day weekend when you have a complicated family dynamic and a complicated relationship with your own mom, that's a lot. It's a lot. It's very taxing. It's emotionally taxing. It's physically taxing. It's a lot. And while it would be great if it was only stressful for that day, while it would be great if it was, like, not stressful at all, but unfortunately not the case typically. While it would be great if we could isolate the stress to the day of, that's just not really how it typically works. And because there's so much there, right? Now, some of you might have gotten through Mother's Day weekend and been surprised by how well you did over the weekend, and maybe you didn't think about your mom much. Maybe you were very present in other areas of your life, and I think that's fantastic and wonderful and something worth sitting with for a second and acknowledging and celebrating, and if you haven't already, reflecting on what are some factors that may have made that possible for you this year. When we're very much in our feels, feeling bad about ourselves, it is not a great time to self-reflect because we tend to spiral. It can be a really hard time to dive deeper because we oftentimes don't have the clarity that we need to dive deeper. It is far more helpful to take care of ourselves and get ourselves to a place where we are not so drenched and entrenched in our feelings. And if you got through this weekend and did better than you expected, you're not in a place where you're completely drowning in your feelings. You're in a place where you do have a bit more dis- distance and emotional clarity, and now might be a great time for you to reflect on what factors helped contribute to the way that your weekend went, and are there things that maybe you can be mindful of to bring into other difficult days of the year and other family gatherings or other holidays, whether you're no contact or in contact with your family. If there are things that you've done this Mother's Day that helped the way you feel overall, those are worth noticing and trying to incorporate moving forward. There are so many things that are common to feel during and before leading up to and after these types of days when you grow up in a dysfunctional family system. You're not supposed to feel one certain way. There are a lot of ways that make sense to feel based on your level of contact with your family, how much clarity and confidence you have navigating your family dynamic, what type of work you've done to develop healthy coping skills that'll allow you to navigate your own challenging emotions. There's so much that goes into it. There are so many different factors there. But one thing I'd like for you to take away from this episode is that so much of what makes breaking the cycle so hard is that we often do so in isolation. We often do so while it seems like the rest of the world, the rest of our families are just going through life, and they are less affected or not affected by the things that are so impactful to us and our mental health and our emotional wellbeing. And there's some validity to that because when people aren't also struggling to break the cycle in their own dysfunctional family, they don't necessarily have the same emotional load surrounding holidays like Mother's Day. And that can make you feel like something's wrong with you if you have a bunch of feelings both leading up to Mother's Day and following it. But something isn't wrong with you. Th- these types of events, these types of days, these types of holidays and traditions and family gatherings are really hard. They're hard for a lot of cycle breakers, and even if they aren't hard for you as a cycle breaker this year, chances are at some point in your own cycle breaking journey, they've been challenging, they've been hard. That's probably why you're listening to me talk on this podcast because you have a very complicated family situation, and not every Mother's Day brings with it butterflies and rainbows and sunshine and all things good and wonderful. I want you to know whenever you listen to this podcast that you truly are not crazy. This is a byproduct of growing up in a dysfunctional family where it feels like you are at times. So if you need to hear someone remind you to be kind to yourself this week and to give yourself a break and allow yourself to not be at a hundred percent because you've just overcome something emotionally taxing, then allow that person to be me because you getting through Mother's Day is enough, and you doing so imperfectly is human. So be kind to yourself, take care of yourself, and until next week, I'll see you then. 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