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. I am currently recording this during a week in which a Viral bug of some sort is going around our household, so I do apologize for getting this episode out to you late It's weeks like this that the perfectionist side of me very much wants to double down and just do more and not only do all of the things on my list regularly, but all of the catch-up things and lean into that desire to just do it all and not let anything fall through the cracks. And then there's this healthier part of me, this part of me that is very invested in my own healing journey that recognizes what happens if I lean into that perfectionism. And it's never good. And I've gone down that road plenty of times throughout my life where things are stressful and I'm feeling really overwhelmed, circling back to what we talked about last week with capability versus capacity Demanding more of myself, expecting more of myself when I in all reality have far less to give at this current moment is not going to benefit anyone. It's not going to produce more quality work. It's not going to make your listening experience any more enjoyable. And so Instead I have been trying very hard to practice what I preach, which is taking a step back, taking a breath, really looking at the entirety of my week, checking in based on how much I've actually slept the night before with my capacity that day And sitting with and rolling with some of those complicated feelings of disappointment and frustration Associated with me choosing to take some things off my list and to not push myself harder to do things like get this podcast out on time because while this podcast is incredibly important to me and I so value all of you who it is important to too It's important to keep it in perspective, and it's not more important than my emotional wellbeing or my physical health or my emotional health. And Those things are easy to get lost in the chaos when life is chaotic. So anyways, that's a little bit about me right now. So doing what I can and tolerating the rest Over the weekend, before the sickness entirely took over our household, I did a question box on my Instagram account, just an AMA. I try to do those, ideally I try to do those like once every one to two weeks. Sometimes it's a little bit further in between depending on what's going on. But One of the questions that was asked brought up a really interesting thing that it's been a minute since I've talked about, and I think it's a really important one. So I thought what better time than now to get into it? Something that frequently comes up when we're talking about navigating a relationship with a parent with borderline personality disorder or narcissistic traits is being less emotionally reactive or responsive to your parents' hurtful behavior, your parents' harmful behavior. What I mean by that is that people often will say I understand that my parent is going to say mean things to me. I don't want to react as strongly when they do. I know that this is gonna happen. I don't wanna have this really emotional meltdown after or feel so defeated or feel so disappointed or sad or upset by the situation. I know that this is a reality, and so I don't want to have such a strong emotional reaction to it. And I get it. Of course, that so makes sense You're at this point where you're really trying to practice radically accepting your parent for who they are and you're pulling back from exerting your time and energy towards wishing they were that version that you see glimpses of, or this person that you wish they could show up as for you. So you're leaning into embracing the reality and understanding this is a part of it, and yet that doesn't make you less emotionally responsive to their behaviors, to their toxic behaviors. And this part gets really tricky because What I often say to adults in this dynamic is that your response, you having a negative reaction to being mistreated, to being abused, emotionally abused, to being talked to by your parent who is supposed to be your safe person, we know they're not, but that's who they're supposed to be. You having a negative response, an emotional response to your parent treating you poorly is actually very normal and healthy And why that is important is because if we were to expand your ability to have less of an emotional response to being mistreated, a couple of things are likely to happen one is that dissociated. it is likely to involve you dissociating to some extent, to mentally checking out, and that is not where we want you to be. We don't want you to dissociate in order to be able to tolerate being with your parent or interacting with your parent. That is definitely not healthy, and that's not where we want you to be. That's not how we want you to cope with this situation And then there's the flip side to that. So maybe you don't dissociate, but maybe you are less reactive because your tolerance for being mistreated goes up. And we don't want that either because that is likely to lead to a host of other issues in your other relationships. If you coach yourself and teach yourself how to be less reactive to being treated poorly, to being mistreated in your relationship with your parent, your brain is not going to just apply that in the context of this relationship. Your brain is going to react less strongly to when you're being mistreated in general in other areas, like at work, in your romantic relationships, in your friendships, and that's not good because that sets you up for other unhealthy relationship dynamics in your life, and we don't want that for you either The really hard part about this dynamic with when you're dealing with this type of parent is that your response to being mistreated, you feeling sad, you feeling let down, you feeling disappointed, you feeling upset, you feeling angry, you having an emotional reaction to being mistreated by your parent is healthy and normal. And how we want to use that information is we want to notice that our body is trying to tell us something. We wanna notice that interacting with my parent in this way doesn't feel good to me, and it's hard for me to recover from the way that it makes me feel. We want to start being curious with ourselves and using this information as data that can inform our decisions around our boundaries with our parent. Because a lot of the times what our body is trying to tell us is that the current status quo in the dynamic between myself and my parent is not sustainable for me. It's really eating away at me. It's costing more than I have the capacity to give emotionally. Your body is trying to tell you something with these reactions, and when it comes to healing, we wanna listen to that. We don't want to stifle that or disconnect from it or suppress that communication that our body is trying to have with us. We want to lean into that and be curious and to consider, is the current status quo in my dynamic with my parent actually healthy for me? Is this something that is actually sustainable for me? And that doesn't mean that you need to now decide if you're gonna have any contact whatsoever with your parent, because I think that's the black and white leap that a lot of people immediately go towards, but it's complicated and it's nuanced, and it's far more gray than that. I think some questions you can ask yourself are Am I capable of having the frequency of interactions with my parent that I'm having now? Am I having too frequent of interactions? Am I texting with them or calling them or seeing them more than I actually have the capacity to handle? Because emotionally it's a really taxing experience. It could be when I'm with my parent, am I going into those interactions feeling ill-equipped with how to handle things when my parent is abusive or mean or cruel towards me? Do I know how to cope in those situations? Do I know how to identify when I'm getting triggered and how to take a break from the conversation, leave? Are there skills there that I'm lacking that I would benefit from seeking out some support developing in order to navigate these situations in a way that keeps me more safe, that makes me feel more safe So often we think of healing through that black and white lens, and it really is so much more nuanced than that. So much of it comes down to being really curious with ourselves and really listening to what it is that our body is trying to tell us, and taking that information. And when we're not in a heightened emotional state, when we are feeling more grounded, reflecting on that and noticing patterns, and making decisions that prioritize our emotional wellbeing, our capacity, our emotional health These are the types of very nuanced concepts that I go into in more detail inside the Cycle Breakers Vault when we're talking about things like radical acceptance, on the surface, it seems so clearly like acknowledging that your parent is who they are should allow you to feel more in control in interactions with them by not expecting more from them. And while that can be true, it also can be so much more complicated than that. So if you feel like you're getting stuck with some of these concepts, go to confidentboundaries.com/vault to learn more about the course and how it can bring some clarity to some of these more nuanced concepts Thank you again for bearing with me this week as I navigate through this storm going on in my own personal household. As always, I so appreciate you being here 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