Navigating Emotions After Growing Up in a Dysfunctional Family
The You're Not Crazy Podcast
42
Navigating Emotions After Growing Up in a Dysfunctional Family
You're Not Crazy Podcast
Episode #42 - Navigating Emotions After Growing Up in a Dysfunctional Family
18:33
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In this week's episode:
Ever been told to "sit with your emotions" but had no idea what that really means? If you grew up in a dysfunctional family, you’re not alone. In this episode, I break down this common advice into three practical steps that you can use, no matter how clueless you feel right now.
Learn how to expand your emotional vocabulary, reconnect with your body’s responses, and process difficult emotions in compassionate ways. It’s never too late to develop emotional intelligence, even if you didn’t get these skills growing up.
I also mention the "Before Boundaries" mini-course, available for $29 atconfidentboundaries.com, designed to help you understand what you need to know before setting boundaries with a BPD or NPD parent. Check out the free boundaries workshop and bonus episodes here:https://www.confidentboundaries.com/
This episode is about learning to process childhood emotions in a healthy, mature way.
Welcome to You're Not Crazy, a podcast for the adult children of parents with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. I'm your host, tori Wixel, a therapist and coach with over a decade of experience in the mental health field. Now let's jump in. Hi and welcome back to the podcast. This week we have a really good episode, if I can toot my own horn ahead. But before we dive into the heart of our episode, let's talk about a few housekeeping things.
Torie Wiksell:
I just posted a new mini course. It's called Before Boundaries. It's available in the Confident Boundaries online community and it's available if you are not a part of the community. You can purchase the mini course alone for $29. Just head over to confidentboundariescom. I'll throw that in the show notes as well. This mini course is what you need to know about having a parent with BPD and MPD before you're ready to set boundaries. It's really easy. It's a quick. That's why I call it a mini course. There's a 15 minute video and a really short workbook with a couple of worksheets and a journal prompt in there to help you really digest what it means to have a parent with BPD or MPD and to break down what aspects of your own relationship with your BPD or MPD parent or your parent who has BPD or MPD traits, what aspects of those personality disorders come into play in your specific situation and your specific relationship. So head on over to confidentboundariescom. You can sign up for the community and get access to it in the on-demand library or, like I said, you can purchase it directly for $29, but it is a great, really short, really quick resource in order to make sure you fully grasp the complexities of both of these disorders and how they impact boundary setting and how they impact boundary setting. So that is something really exciting.
Torie Wiksell:
What else has been happening? This week, I released a bonus episode of the You're Not Crazy podcast where I talked about family rules and family systems. So if that's something that interests you, definitely check it out. My free boundaries workshop is officially up and running on demand. If you haven't already taken it, I definitely encourage you to check it out. It is less than an hour. I think it's about 45 or 50 minutes long and in it I go through literally how to set boundaries with a parent with BPD or MPD. Everything that I'm talking about today you can find at confidentfoundriescom, but I'll throw the unique links to everything in the show notes as well. Let's dive into today's episode.
Torie Wiksell:
Today, I decided to talk about what it means when therapists say we should all sit with our emotions. Growing up in a dysfunctional family, we didn't talk about emotional intelligence much. I imagine your family doesn't either or if they do that, it's very skewed and misrepresented. Something that people with narcissistic personality disorder love to do is to take therapy words and concepts and completely misuse them in an effort to manipulate other people. So it's quite possible that emotional intelligence was talked about quite often as you were growing up, but just in a very inaccurate and harmful way.
Torie Wiksell:
With that said, I don't think any of us grew up being taught how to sit with our emotions, and I know, as an adult, part of my own healing journey has been how to identify my own emotions and process them and regulate them and learn to tolerate them in a way that is helpful and healthy. And I know for so long I would hear people say okay, you should just sit with your emotions or you need to sit with your emotions, and my immediate thought was what the fuck does that mean? What does that mean? Sit with your emotions? Okay, I am unhappy. I am really stressed out. I am overwhelmed. I am sitting here like what is supposed to happen. What is the purpose of that? I'm just going crazy. I don't understand what this means and how this is supposed to help at all, and I think it's a really complicated idea. If you didn't grow up with emotional regulation, distress, tolerance being modeled for you, I think, if you didn't see your parents working through their own emotions in a healthy way, the idea of sitting with your emotions and having it be helpful sounds insane. It sounds completely crazy. So what does it actually mean when therapists say we should sit with our emotions, you should sit with your emotions.
