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 this week's episode of the You're Not Crazy podcast. Thanks for joining me for another week talking through complicated and very dysfunctional family dynamics I am thrilled to tell you that I have officially finished updating the Cycle Breakers Vault. I've gone through, I've edited all of those workshops that were originally done for the now closed Confident Boundaries membership And I have updated the branding and the material throughout the course to make it even easier for you to go through, even quicker for you to go through, and even more helpful and more effective I also updated the AI tool that's inside the Cycle Breakers Vault. If you haven't heard me talk about that before, I created a GPT. You get the link to access it when you're inside the Cycle Breakers Vault. And I updated it with all of the revisions to the course that I just did. So the great thing about that AI tool, it's not an AI therapist. Trust me, I'm not a fan. It is not a replacement for therapy. It is trained not to do therapy. What it is intended to do is help you implement the things that you're learning as you go through the Cycle Breaker's Vault into your real life and apply these concepts into the actual situations that you're dealing with so if you've been thinking about checking out The Cycle Breaker's Vault, now is an excellent time to do so. okay, hopping into the heart of today's episode, I want to talk about boundaries today. I wanna talk about why the boundaries that you set with your difficult parent never seem to stick. When I post about boundaries. I often get the response, " That doesn't work on my parent," and that makes so much sense because when you're dealing with a parent who has borderline or narcissistic personality disorder, they are very likely to push back on your boundary. That is just par for the course here So it doesn't surprise me when I hear that people's parents are pushing back on their boundaries. That's not surprising to me at all. I know it feels awful, and it's so frustrating, and it's so overwhelming, but it's not surprising. And the reason why this is so important to talk about is that oftentimes when we are trying to implement healthy skills like setting boundaries so that we're actually making decisions that are within our capacity and we're not overextending ourselves and we are taking care of ourselves because that is necessary for us to be emotionally healthy adults. When we are implementing things like boundaries We often learn about these concepts And how they're applied in healthy relationships with emotionally mature people. And that's not what these things look like in our types of families. It's just not When you are setting a boundary with someone who is emotionally mature or who at least has a baseline of emotional maturity, that person is likely to respect your boundary, whether that's in a friendship or a romantic relationship. In healthy relationships with emotionally mature people Boundaries are oftentimes well-received or at least appropriately received from a neutral place. They aren't typically met with hostility. When you have a healthy relationship, the other person that is a part of that relationship wants you to be a healthy adult. They want you to be an emotionally healthy person. They don't want you to be overextending yourself in your relationship with them. They want you to be happy and healthy, and they want to be in a relationship with you because they enjoy you as a person. And so when you make changes in those dynamics, it's not horrible most of the time. Sure, sometimes someone might be surprised, right? If you're in a romantic relationship and you're working on setting new boundaries, they might be surprised or taken aback and wanting more context, wanting more understanding, which is totally fair and reasonable. But when you grow up in a dysfunctional family system, when you have a parent with borderline or narcissistic personality disorder… Again, whenever I'm talking about parents with borderline personality disorder, I'm always talking about unmanaged BPD. So when you have a parent like this, you are dealing with a parent who lacks emotional maturity. They are emotionally dysregulated. They rely on you to be responsible for their emotions, for their ability to regulate. The dynamics there are so extremely inappropriate, and they are so different than healthy relationships that as adults we hope to be in And so when you take advice that would apply and work in a healthy relationship and you try to apply that to a relationship with a parent who is punishing and who will lash out when they're angry and who has very poor boundaries themselves and doesn't believe that you should have any boundaries at all, it doesn't work how we're told it should work. It just looks so different in these types of dynamics. And so You go and you set a boundary And just to make sure we're all, all on the same page, when we're setting a boundary, it is about what someone else can expect from us, right? Boundaries aren't about controlling other people. They're about saving the relationship. We set boundaries because we care about this person and we care about the relationship, and a boundary is helping us redefine the way we engage with this person in this relationship so that we're not burning out. We're not so overextended emotionally, financially, otherwise, that we have to walk away from this relationship. Boundaries are our attempt to redefine the dynamics so that this relationship is sustainable because we want to maintain this relationship. So when we're setting a boundary, when we're letting our parent know that this is what they can expect from us moving forward, this is how we're approaching things differently And our parent either freaks the F out, or they push back, or they try to argue with you or get you