You're Not Crazy: A Podcast for Cycle Breakers with Toxic Parents

Overcoming a Fear of Abandonment After Growing Up with a Borderline or Narcissistic Parent

• Torie Wiksell • Episode 28

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If you grew up with a parent with borderline or narcissistic personality disorder, the fear of being abandoned by people you love might run deep. In this episode of You're Not Crazy, we unpack how toxic love from a parent impacts your relationships and self-worth as an adult — and, more importantly, how to break free from those patterns.

We discuss:

  • What conditional love from a BPD/NPD parent really looks like and how it contributes to a fear of abandonment
  • Choosing yourself
  • The power of setting clear, firm boundaries (even when it feels impossible)
  • Steps to develop self-acceptance and improve your self-worth

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Torie Wiksell is a therapist and coach who specializes in working with the adult children of parents with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. Torie brings a unique perspective having spent years working with clients with personality disorders and growing up with a mother she suspects had NPD with BPD traits. Torie provides online therapy to clients located in WA, OR, and CA, and online coaching internationally.

Disclaimer: This podcast is not therapy. If you are in mental health crisis, please contact the Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988.

You're Not Crazy is a podcast owned and produced by Torie Wiksell and Confident Boundaries, LLC.

Torie Wiksell:

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 this week's episode of the podcast, our first podcast of 2025. I'm so excited to be back here with you this week. First, I want to start by just thanking everyone who has joined the Confident Boundaries community. I think we're up to 16 members as of my recording of this and it's just really exciting. It's really cool to see new people hopping in there and I really love that. People are starting to engage and ask questions and ask for feedback and give feedback, and it's really cool to see our little community growing. So if you haven't signed up yet but you are interested in getting more support around your relationship with your parent who has borderline or narcissistic personality disorder, if you want to connect with other people who also have a parent with BPD or MPD, people that really get it and can validate what you're going through, can encourage you to set healthy boundaries or just be a listening ear when you need it. If you want to learn more through the monthly workshops I'm going to be doing live in there. Go on over to confidentboundariescom slash join. Again, that's confidentboundariescom slash join and sign up. The community is only $39 a month, so I tried to make it fully accessible for everyone to find a place where they can go to for help learning how to effectively set boundaries for my online course, the Boundaries Roadmap monthly workshops.

Torie Wiksell:

Like I said, we're gonna be doing one in the community on January 16th and that one is called Safety First, self Second Protecting Yourself Without Losing Yourself. The reason being is that it's really complicated when you're looking at honesty in relationship to a parent who has BPD or MPD. We have to really take into consideration what information we're sharing, why we're sharing it and how that ultimately can impact us if our parent chooses to use it as ammunition or a tool for manipulation or punishment in the future. And so that workshop is all about how can you stay true to yourself and your value system while also making hard decisions around when it is appropriate to withhold information from your parent, and all of that good stuff. So again, that's happening on January 16th. It's going to be live. It's an hour long workshop I'm going to host in the group between 12 and 1 pm Pacific time. It's going to be recorded. If you can't attend live, the playback is going to be available for you to watch whenever it's convenient for you. So head on over to confidentboundariescom slash, join and go ahead and sign up, and make sure to say hi when you do. I'm in the community every single day, so if you have questions for me, ask away in there. Okay? So, with that said, let's hop on into the episode.

Torie Wiksell:

Today we're going to be talking about dealing with the fear of abandonment as an adult. When you grow up with a parent with borderline or narcissistic personality disorder, this one is so tough. When you grow up with a parent who has unmanaged BPD or narcissistic personality disorder, that parent is very inconsistent with the love that they show you. Right, that love is very conditional. It is hot and cold. It looks very differently depending on which personality disorder we're talking about, but the consistent thing there is you are not shown, you are not treated with unconditional love from your parent. You're just not. If you were, they would not have either unmanaged BPD or narcissistic personality disorder. These are reflective of these disorders the fact that your parent either lacks empathy or they are so emotionally dysregulated that they will sometimes be very loving to you and sometimes be very cruel and punishing in the case of BPD, lacking empathy, narcissistic personality disorder.

