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 the podcast this week. I am super excited to be back talking with you, although I am a little sleepy. If you are in the US and in one of the states where the time just changed, I am really feeling for you.
Torie Wiksell: 0:50
This one really throws me, and I feel like that's probably true for most people. It is a tough one. It's not only tough because of the hour lost, but it really throws my entire internal schedule just with the longer days all of a sudden. It's a really weird one for me to adjust to, so I'm definitely feeling really out of it. I'm not necessarily sleep-deprived—I went to bed fairly early—but I am definitely adjusting.
Torie Wiksell: 1:20
So first things first, I wanted to address there not being a YouTube episode today. If you're someone who has started to watch the podcast on YouTube, I apologize, but over the past week, I've realized that I don't like doing YouTube. I just don't. I can't really tell you why. I'm not exactly sure myself. I'm on camera all day long, so I don't necessarily think that's the sole reason. I am on camera when I'm doing therapy sessions. I'm on camera when I'm doing coaching sessions or in the community or on social media, so I don't necessarily know that's the reason. However, I have loved doing the podcast up until the past few weeks. The past few weeks I have found myself dreading it, which is really a bummer, because I love this podcast and I don't want to dread it, and I've been trying to figure out what is going on. And the reality is I just really didn't want to film it for YouTube. So I don't know why I apologize if that's something that you're into, but when I kind of made that connection, I was like, well, you know what? We're getting rid of the YouTube. Then, because I love doing this podcast and I'm so appreciative to all of you who have found the podcast and reached out and told me that you love it too, and I am committed to showing up my best self every week and bringing you really quality content that you can depend on. And in order to do that, I have to love what I'm doing. And so, no more YouTube. I am recommitted to the audio-only version of the podcast, and I'm already feeling much better, even though I'm pretty sleepy today, but I'm still feeling way better. So no more YouTube, not for me. But the podcast shall live on as long as you will allow it to. Don't worry, as I always say, no matter anything else going on in my world. I love doing the podcast and I intend to do it for as long as you'll listen to me talk. So here we are today.
Torie Wiksell: 3:26
I wanted to reflect on this past year. I opened my second company, Confident Boundaries, a little over a year ago in February of last year, and before that I had my private practice for several years and I know in the bonus podcast episodes in the community I had my private practice for several years and I know in the bonus podcast episodes in the community I've talked a little bit about starting the podcast and behind the scenes with that, but I don't actually think that I've talked about it on the main show and so I wanted to spend some time today just kind of talking you guys through how this podcast came to be, how I branched out side of therapy, although I'm still very much in therapy and the therapy world and I intend to be for, hopefully, decades and decades to come, but just a little evolution of how I got here, how we got here and what things are looking like moving forward. So I started doing therapy in 2013 as a grad student and it is wild to think that it has been that long. I still envision myself as a very young therapist I relatively am, but not quite as young as I was fresh out of grad school in my 20s. A lot has changed in my career as I've grown professionally and personally and shifted into private practice and really shifted my focus to working with the adult children of parents with BPD and narcissistic personality disorders, and so, while I have been pretty focused in on working with this particular area for gosh years now, so I think we can probably all agree that this is a very specific niche. It is, it's a very unique family dynamic that I grew up with, that you grew up with, that I work with on a daily basis and because of that, as a therapist, I had a lot of people reaching out who wanted to consult with me or wanted to work with me.
Torie Wiksell: 5:38
Because this is such a specific niche that I work with and, unfortunately, because of the way therapy and licensing work, even though I do online therapy, I can only do online therapy with people who are located in the states that I'm licensed in, and so what would end up happening is I would repeatedly get emails or phone calls—mostly emails, though—from people who found me through Google or through a referral somehow, and they either wanted to consult with me or work together in therapy, and I would have to write them back and say I'm so sorry, I wish I could help. Here's my best advice for finding someone that can and give them a bit of direction to go in, but I wouldn't be able to help, and that felt awful. Every single time I had to turn someone away, it felt horrible, because I know how hard it is to recognize that something is not right, that you are struggling, and to finally get to a place where you have identified what that struggle is and are ready to reach out and seek out support, only to be told that I'm so sorry, but I can't help you. Good luck finding someone else. It just it feels so shitty to have to say that as a therapist, and I know it feels so shitty to have to hear that on the receiving end, and so, after a while of this happening, I really put a lot of thought and energy into how can I help bridge this gap a little bit.
Torie Wiksell: 7:17
There are very few therapists who have devoted their practice to this very specific niche and even fewer therapists who have my lived experience, who are openly talking about it publicly, and what I came up with ultimately was that I was going to expand my professional business to open up a coaching company, and that's how Confident Boundaries was born. A year ago I decided that while I can't do therapy, I definitely can do coaching and consulting work, where someone can meet with me for a handful of appointments and I can provide them with education around what it means for someone to have BPD or MPD, what it means to be in a family, parent-child relationship dynamic with someone like that, and strategies for navigating the really complicated layers. I could kind of bridge that gap for someone who maybe had a therapist that they loved, but that therapist didn't necessarily have the experience or the education to really support them in this one area, or someone maybe who's done a lot of work in therapy, or someone who is otherwise functioning pretty well but realizes that they really do need some feedback and support here, and so I was really resistant to doing coaching for a long time and I think I did talk about this actually in the therapy versus coaching episode that I did many, many moons ago when this podcast first started. But during the pandemic there were so many coaches that came up on social media and online and they felt so gimmicky. And a lot of people that I saw online calling themselves coaches were not trained therapists. They didn't have the background to be doing the type of work that they were advertising that they did, and I saw them spreading a lot of misinformation and that really soured me.
Torie Wiksell: 9:31
On coaching in general, I was very unhappy with what I was seeing and I was really concerned about the impact that it would have on people and their mental health, especially when we were going through the beginning of the pandemic and people were in a really fragile state. So I was really anti-coaching for a very long time and then I came to the conclusion that you know what, just because some people are out there and they're calling themselves coaches and I have understandable concerns about them, that doesn't mean that me calling myself a coach means that I'm going to do harm as well, and so I had to kind of really move into that gray area of flexible thinking where I could acknowledge that, yeah, there are definitely problems within the coaching community, within the consulting community, especially, being that it is entirely unregulated, unlike therapy, and, at the same time, this is a really important and useful skill set that I have. And for me to just dig my heels in and say I'm not going to do coaching or anything outside of therapy because I don't like the way some other people have approached this doesn't really make a lot of sense either. It's essentially me just having like an adult mini tantrum and not helping anyone, including myself. Adult mini tantrum and not helping anyone including myself. And so I processed all of that and I got to the point where I was comfortable clearly defining the differences between what I did in therapy, what I did in coaching. I opened up Confident Boundaries and really intended for it to be a business where I could do coaching and consulting work and then also provide online courses. I thought that that might be a really helpful way to bridge the gap and help provide information to people who couldn't work with me in therapy, who are interested, who didn't need to work with me. I think you get where I'm going, and so that was really the intention of Confident Boundaries when I was first born.