to compromise. That's par for the course with this type of parent. They're almost certainly going to push back. They're almost certainly not gonna like your boundary. They're not the one that's initiating change. They don't want the change. They're not a fan of the change, and their life would be a lot easier if they can get you to back down. So that is oftentimes what they try to do. They try to put pressure on you. They try to use the ways of communicating that they know and rely on to get you to go back to how things used to be so that they don't have to make changes. That is so par for the course. And why this is so important for you when you're trying to navigate your relationship with a parent like this is because You have to plan for the pushback. You have to plan not just what is the boundary, how am I going to set it, but that is only part one. That's part one of the situation. Part two is how am I going to enforce this boundary? How am I going to handle all of the emotions that come up for me when they push back, when they get frustrated, when they get angry with me? How am I going to handle that and enforce the boundary? And this gets even harder because with parents like this, there's the manipulation, it's not just that they're pushing back. It's not that they're just saying, " I don't like that. I don't agree with it." It's that they're doing so in ways that are super toxic. They're guilt-tripping they're gaslighting you. They are Bringing in third parties like a sibling of yours or your other parent or an aunt or an uncle or a grandparent to try to put pressure on you to go back to how things used to be, it is so overwhelming, it is so stressful, and it is so consuming. And where people get boundaries in these types of family dynamics wrong oftentimes is that they do so much work figuring out what is my boundary, what is the boundary that I need to set, what is the boundary that I'm going to set, how am I going to set it, and they don't have a plan for how they're going to enforce that boundary, how they're going to deal with the pushback. And even when they have some idea intellectually of what they would like to do, they don't oftentimes have a plan for how they're going to handle all of those really intense, really uncomfortable, really stressful feelings that physically come up those are the ones that make us want to disconnect and want to avoid and want to shut down and want to just go back to how things were, to just make it go away because it feels so unbearable and so intolerable to deal with the fallout and the pushback from trying to hold our boundary that we just want to shut down because we don't know what else to do. We've exhausted all of our resources trying to figure out how do I even set this boundary to begin with. I don't have the capacity to deal with all of this chaos and this pushback And that's really the cycle there. That's the cycle that is so dysfunctional that cycle breakers find themselves stuck in. It's this, " I have worked so hard to get to the point that I even understand that boundaries in this relationship are necessary and what they might look like, and I go to implement them finally, and there's this pushback. And it's not just a little pushback, it's extreme, and it's debilitating, and I can't do this. I don't have the capacity to do this." And that's the thing that we don't talk enough about. We don't teach people, we don't learn how do we navigate the part two. It takes so much time and energy getting to the place that part one is even a thing where we're like, " Yes, I'm going to try to finally set a boundary with my parent." Part one is such a huge hurdle and it's such a big achievement in and of itself, but without part two it often just implodes and it goes poorly and it's defeating and it pulls us back into the dysfunction So when you are thinking about approaching boundaries with this type of parent, with a parent with unmanaged BPD or narcissistic personality disorder, it is so important to not only focus on what does it actually look like to set a healthy boundary? What is my boundary? Where are the boundaries that I need to set? Where am I feeling overextended? overwhelmed just beyond my capacity. Those things are so important, and it is also so important to really think through how is my parent likely to respond? What are they likely to do? How am I going to deal with that, and how am I going to enforce this boundary? How am I going to deal with all of those unpleasant and uncomfortable feelings that come up when my survival response is triggered again? Because that's what happens in this dynamic It's redefining what it actually looks like to make a change in this type of relationship dynamic and making sure that we're looking at the full big picture, not just one piece of the puzzle. Because it is so defeating when you work so hard to make that change and you think that you're doing all the right things, but because you don't have the full picture, you don't have all of the pieces of the puzzle, you just leave defeated again Next week on the podcast, we're gonna talk a bit about why I want you to stop getting your parent to try to understand your boundaries. I want you to stop doing that, and I'm gonna tell you exactly why I want you to stop doing that. This month we're gonna talk a lot about boundaries and the things that go wrong and how to work around them. I also know that June is Father's Day month, the month with which Father's Day lands, and so don't worry, we will be chatting about that as well. Thank you for joining me for another week of the You're Not Crazy podcast. I so appreciate you being here. I appreciate you taking the time to leave a five-star review and a kind comment to help other cycle breakers find the show Take care of yourself, and I'll see you next week. Bye 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