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Torie Wiksell: 0:14 

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 guys. Welcome back to the podcast this week. So today I'm going to get a bit more personal than I typically do on the podcast. I know that sometimes I share little tidbits and anecdotes about my own story and my own journey in this world of narcissistic and BPD parents, but today I'm going to spend the podcast talking all about me and my stories.

Torie Wiksell: 1:01 

So my daughter recently had a birthday and it's really interesting to be a parent when I didn't have a great relationship In all reality. I had a very messed up relationship with my own mom. So, as I'm sure many of you can relate, if you're parents yourself, or even if you're not and have just had a complicated relationship with your own mom, becoming a mom myself has been interesting. So a little backstory my mom actually passed away from breast cancer when I was in my early 20s and I'm not going to go super deep into that right now. But that poses a whole other realm of issues when you have a complicated relationship, a toxic relationship with your parent, and then they die when you're fairly young. It doesn't make things easier per se, it just makes them complicated in a different way, and so I definitely am happy to talk a bit more about that at some time in the future. But for today's podcast, going back to my daughter's birthday, she recently had a birthday and it was just great and she's just so cute and loving and inquisitive and kind and all of these wonderful things. And the really interesting thing about becoming a mom myself, when I had such a dysfunctional relationship with my own mom, is that I've been surprised how much angrier I have gotten towards my own mom throughout this process.

Torie Wiksell: 2:54 

Becoming a mom myself. I can't imagine not doing everything in my power to work on myself in a way that allowed me to show up for my daughter in the way that she needs me to, and that's a lifelong journey for me. I'm not going to all of a sudden reach this end point where I'm just the best mom on the face of the earth, because that is delusional. It's going to be something I constantly have to work at for a ton of reasons One being I'm a human being and two, being I have this really complicated backstory when it comes to how I was raised and how I was parented, and so it's really interesting that, being a parent myself, I know how hard it is to be a parent. It's so hard and if you're parents, I'm sure you get it. It is really hard and I love my daughter more than anything in the world and it's still extremely hard. And it's hard because it brings up stuff for me and stuff that has nothing really to do with her, and it challenges me to be really on top of regulating my own emotions and holding space for her and being very mindful of my own emotional capacity and coping in the things that I'm saying and how I'm saying them and my body language. And I don't expect to be a perfect parent. I know I'm not a perfect parent, but I'm trying really hard to be the best parent that I can be, and what I have found is that I get very angry when I really take time to sit and think about how much my own mom was unwilling to do that for me. So I'm going to tell you a little story here that I don't share with many people.

Torie Wiksell: 5:02 

My parents had a very drawn out, messy, complicated, chaotic divorce, and it went on for a very, very long time and was very stressful and chaotic. But throughout this time my parents and my sister and I all went on a vacation to Mexico, as one does when parents are getting divorced. I can't explain it, but anyway. So my mom and I at some point, I was probably around 14 or 15. My mom and I at some point are sitting on the beach in Mexico talking and my mom just says I think I'm going to move to Indonesia. My mom was a teacher and teach there and we lived in Southern California, and so this felt a little confusing to me and so I said to her you mean, when my younger sister goes to college, that's what you'll do? And she said no, very calmly, no, I think I might do it now. Meanwhile I was 14, 15 years old, my sister was younger than me, we both lived with our mother, and so it was kind of a very life-altering comment that was made just very nonchalantly comment that was made just very nonchalantly and it really upset me, it really traumatized me and it really fed into so much of my fear of abandonment that wasn't triggered only by this one interaction, but this one interaction is so reflective of the very callous and insensitive ways my mom would just throw out, casually, abandon emotionally and physically.

Torie Wiksell: 6:54 

And so many years later, while my mom was still alive, she and I were talking in the kitchen one day and I had been in therapy a few years. At this point I was an adult, I was in college, but I was back home, for whatever reason, and she and I were talking in the kitchen and I decided to bring it up, to give her the benefit, hurt me, to try to move forward in some way. And so I brought it up and I said this situation has really upset me and it's really bothered me. And she said well, I only said that because I wanted your dad to tell me not to go. What, excuse me? Like just, you can't see my face right now, but it's just like mushed up.

Torie Wiksell: 8:00 

And the initial interaction that we had at the beach that day was really disturbing. It freaked me out. It made me panic about where I was going to go, who I was going to live with, how I could take care of myself and my sister. It put me into this spiral panic that I often went to as I was growing up, into this spiral panic that I often went to as I was growing up and as a young adult who was trying to figure out this dynamic and create a healthier life for myself and apply the things I was learning in therapy to my own life.

Torie Wiksell: 8:42 

Going to her and having her acknowledge that she remembered this incident and to have zero, zero emotion, to not be able to consider anything other than the fact that she wanted my dad to ask her not to move halfway around the world, to not care about the emotional impact that her throwaway comment caused had on me, I think really says so much. It's not just about the initial interaction. It's about the fact that she did not care. She lacked complete empathy, she truly did not care how much pain she caused to me, and I think for a very long time I have been much more comfortable identifying my mom as someone with borderline personality disorder and I think a major component of that is that I know with BPD that there is therapy that works if you put in the work and the effort and there isn't a lack of empathy with BPD. There is a lot of other chaos and there is a lot of other trauma and abuse that can happen in respect to that parent-child relationship.

Torie Wiksell: 10:16 

But I think really, if I'm being honest with myself, to say that my mom had narcissistic traits felt a lot safer emotionally than to say that my mom was a narcissist, because it feels horrible to think that the person who is supposed to be this constant caregiver, someone that you rely on in your life, really does not care, did not care about you Other than in regards to how that could impact them, is a really hard pill to swallow and I've been, you know, a therapist for a while now. I've been doing my own personal therapy for even longer and it's a hard one. It's really hard, and it's become so much clearer to me, being a parent myself, just how little, if any, empathy my mom had for me. It was much more this idea and this image of being a good parent, of coming off a certain way, but in the reality of showing up for me emotionally and consistently. My mom had no desire to do that whatsoever and I think for a long time, just identifying that my mom had BPD and that she was a BPD patient with some narcissistic traits just felt a lot better.

