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 episode of the You're Not Crazy podcast. So I'm just gonna start by saying yes, this episode is getting out to you quite late in the day on Tuesday. I apologize for that. The guide still has not made an appearance. If you're on my email list, you haven't heard from me in a couple of weeks, and that is just how my July is going. So on the glass half full side of things, I am feeling physically 100% back to my normal self, so that is very wonderful. But life-wise, personal-wise, July has been complete chaos and for so many reasons. So anyways, this is really an opportunity to practice what I preach in flexibility and what I've been talking about in recognizing what my capacity is versus what I am capable of. But getting this podcast episode out to you is a high priority on my list, and if you are part of the private feed, you will be getting an episode out today, and you will still be getting your second episode out before the end of the month. So thank you guys for bearing with me this very chaotic July. But let's jump into the episode Okay. Today I wanna talk about coping skills. Coping skills are something that is very interesting, and in the past many something years on therapy/mental health social media, they've gotten a very bad reputation, and I think it's because people lack nuance when they talk about things like this. In a nutshell, is deep breathing going to solve trauma? No. No, it is not. It is absolutely not. But can deep breathing provide you some value as a cycle breaker as you're trying to navigate your complicated family dynamics and break the cycle and heal from the chaos that you grew up in? Yes. Coping skills absolutely have value. They are not the end-all be-all. They are not going to stop active abuse that's happening. They, of course, are not going to make you feel hunky-dory and super happy and jazzed if your parent is berating you or gaslighting you in the moment, but coping skills are still really important. This is nuance that I think gets lost a lot of the time when we're talking about mental health these days. When we're talking about dealing with stressful and dysfunctional family dynamics, it is layered, it is complicated, and there are many parts of healing and therapy and learning how to navigate these situations and set healthy boundaries There are many parts of that healing process And if you pull any of them in isolation, they're not going to be incredibly helpful. They're not gonna be this magic pill to healing. If you practice radical acceptance, but you don't work on any other aspect of processing your trauma or learning how to cope w- with, or even identify your own emotions, there's gonna be limits to how far that takes you, right? The same is true for coping skills. When I think about coping skills, I'm thinking about active things that we can do to help ourselves, to help our bodies in the moment when we're feeling incredibly overwhelmed or stressed or tense or anxious Things that we can do, like skills, that help us cope. And so there are a lot of different coping skills. I would consider walking or running a coping skill. I would consider deep breathing if you're someone who's learned box breathing, the breathe in through your nose for four counts, hold for four counts, breathe out through your mouth for four counts, hold for four counts, and repeat. Four, four, four, four. Four? I think that was four fours. Box breathing is a great one. You can do belly breathing if that's something that you've learned. Grounding exercises are excellent coping skills. Paying attention to your senses, so taking a cold drink of water, holding something cold in your hand, touching something, like even your desktop, and just feeling how that feels, the sensations, focusing your attention back onto what's actually happening right here and right now instead of allowing your brain to dissociate and spiral and run a million miles a minute. All of these things are helpful. All of these things are useful. While you don't need to do every single coping skill, you need some coping skills. We all do And this is where it gets really complicated and tricky because Like I said earlier, your coping skills are not going to heal your trauma. Your coping skills are not going to stop you from being upset when your parent is continuing to be emotionally abusive towards you. Coping skills don't have that power, but that doesn't make them unimportant, and that doesn't mean that they're not helpful and valuable When you're thinking about your own coping skills, something I think is really helpful is looking at them as tools to help you regulate when you're feeling emotionally flooded or triggered or activated in some way. These are active things that you can do to help your body in those moments. And some coping skills are gonna be more accessible at certain times than others, right? Deep breathing is one that's gonna be pretty accessible to you no matter where you are or what you're doing. Same with sensory grounding things. Even if you're in a meeting at work, you can still put your hand on your glass of water or your desk or a pen and bring your attention back to how that physically feels, what the s- shape is, what the texture is, what the sensation is. These are skills that can work in a variety of situations. Now, are you gonna be able to leave that meeting and go for a run all the time? No, probably not. So while running or even going for a walk, while those are incredibly helpful coping skills, or they can be for a lot of people, they're not always gonna be the most accessible ones to you. And that's why it's also important to have a variety of coping skills in your pocket. And the reason why I want to be a cheerleader for coping skills today is because I think that In the last many years, we're becoming more trauma-informed, and that is a really good thing because growing up with a parent who has narcissistic or borderline personality disorder involves a lot of trauma And at the same time, what I don't love that I'm seeing with this more trauma-informed conversation that we're having is that there's like this demonization Of things like coping skills or even cognitive behavioral therapy. And that's not good because healing from complex dysfunctional family dynamics is layered, and there is absolutely a place in that healing for CBT and forms of CBT. There are also a lot of different forms of cognitive behavioral therapies. There is absolutely a place for coping skills. It is not just about processing your trauma. We have to develop ways to help our bodies navigate through tricky emotions and how those feel in our bodies. That is what coping skills are useful for. We have to learn healthy ways to look at navigating through the world and through life. Those are things that CBT can be really helpful with. And when you grow up with an emotionally immature parent, a narcissistic parent, a parent with unmanaged borderline personality disorder, you don't see that. That's not modeled for you. You don't learn it And so while I'm very grateful to hear more conversations about trauma and processing trauma and the impact of trauma and coping with it and living with it and healing it, I don't love the demonization of these other really important and really useful tools that we still need. It's not like one replaces the other. CBT on itself is not okay when you grow up in this type of family dynamic. It definitely has its limitations, but that doesn't make it bad, right? This goes back to flexible thinking and the nuance. These situations are really complicated, they're really layered, and so is healing from them It's how I talked about some podcast episodes ago, making sure you're meeting your basic needs is really important because as a cycle breaker, we learn how to override what it is that we're feeling, how our bodies are doing, what our bodies are trying to communicate to us. And because of all of that, it's really easy to either forget to take care of our basic needs or to neglect them, to push through them, to prioritize productivity or fixing problems for other people over those things. But we're human, and we've gotta make sure that we're resting and eating and nourishing our bodies and moving them and taking care of ourselves and showering and practicing these things that are vital for our daily functioning and that are going to greatly impede our ability to navigate stressful events. Because if we're really wanting to give ourselves a fair shot at showing up as the cycle breaker that we want to be, navigating very complicated family dynamics and setting boundaries and doing hard things We've gotta have a foundation to do that, and part of that foundation involves basic, meeting your basic needs, and part of that foundation involves learning skills that help you help your body when you're feeling really overwhelmed and stressed out, that allow you to coach yourself into a place where you're a bit more present and grounded and focused and capable of processing what it is that's actually happening right now All of these things have a place. All of them are useful. So this is just my little reminder to you that, yeah, these situations are super complicated, they're super layered, they're super nuanced, and there are a lot of aspects to healing So if you don't know off the top of your head what your go-to coping skills are, that might be worth spending some time reflecting on and thinking about, and if you're in therapy, talking with your therapist about, because these are things that are on the easier side of healing. These are skills that are easier to identify. And while they're not easy to practice and implement and start to get confident and master, they're far easier than other aspects of healing. They're far easier than setting boundaries, and they're going to help you when you do hard things like set boundaries or try to approach a situation with your parent in a different way. These things are gonna help you because those situations are really activating, and they're really emotionally triggering, and it's going to allow you to help your body get through those moments a little more effectively Hopefully the guide will be coming out this week. I'm not gonna make you another promise because this month has just really been chaos. Thank you guys so much for tuning in for another episode of the podcast, and I'll talk to 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