Torie Wiksell:
What does that mean? I think it means a couple of things. It means one being able to identify what you're feeling, your different range of emotions. Being able to say not just I'm feeling good or I'm feeling bad, or I'm feeling okay but I'm feeling happy, I'm feeling bad, or I'm feeling okay but I'm feeling happy, I'm feeling hopeful, I'm feeling apprehensive, I'm feeling content, I'm feeling cautious, I'm feeling nervous. I'm feeling all of these different things that we could be feeling and then recognizing in our bodies.
Torie Wiksell:
How does that physically feel for me? Where do I hold those emotions? Am I feeling a bit nauseous? Am I feeling hot and sweaty and clammy. Am I feeling agitated? Am I feeling fidgety? Am I feeling prickly? Am I feeling tense? What am I feeling in my body when I'm experiencing different emotions? And after noticing those things, how can I allow my body, how can I help my body move through that emotion and move through this, instead of trying to shove it away or push it away or make it go away? That really, at least when I'm talking about sitting with your emotions, that's the experience, that's the process that I'm talking about. It's the ability to identify what it is that I'm feeling, to recognize how I hold that in my body and to help myself move through that emotion.
Torie Wiksell:
And so I want to break down those three things today, because my guess is that a lot of the listeners of this podcast would also benefit from learning how to sit with their emotions. I mean, everyone would benefit from learning how to sit with their emotions if they don't know how to already. But my guess is, since we have this commonality of dysfunctional families amongst myself and all of our podcast listeners, my guess is many of you are probably struggling with this too. So, as far as emotion identification goes, I think that I recently talked about this on the main podcast, but forgive me if I did not. I'm going to repeat it just in case I talked about this in the community or on the bonus podcast episode, because I want to make sure that everyone's on the same page.
Torie Wiksell:
When we're talking about identifying our emotions, there are a few things that can be really helpful to figuring out what it is that you're feeling, because it's so easy to be very black and white about I'm feeling good, I'm feeling bad, I'm feeling good, I'm feeling bad, I'm feeling blah, I'm feeling okay, I'm feeling whatever. Those aren't emotions. Those aren't very helpful things to identify. They don't give us a lot of information on how we can help ourselves or why we might be feeling a certain way. So when you are working on getting more in touch with your emotions, a really helpful thing to do is to set a timer to go off a couple of times a day, maybe three to four and just randomly, and do that for an entire week. And every time that timer goes off, I want you to ask yourself what emotions am I experiencing right now? What emotions are coming up for me?
Torie Wiksell:
Google emotion identification chart If you don't know if all you can think is good or bad, or happy or sad, or if you can only think of very basic emotions. Google emotion identification chart A chart will come up. There will be lots of images. Click on any of them, lots of different emoji faces and that will give you an array of emotion words to choose from. This is so important because it's really important to be able to identify what you're feeling in order to help yourself learn how to manage your stress better, how to help yourself when you're feeling flooded. It's so important to get more in touch with what it feels like to experience different emotions for you. It also is really helpful when you're thinking about setting boundaries, because it's really important to know how the status quo is really affecting you emotionally and if all you know is good or bad, that doesn't give you a lot of information to say what boundaries might be helpful for me to set for my own mental health and my own emotional well-being. So, going back, we are identifying our emotions, okay, so we've identified them right or we're working on it.
Torie Wiksell:
Number two is recognizing where those emotions come up for us, how we hold them in our bodies. This is really important, I know for me myself. I am super great at analyzing everything from an intellectual level. I am a deep thinker, I've got lots of thoughts, I can think through things very quickly, I'm a very thoughtful person, I am constantly thinking, my mind is constantly going and I'm very good at that. What I'm not good at is experiencing my emotions and sitting with them, and that's because of many reasons. One I also have OCD, as I've talked about on this podcast, so that definitely makes it more challenging for me to sit with my emotions.