Torie Wiksell: 12:02 

But the reality is my mom had a lot of BPD traits but I think that in reality. What she really had which was a much bigger problem for not only her but for me and how it impacted me growing up was the narcissistic personality disorder, because narcissists are so good about reading people and knowing how to manipulate people, especially people that really care and people that have a lot of empathy. They're so good about knowing how to manipulate them in a way that they feel like that person really cares about them. And it's just so dark and it's so toxic and it's so perplexing to me that you would become a parent when you don't have the real willingness to put your child ahead of everything else, all of your needs and wants, in order to try to provide a life where they can learn who they are and feel comfortable being themselves. But that really wasn't the relationship that I had with my mom. My mom was infamous for saying to me if I told you to go left, you would go right just to spite me. And the reality is we were just very different people and it wasn't to spite her, it was just because that was the direction I was wanting to go.

Torie Wiksell: 13:49 

And I think with my own mom, something that was a big trigger for her, if I had to guess, was that when we were kids, I was like her doppelganger. If you look at pictures of both of us up until the time we're about five or six, we look like twins. She had blonde hair and blue eyes and I have dark hair and hazel eyes, but aside from that we look identical and I think that was a very big trigger for her that I looked so much like her that she saw me as this extension of herself. And yet I was my own person with my own personality, and I think that this really created an issue for us long term where she would have this very dysfunctional push pull with me and it made me feel like I was either the greatest person in the world or a piece of dirt and garbage. And there are just so many dysfunctional interactions that I can recall.

Torie Wiksell: 15:04 

You know her leaving me at events for an hour or two because she had to work. She was a school teacher. I don't know how many school teachers out there leave their kids standing regularly alone after school or work for a couple of hours. But that was my reality and there was always a justification for why. Something upsetting happened to me she would show up at football games when I was a cheerleader in high school and corner me like behind the bleachers type deal where no one else was around, and just scream at me and yell at me and tell me what a horrible person I was. And it was just this constant anger and then pretending in public that she was a different way and it's exhausting.

Torie Wiksell: 16:02 

And I think becoming a parent myself has really woven a thread through a lot of those interactions and memories, reframed my experiences with her in a way that I no longer have space, emotional space, to offer this benefit of the doubt and minimize some of her abusive behaviors, as I have in the past, because I just don't care enough to exert the emotional and physical energy that is required of me to do so. I would much rather invest that on working on myself and continuing my healing journey and showing up as a healthy parent for my own daughter. And the reason why I wanted to share this with you today, aside from it being very timely with my daughter's recent birthday, is that I imagine that there are others of you out there who are really struggling to accept your parent for who they are, because you deserve to be loved and valued and cherished and you deserve to have had someone in your life that loved you unconditionally as a parent should and you deserve to be able to trust that, when your parent is showing you love and compassion, that that is genuine and it is not a manipulation tactic. And, at the same time, if you are in a parent-child relationship similar to mine, I think it's so important that you work on getting to a place of real acceptance with who they are and basing that acceptance not on my personal story but on your pattern of experiences and interactions with them. And it's really important because it does take a lot of mental and emotional and physical energy to do these mental gymnastics, where we try to look at the bright side, find the good, really hope for that redemption story right when they wake up one day and something finally gets to them and they get it.

Torie Wiksell: 18:48 

It clicks, because when you're dealing with a parent like mine aside from the fact that my mom is no longer alive when you're dealing with a parent like mine, she had opportunities to have that aha moment, right Like when I approached her years later about how that comment on the beach impacted me. She had the opportunity to try to repair our relationship and yet she didn't care, and that's not something that changes. When you don't have empathy for causing your child emotional pain and suffering when it's brought to your attention, you are not going to develop empathy. You might develop an ability to manipulate your child into thinking that you have empathy when it serves you and you want them to do something, but you are not going to develop empathy. And so, if you are relating at all to this story, if you are in a place where you are in a place where you are battling between who your parent truly is and who you wish they were, I want to really encourage you to just be honest with yourself on what empathy they've shown to you and when you have tried to repair that relationship. How did that go? How did they respond when you brought to their attention that you were hurt? Did they care? Were they apologetic? Did they take accountability?

Torie Wiksell: 20:31 

Accepting that my mother lacked empathy and, truly, at her soul, did not care, how her actions impacted me, has been incredibly hard and incredibly freeing, and it really really helps me put into perspective of how different I am than her and how different my relationship with my own daughter is than the relationship that she and I had. And so, while it is so hard to really accept the reality of my relationship with her growing up and all that that entailed. It is so freeing to not have to worry about becoming her and repeating the same patterns with my own daughter, because I put in the effort and, yeah, I'm going to fuck up, and when I do fuck up I'm going to try to realize it and repair that relationship. And on the times that I don't, my daughter comes back to me. I'm certainly going to hear her out and I'm going to try to understand where that pain came from and try to repair that relationship to the best that I'm able to, and that's something that's completely within my control.

Torie Wiksell: 21:55 

Well, I know today's episode was a bit different than the past couple of episodes have been on here, but I appreciate you guys lending an ear to hear me ramble about my own story and where I am in my healing journey with my narcissistic mom. I'll see you guys next week. Thanks so much for joining me for another week of You're Not Crazy. If you like the podcast, please make sure to rate us five stars and leave a review. It helps so much. And make sure to check the show notes for discounts and updates of what's going on in my world. Okay, I'll see you next week.