Torie Wiksell:

So when you're a child and you're growing up with a parent who demonstrates one of these disorders and it is unregulated what happens is that you learn that this parent, who is supposed to be your safe space, who is supposed to be where you are able to form a secure attachment, develop emotional safety and stability unstable and that you learn that you need to adjust what you think, how you act, what you believe in, how you feel, what you say, what you do, in order to prevent someone you want to love you from emotionally abandoning you. You need to adjust and change yourself to prevent someone that should love you unconditionally from abandoning you. This is obviously a recipe for disaster, right? This is not good. When I lay it out on the table like that, I don't think anyone is listening to this, thinking like, oh, yeah, that's great, I definitely want my kids to feel that way. Or oh, I think that's a recipe for a really lovely love story down the road. No, it's not. It's definitely not. It teaches you to have really, really toxic views on relationships and what people who love you treat you like and what your expectations should be and what you're responsible for in relationships, right? What I always say is that people are who they are.

Torie Wiksell:

If someone has depression, they do not only have depression in one area of their life. They don't only have depression when it comes to their social life. They have depression when they are alone, they have depression when they are at work. They have depression in all of these different areas. Right, they might be good at masking it, but depression is a part of them. It's same is true with people with personality disorders. Someone with narcissistic personality disorder doesn't have healthy relationships in one aspect of their life and then dysfunctional ones in another. They have dysfunctional relationships.

Torie Wiksell:

Dysfunctional relationships are, just frankly, really misunderstood by a lot of people in our society, and so I'm sure, if you're listening and you grew up with a parent with narcissistic personality disorder, people with narcissistic personality disorder can be quite charming and charismatic and your parent might have been the life of the party or the fun person to be around or such a great mom, right, like we've talked about in previous episodes, people outside of close, intimate emotional relationships with them might have a perception of them that there is a level of superficiality to certain relationships in which they can maintain this image, and if relationships go deeper than that superficiality, then the cracks start to show and a lot of people make excuses for toxic behavior. A lot of people make excuses for toxic behavior amongst people in their own families. A lot of people make excuses for toxic behavior amongst people in their own families. A lot of people in the world make excuses for toxic behaviors that don't seem to have immediate impact or effect on them personally. You know not to get super political on this episode, but you just look at the recent US elections that we've had.

Torie Wiksell:

A lot of people are able to make excuses for abusive, narcissistic, toxic behaviors. They're able to put this distance where, if it's not directed towards me immediately in this second, then I can excuse the fact or dismiss the fact or minimize the fact that that abusive behavior has on the person that it is immediately directed to. There's a lot of toxicity, there's a lot of disconnection between patterns that people demonstrate and there's just a lot of normalization of abusive and toxic behaviors in our society, unfortunately. But people are who they are. People experience behaviors that are very cyclical, people are creatures of habit, and so the same is true for us. That's a long roundabout way of painting this picture of the fact that we are who we are who we are People that grew up with a parent with bpd or narcissistic personality disorder. We have attachment issues a lot of the time, if not all of the time, because we did not grow up with a primary caregiver who we were able to attach to in a healthy way, and so that does not mean we are lost causes by any means. I would like to think that I am in a very healthy, stable marriage and have been with my husband for over a decade now, so I think it is possible.

Torie Wiksell:

However, the road to get here was not an easy one, and it took a lot of time and effort and energy unwinding the really toxic dynamics, one of which was a major fear of abandonment, and I still have a fear of abandonment. The difference is, in the past I would act on this fear of abandonment in a way that would allow people to mistreat me, whether that was in friendships, whether that was in my relationship with family members, whether that was in romantic relationships. If someone mistreated me, I would initially push back and stand up for myself, and when that person threatened to leave, when that person threatened to break up with me, when that person threatened to withhold their friendship, to not speak with me, I would immediately back down. I would immediately drop my you know concerns, my boundaries, all of that. I would immediately back down, because it was so devastating to me to have someone that I thought loved me, to have someone that I thought cared about me, to just abandon me. The thought of that felt so bad and so awful.

