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. Welcome back to the podcast. So this week we're going to talk about why we all—myself included, who grew up with a parent with either borderline and/or narcissistic personality disorder—need to be on the lookout for the Tony Robbins in our lives.
Torie Wiksell: 0:50
So what do I mean by that? You probably know who Tony Robbins is, I'm guessing. Maybe you don’t if you’re a little bit younger than me, but if you don’t know who he is, he’s this huge motivational speaker and he is supposed to be this very empowerment guy. CEOs and people in the business world pay him disgusting amounts of money to do coaching with him and he has these huge, what do you want to call them? Like seminars, I guess, where thousands and thousands of people go and they listen to him. And there’s this documentary on him and it is wild. So if you haven’t seen that, I would highly suggest checking it out. It’s horrific. In my personal and professional opinion, the way that he tells and encourages people to deal with trauma is just abhorrent, and it is horrible and super re-traumatizing. But Tony Robbins is just one of the many people out there who have this same huge personality, who claim to have all of the answers and be able to help every single person in the entire world, and they’re all full of shit.
Torie Wiksell: 2:13
So let’s get into this. So when you grow up with a parent who is either, you know, abusive or neglectful or emotionally incapable of parenting you, you learn very unhealthy things about relationships and you might be thinking, well, duh. Obviously, that’s why I’m listening to you and I’m trying to peel back those layers. Great, wonderful, we’re all on the same page here, and at the same time, there’s so much that seeps into your psyche really deep that I feel like this is genuinely worth an entire podcast episode to talk about.
Torie Wiksell: 2:54
So when you grow up in these dysfunctional family situations, you learn that you can’t trust your own intuition. You can’t trust your own thoughts and feelings and opinions, because if they’re not desirable to the person who’s raising you, then there are very serious consequences for that, right? It’s very much like the whole walking on eggshells thing. If you feel like you’re walking on eggshells as a kid, you’re trying to anticipate your parents’ volatility and you’re trying to prevent it. And so, in order to prevent it, you’re going to put their needs and wants and desires above your own. And so when you do this repeatedly growing up, what happens is that that intuition, that voice inside all of us that tells us something doesn’t feel right, something’s wrong, you’ve been programmed to ignore that. You’ve been programmed to A) just not even notice it anymore, or B) when you notice it, you coach yourself—either consciously or unconsciously—you coach yourself to suppress it because that can’t be good enough, right? You feeling like you’re uncomfortable, you feeling like something’s wrong is not good enough to act on.
Torie Wiksell: 4:24
How this ties back into all of those gurus and people out there who claim to have all of the answers and know everything about everyone and how to help everyone. How that ties back into them is that, essentially, when you’re raised in a dysfunctional parent-child relationship, the same toxic, abusive, dysfunctional cycle that happens is the exact same abuse that happens in cults. It’s the same that happens in abusive romantic relationships. The cycle of abuse is the cycle of abuse, and so when you are a part of that, it is so easy to be abused by other people. You grow up in a situation where you are taught this is the more desirable way, right? Because if the more desirable way was the healthy way, then you would be able to have your feelings as a kid, you would be able to speak honestly, you wouldn’t be walking on eggshells because there would be no scary detrimental consequence of you doing or saying something that was perceived as wrong. But when you’re growing up in an abusive cycle, you all of a sudden start to see the world through that lens, right?
Torie Wiksell: 5:53
And so someone who doesn’t grow up in a dysfunctional family, someone that grows up in an emotionally healthy family—and that, in and of itself, is on a spectrum, but abuse and healthy are not in the same family—so if you grew up in a healthy family, you’re taught to listen to your intuition and you’re taught that other people don’t have to think and feel the same way as you, even your parents, and that’s not only okay but that’s great. You’re modeled and taught how to express yourself and how to stand up for yourself and how to set boundaries in a way that is pro-social, right? Like you could be a narcissist, to feel like you're doing all of those things. But that would not be a pro-social approach to standing up and advocating for yourself. That would be very destructive. And so in healthy families, parents encourage their kids to be their own person and they show them how to navigate the world in a really healthy way and how to stand up for themselves and set boundaries. And when they inevitably do something wrong—because we’re all imperfect humans—they help them and they learn. They help them learn how to move forward and repair relationships and forgive themselves and all of that.
Torie Wiksell: 7:16
But when you grow up in an abusive and dysfunctional family situation, you don’t learn that. You learn that abuse cycle and then you go out into the world and you’re way more susceptible to being dragged into dysfunctional friendships, toxic work situations and being victims of people like the Tony Robbins of the world because they are so powerful-seeming, right? And if I came on here and I had this audience of like millions of people and I said I am the person that you need to listen to 100% of the time about everything that has to do with dealing with a toxic parent, then A) I would be full of shit too, but B) like that would influence some people, right? And people would start to—the people who are more susceptible to that, that feel some sort of connection to me in some way. You know, I could really do a lot of damage there. If I stood on my, you know, if I stood on my soapbox and said if you don’t listen to every single thing I do, you are doomed for this toxic, horrible life. And you need to tell your parent X, Y and Z, and if you don’t set that boundary, your life is going to be in shambles. And that sounds crazy, but that’s literally what some people do, and I’m talking about people on social media, I’m talking about people with podcasts, and I’m talking about, like, the Tony Robbins of the world, right?
Torie Wiksell: 8:58
And so what I want to communicate to you this week is that growing up in that dysfunctional family environment makes you more susceptible to giving super toxic and abusive and people who are just frankly full of shit more power than they deserve. They don’t deserve power. If they are someone who truly can help you, what they’re going to say is something like what I’m about to say to you, which is take everything I say with a grain of salt. My goal is to give you information and knowledge and to just share a bit of my own story and my own journey and what’s worked for me and what I’ve seen work for other people, but also help teach teachable skills, right? Like a lot of what I do, as both a therapist and a coach, is help people understand what is healthy and unhealthy and like if you are finding a lot of unhealthy in your life, how can you move towards the healthy, whether that’s setting boundaries, learning coping skills, or going no contact or something else totally.
Torie Wiksell: 10:09
But I don’t know you. I don’t know what’s best for you. I just know that there are these similarities and these commonalities that come up between myself and other people who have grown up in these dysfunctional parent-child relationships, and I know that it doesn’t have to be this horrible, you know, stressful life that has no end in sight. It just doesn’t have to be that way. So if you guys get anything from this week, it’s take everyone with a grain of salt. No one deserves to be on a pedestal. So kick off that pedestal and see how they react. See you guys next week. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of You're Not Crazy. Please rate us five stars if you like the podcast and leave us a review. It helps so much. And if you have a friend or family member who you think might like the podcast, please share it with them. Okay, I’ll see you next week.
