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, Torie Wiksell, 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 this week's episode of You're Not Crazy. First, I apologize about getting this episode out a little bit late to you today. It has been quite a week for me lots of technical issues I'm going to tell you guys all about it in just a second but thank you so much for your patience and bearing with me. I have had some really fun, really exciting things happening behind the scenes, and that got a little messy and complicated this weekend. So let's get into it. The first thing that I want to say is that I know that if you've been listening to this podcast since it first started in July, you've kind of followed the scope of what we're doing here. But I also know that we have so many new listeners that are finding us every week. Know that we have so many new listeners that are finding us every week, and so I just want to give a quick catch up to everyone in case you're not super familiar with how we got here today, or how I got here today, how you got here today, how we both got here today.
Torie Wiksell: 1:39
I've been a therapist for close to 12 years now and I've spent a lot of my career working with clients with personality disorders and as things progressed in my practice, I started also working with the partners and family members of clients with personality disorders primarily borderline personality disorder, but also narcissistic personality disorder and I myself grew up in a family where I had a parent with a really unmanaged personality disorder, which at one time I thought was probably BPD. I've really come to learn throughout my own personal healing journey that my mom's issues were probably much more consistent with narcissistic personality disorder. So fast forward a bit. Over the last few years in my therapy private practice I have worked primarily with the adult children of parents with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. I love it. It is my favorite thing to do. I also have a small percentage of my practice that's devoted to clients with obsessive compulsive disorder. I have OCD. It's something that is really important to me that I help make therapy for that more accessible.
Torie Wiksell: 3:01
But because this podcast is not about OCD, we're going to circle back to what my main focus is, which is helping adults navigate their relationships and trauma and healing around dealing with a parent with BPD or narcissistic personality disorder. So I've been doing that for several years in my therapy private practice that's called Tori Wixel Therapy, and throughout that time I've had lots of people reach out to me, finding me through my website and wanting to work together, because this is such a specific niche that I have Not a ton of therapists also specialize in this very specific area, and so what was happening is I would have lots of adults reaching out to me wanting to work together, wanting to pick my brain a bit, and because I'm licensed in California, Oregon and Washington, I was really limited to working with only adults in those three states and I would have to essentially kind of turn people away and say I'm so sorry, I can't really help you. This is kind of my advice on things you might want to look for to find a therapist that can be helped you, but essentially, good luck. And that felt horrible. I think it probably felt really horrible for the people who were reaching out to me wanting to work together and it felt awful to me as someone who has built my life and career around trying to help other people who are struggling and wanting to better themselves, and so early this year I opened up my second company.
Torie Wiksell: 4:43
My second company is called Confident Boundaries and Confident Boundaries is essentially where I do everything that's not therapy. So I self-produce this podcast under Confident Boundaries, I do coaching under Confident Boundaries and I have courses and guides and a bunch of other stuff under Confident Boundaries. So essentially, Tori Wixel Therapy is my therapy practice and I only do therapy through that. And then Confident Boundaries is where everything else happens. So if you're on my email list, it comes from Confident Boundaries. If you're listening to this podcast, it's produced by me at Confident Boundaries and I think you get the idea. So that's kind of how we've gotten here today.
Torie Wiksell: 5:27
Well, through the course of this year in building Confident Boundaries, I have been able to expand my reach and help far more people than I was able to under just my private practice. And that makes me feel so happy, because every time I hear from one of you, every time I work with a coaching client and I'm able to just put down their anxieties a bit and help normalize the feelings that they're experiencing in the context of these are things that so many adults who are trying to break the cycle of trauma and abuse and dysfunction in their own families are feeling too. It just makes me so happy that we're working together to get our society in a healthier place, because it really does have this ripple global effect. When we all work on ourselves, when you work on yourself, when I work on myself in personal therapy and healing and connecting with healthy other people who are on a healing journey, it really does have that positive ripple effect and that makes me really happy. And that's one of the big reasons why I've gone into this field is I want to make the world a better place on this individual and more global scale.
Torie Wiksell: 6:51
Circling back to Confident Boundaries, as I was listing before, I've been able to expand the impact that I have and helping getting information to people like you by doing things like coaching and producing courses and producing this podcast, and that is great. Also, I am a one-woman show and so I solely run my private practice. I solely run Confident Boundaries. I have solely produced the courses and materials and this podcast, and it is fun and it is exciting and it is also a lot of irons in the fire and so I don't want to burn out. I want to be able to continue to do this in a meaningful way, and I don't ever want to get to a place where I'm phoning in anything that I'm doing, because these things are really important and I really am passionate and I really care about them. And so I've been thinking a lot about how I can streamline and simplify the things that I'm doing in a way that makes them at least as helpful as they have been preferably more helpful even and what I've come to the conclusion of is I'm just going to put everything that I do in Confident Boundaries under one umbrella. I know that's a little confusing because it kind of already is under the Confident Boundaries umbrella, but go with me here. So, as of today, I'm officially launching what's called the Confident Boundaries Online Community, and in this community it's going to have everything. It's going to have the Boundaries Roadmap online course. It's going to have all of my guides. It's where I'm going to do live trainings, it's where I'm going to do Q&As, it's where I'm going to be in the community every day talking.