Torie Wiksell:

And growing up I was programmed to think that that was my fault right, that I'm difficult, I'm the problem, that my expectations of other people are absurd and that I am impossible to please, that I am too difficult, that I'm all of these things right. And so I grew up being programmed to believe that I am impossible to love, that I am the problem, that I am lucky that people deal with me, because I am so difficult, that I am so challenging, that it is so exhausting and hard to be in my life that I should just be very grateful and lucky that anyone is willing to deal with me. And so that was a disaster. That was a disaster way of growing up. That was a disaster way of being primed for romantic relationships.

Torie Wiksell:

Not surprisingly, I entered some pretty dysfunctional ones, with one being extremely abusive, when I was in college, with this fear of abandonment. The way that I was able, after so much time and energy and effort, to break this pattern and to overcome it was not getting to a place where I'm not afraid of it, like I don't love it. Sometimes I still have this fear like pop up where I think, oh my gosh, what if, you know, my husband were to leave me or something were to happen and that would be so scary and, yeah, that's not desirable. But the way I was able to deal with this and overcome this and stop acting in response to it and stop engaging in this cycle of allowing people to treat me poorly was to really work on being comfortable being by myself, to really really work on being comfortable being alone. Because the underlying fear here was I am not okay by myself, right? I need someone else to make me okay.

Torie Wiksell:

And the truth is I would much rather be with myself alone than to be around someone who doesn't respect me and doesn't like me and is willing to mistreat me. I'm not that horrible to be around. I'm not that hard to be around, at least not that much harder than other people. Right, like, people are hard, relationships are hard, they're difficult, but I had been fed this web of lies, all of this BS, throughout the years, and so I had to relearn who I am and what I bring to relationships I'm in, whether those are friendships, work relationships, romantic relationships, family relationships. I had to be willing to say I'm going to really work on myself and get to know myself, and I'm going to make the choice to have really firm boundaries when someone does not treat me well.

Torie Wiksell:

I will choose to be alone versus being exposed to someone who needs to be convinced that I'm worthy to be in their lives. I am going to choose to spend time alone over being around people that make me feel bad about myself. I'm going to make this choice because I deserve better as human beings. We need other people in our lives, we need relationships, and the thought of taking this step back and intentionally choosing nothing over something is really hard. It's really hard and it's really scary, and by me doing that and by me doing that, I was really able to get good at being confident in the fact that, like I can be alone, like I am capable of navigating life without having someone else tell me what I should think, what I should do, that I'm worthy, that I'm a good person. I'm worthy, that I'm a good person. I'm okay sitting at home alone watching reality TV. I am okay cooking food by myself. I'm okay hanging out by myself. I am okay being alone.

Torie Wiksell:

When I was able to really implement that and really put that into practice, I no longer felt compelled to make people stay in my life. I was practiced choosing myself over dysfunction, choosing myself over unhealthy relationships, and that is how I personally have dealt with my own fear of abandonment. Is that the only way to deal with a fear of abandonment? Absolutely not. Just like there's not only one way to heal from a toxic family relationship, but this is the most impactful way that I have dealt with my own fear of abandonment and it's still there because I'm human and that's normal and these things go back really far and really deep. And so I think, just having realistic expectations of the fact that healing doesn't look like we get to this finish line where, all of a sudden, we don't struggle anymore, healing really looks like we have control over our lives and the trauma doesn't run our lives, it doesn't make all the calls, it doesn't dictate the course of our life, and so now the fear of abandonment doesn't control my life, and that feels pretty good.

Torie Wiksell:

With that said, guys, thanks for listening to my story time today about my own healing journey, and definitely don't be a stranger. Send me a DM, send me an email, say hi when you join Confident Boundaries, the online community, and 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.

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Torie Wiksell

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