Torie Wiksell:
Number two I grew up in a family where I was consistently and repeatedly told that my emotions were wrong, that I was wrong, that they were bad, that they were an inconvenience, that they were intentionally inconvenient or just plain wrong, and that creates this disconnect between what our emotions are and how we're holding those in our body. If I am told throughout childhood and growing up that what I believe to be sadness is wrong or it's not appropriate for a given occasion, then my brain's going to try to make sense of that and figure out. Well then I guess when I'm feeling this way, I shouldn't be, or I'm not, or whatever the compensating strategy is, it's going to come up with a new rule that makes sense for my given situation. So, as an adult who's learning how to sit with your own emotions, it's really important to re-familiarize yourself with how different emotions feel for you in your body, how you carry them, how you hold them, how they impact you physically, and so a really great way to do this is when you're doing those emotion check-ins throughout the day, doing a quick body scan and starting at your forehead and working all the way down to your fingertips and your toes and just going body part by body part how's my forehead feeling, how's my jaw feeling, how's my tongue feeling, how's my neck feeling, my shoulders, arms, legs, stomach, chest, knees Well, can you feel your knees? I don't know. I think you get my point though my calves, my feet, my toes, my fingers, really tapping into all of these different parts of your body and really just taking note of how you're feeling there and really trying to recognize how you yourself, as a person, experiences the emotions that are coming up for you right then. And then the third part that I talked about helping your body, helping yourself, move through these emotions. A couple of things are really helpful with this One.
Torie Wiksell:
It's super important to remember that emotions themselves are not a problem. Growing up, your parents' emotions were not the problem. It was the way that they behaved and reacted in response to those emotions that was problematic. It is still the way that they respond to and react to their emotions that either is or is not problematic. It is not the emotions themselves that are dangerous. It is oftentimes the way people process or avoid their emotions that are harmful. So it's really reminding yourself that it is not bad or dangerous for you to experience distressing emotions, whether that's anger, rage, sadness, guilt, all of these things. These are all parts of being human and while they can be really distressing emotions to feel, they're not dangerous to feel.
Torie Wiksell:
Also, it's reminding yourself that no emotion can last for forever. I could not be hysterically upset right now and five years from now be that same level of hysterically upset. It's just not possible, it's not humanly possible, to maintain that intensity of that emotion for years. It's just not. And so I think really reminding yourself that emotions do come and go in waves, even though when you're dealing with a tremendous amount of stress and trauma, it feels like it lasts forever On a minute-to-minute level.
Torie Wiksell:
That's not true, and a lot of sitting with our emotions is really teaching ourselves how emotions work and what is a myth that we believe about emotions and what is the reality? Is a myth that we believe about emotions and what is the reality? Also, really, going into that self-compassion of if I'm feeling really panicky right now or really agitated, can I get up and go grab a drink of water, can I take a few deep breaths, can I go outside, can I help my body ground and calm and recognize that I'm safe right now, even though emotionally I don't feel like I am? It's really showing yourself that compassion and kindness and taking the time and exerting the energy into helping yourself feel more grounded and capable of sitting with and moving through that emotion. So, in a nutshell, sitting with your emotions is something that takes practice and effort, but it is completely doable. All you have to do, all you have to do. That makes it sound so easy. It's not, but what to do is to identify your emotions, check in with your body, notice where you're feeling them and then offer yourself compassion and help yourself move through them.
Torie Wiksell:
With that said, that is our episode for today. Again, you can find me over at the Confident Boundaries online community, over at Instagram, at Tori at Confident Boundaries, and make sure to check out the show notes for links to everything I mentioned at the top of the show. Thanks so much, you guys. I'll see you next week. Thanks so much for joining me for another episode of You're Not Crazy. If you like the podcast, please leave a review and rate us five stars. It helps so much and make sure to check the show notes for links to bonus podcast episodes and other ways I can help. See you soon.
About the Show
Welcome to You're Not Crazy, the podcast for adult children of parents with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. I’m Torie Wiksell, therapist, coach, and cycle breaker- here to guide you through the complexities of growing up in a dysfunctional family each week.
If you’re tired of wondering, “Am I the problem?”, or struggling through gaslighting, emotional manipulation, and setting boundaries with toxic parents, you’re in the right place. This show is here to help you heal, break free from codependency, and reclaim your emotional health — whether that means setting boundaries, going no-contact, or finding peace in your relationships.
You’re not crazy and you're not alone. I'm so glad you're here.
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