Torie Wiksell: 8:52
There are areas of the community where you can post, and it's really similar to Reddit. So if you're someone that's a Reddit lurker, like I am, this is your cup of tea, I'm sure, and if you're not, it's super easy to get the hang of once you're in there. But I have three different community chat, like Reddit feature or Reddit sections, isk, and those are places if you just need to vent that you can post with other people that get it because they also have a parent with BPD or narcissistic personality disorder. There's a community chat where you can post asking for encouragement if you're working on setting healthy boundaries, if you're thinking about going no contact but you're feeling really guilty about it and you just need someone to be your cheerleader, you can post in that community chat section. There's also a community chat section where you can ask for advice, so you can ask the community for tips for feedback, for support if you're feeling stuck, tips for feedback for support if you're feeling stuck, things that you can try to do differently.
Torie Wiksell: 10:06
This is intended to connect people that have similar experiences that are so unique with other people who are also on the journey of healing, and I don't think that there's another community like this. At least I don't know of it. I know that throughout the years when I work with therapy clients, when I work with coaching clients, this has been something that so many people have said. I really want to find a place where I can connect with other people that are also going through this, because it just feels so isolating and I feel crazy at times and other people don't get it, and while my friends love me, while my partner cares about me, they just really don't get it, and I am hoping that this is that place, and so I would love for you guys to check it out. I priced it really excessively. It's $29 a month, that's it, but only until January 1st, and then it's going up to $39 a month, and so if you are interested in connecting with other adults who are in a similar family dynamic, who are also on the journey of healing, or if you are interested in connecting with other awesome listeners of this podcast, head over to confidentboundariescom. Slash join to find out even more about the online community. I'm so, so excited because this is really an opportunity to help teach the things that I talk about right.
Torie Wiksell: 11:36
When you have access to the boundaries roadmap as part of this community, you get the information and the skills to help you set boundaries effectively with a parent with BPD or narcissistic personality disorder, because it's just not the same as setting boundaries with someone that doesn't have those boundaries, those traits. You get resources that are really tangible, that are effective. You're not having to Google right. You're not having to spend hours and hours and hours looking through the internet and reading different things and trying to figure out how to piece things together in a way that will work and that will help alleviate your stress levels. You don't have to do that anymore because you can come to this one single resource and you can connect with other people who get it. You can vent without judgment or without someone minimizing what you're going through. You can ask for advice. You can be someone else's cheerleader. You can say, hey, I've been there, this is what I did, it seemed to have gone well for me. Or hey, I've been there, this is what I did. I wouldn't recommend it, and this is why you can connect. You can ask me questions about your personal situation. You can just do things that we don't have the ability to do here on this podcast, and so I really hope that you'll check it out.
Torie Wiksell: 13:00
Like I said, if you join before January 1st, you get locked into that $29 a month price for the lifetime of your membership Starting January 1st. It's going to go up to $39 a month. There's also an option to purchase a year membership and essentially you get one month free when you do that, so the price for that is $319 for the entire year. You get essentially 12 months of the membership for the price of 11. So I'm going to post the links on the podcast notes and I'm also going to post links to the $29 a month option and also the annual subscription option, so that it's really easy, it's really accessible and you guys can get in. It's really exciting. We have a couple of people who have already joined. I'm moving people from the Patreon page over into the community and so if you sign up right now, you might see a couple of people have already made their way in there. This will be a transition that I'm rolling out.
Torie Wiksell: 14:04
Oh, back to my story of this weekend and it being really chaotic. So in order to create this community, I had to move my website to a different platform. The previous platform that I was using doesn't have the capacity or the capabilities to create this type of online community, and so over the weekend and over the course of the last week, I've been working on doing that transition and move. As I've mentioned numerous times, I'm not the most technologically savvy person. I'm also not completely inept either. I'm like you know. It's not a black and white thing. I'm somewhere in the middle. So I thought I was competent enough to do this and I knew it would be a lot of work also.
Torie Wiksell: 14:49
Well, I ended up crashing my website along the way, and yesterday I completely lost access to my email account all day, but I didn't realize that until I thought it was very weird that I wasn't getting any emails. I was sending them, but I wasn't receiving any, which is very atypical throughout the course of a day. So I learned that I had somehow lost connection to my email. Now the website is back up and it's working, and it's working quite well. My email is also working now.
Torie Wiksell: 15:22
So if you get a duplicate email from me today that I sent you yesterday, please just give me a little grace there. I want to make sure that everything I sent out yesterday actually did make it. So you might be getting a follow up email from me today. Or if you got one yesterday and it didn't make its way through, just feel free to reply and just say hey, I got this, no need to send again.
Torie Wiksell: 15:46
But, regardless, this has been a journey, but I think that this will really simplify everything on my end so that I can continue to devote time and energy to creating really quality content for you guys.
Torie Wiksell: 16:02
I want to make sure that, when I'm creating these podcast episodes, when I am in the Confident Boundaries online community, that I'm showing up in a really meaningful way, and the only way for me to do that is to create and produce content that is sustainable for me to do long term, and so, by joining the Confident Boundaries online community, you're helping to support this free podcast. You're helping to give me the ability to devote time and energy to creating resources that really help this community and help grow this community, and so I am so grateful for everyone who has been a part of this journey. I'm so grateful for everyone who has taken the time to write to me and share a bit about their story and some of the challenges that they're experiencing. You guys are such an amazing community, and I am so honored to be a part of it, and I'm really, really looking forward to getting to know you even better over in the Confident Boundaries online community, so I hope you'll join me over there.
Torie Wiksell: 17:16
I hope you'll say hey, and don't forget to check the show notes for those links. I'll see you guys next week. Bye, 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.
