Forgiveness Is Overrated—Now Acceptance? That’s Gold When You're Trying to Heal From a Parent with Narcissistic or Borderline Personality Disorder

If you've ever been told that you have to forgive in order to heal, I want you to know—that’s just not true. In this episode, I’m breaking down why forgiveness is overrated, especially when it comes to parents with borderline or narcissistic personality disorder (BPD/NPD). Instead of forcing yourself to forgive, what if you focused on acceptance instead? Because that’s where the real healing happens.

In this episode, we’ll cover:
✔️ Why forgiveness is often a trap we get stuck in
✔️ The difference between acceptance and approval—you don’t have to “approve” of your parent’s behavior to accept reality
✔️ How acceptance helps you stop wasting energy trying to change someone you can't control
✔️ The truth about manipulative parental behaviors and why they keep you stuck
✔️ Why regaining autonomy over your own life is the real goal—not making peace with an abusive or toxic parent
✔️ How letting go of the pressure to forgive can actually set you free

You are not a bad person if you don’t forgive. You don’t owe your parent forgiveness—but you do owe yourself peace. Let’s talk about how to get there.

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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.

Chapters

• 0:14 Autonomy and Acceptance in Healing
• 16:30 Moving Forward

Transcript

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. Some fun things to catch you up on. I just released a bonus episode of the You're Not Crazy podcast over in the Confident Boundaries online community. Just in case you aren't aware, in addition to the Boundaries Roadmap being over there, my online course about setting boundaries with a BPD or MPD parent, and the Community Connect feature and the online trainings I do, I also release about one bonus podcast episode over there a month and that's exclusive to the online community, and the one that I released this weekend is about how personality disorders are formed. I have been noticing a lot of conversation around praising children too much, resulting in narcissistic personality disorder, and, probably no surprise to you, I have a very hot take on it and I don't love that thought process. So if you want to hear what my perspective is and how I feel about people talking about praising children too much, resulting in narcissistic personality disorder, hop on over to confidentboundariescom slash, join and check out the online community. Also, you'll hear a new ad this week for my brand new coaching membership, so I am opening up a couple of spaces to work one-on-one with me in coaching. So you'll get two 60-minute coaching sessions every month, unlimited email support with me in between our coaching sessions and access to the Confident Boundaries online community for $600 a month. So if you're interested in that, hop on over to confidentboundariescom. Slash coaching and check it out.

Torie Wiksell: 2:28

Now let's get into this week's episode. So over the last couple of days this is an aside, but I promise you it's going to lead into the episode for this week. So just bear with me. You know me by now, I'm sure, and that I'm a rambler I recently changed my name on social media from at Tori Wixel to at Tori at Confident Boundaries, and I did that for a few reasons, but that's a different story for a different day. So essentially, when I did that, it kind of messed up things in my algorithm. I don't really understand the technical side of all of this stuff or what is going on in the social media world. So, anyways, I decided to revisit TikTok for a minute. So I posted a video over on TikTok and I talked about a couple of different things, but one aspect of what I spoke about on this TikTok seemed to really resonate with a lot of people, so I decided why not devote an entire episode of You're Not Crazy to this one thing? So you're wondering what is it? Long story, get to your point, tori. Okay, we're here.

Torie Wiksell: 3:43

So one thing that I talked about is forgiveness is really overrated and we talk about it so much. Right, we really need to forgive people for not them, but for ourselves. I think forgiveness is super overrated. I think, honestly, you could be an entirely emotionally healthy, lovely human being who has a very fulfilling, happy life if you never forgive your parent for all the injustices they caused to you. I think that we put so much emphasis on forgiveness and what it means and what it looks like and the impact of it in healing, and I think that it's really really, really not that important.

Torie Wiksell: 4:31

Should you forgive someone? Should you not? Honestly, I don't care if you do. What I care more about is acceptance. Acceptance is huge. Acceptance will make or break your mental health. Acceptance will make or break your ability to heal. Acceptance is a non-negotiable forgiveness. I don't care. I don't care if you forgive them. I don't care if you don't forgive them. I don't care about forgiveness because it doesn't matter as far as your ability to move forward in your life and heal.

Torie Wiksell: 5:03

But acceptance is so tricky and I know that we did an episode talking about radical acceptance before, but let's talk about it some more, because acceptance is truly one of the most important things that you need to embrace and accept in order to heal from all of the layers of trauma and abuse that have occurred throughout your life and your relationship with a parent who has borderline or narcissistic personality disorder. So acceptance gets such a bad rap because we don't really understand it, and when people say acceptance, what they hear is approval. Acceptance and approval are two totally separate things. When I say acceptance is gold, acceptance is the key to your healing journey. It is the key to your sanity, your emotional health, your ability to move forward. What I am not saying is that approval is the key to your health and ability to move forward.

Torie Wiksell: 6:18

What I am saying is that when you can say, yes, this is reality, I don't have to like it, I don't have to condone it, I don't have to approve of it, but this is reality, that is probably the most powerful thing that you can do for yourself. Acceptance is really saying this is who my parent is. This is the behavior, this is the pattern of behavior that they have demonstrated throughout my life and our relationship. This is the reality. You saying that does not mean that you like it. It's you looking at what is real and you sitting with what is real instead of focusing on what should have been or you wish things looked like. You saying I accept that my parent is who they are. I accept this is how they go about trying to get their needs met, because that right, there is a lot of the abuse and toxicity cycle that we talk about in these family dynamics. It is my parent knows how to get their needs met in a certain way and that way is causing a lot of harm to me. It is not a healthy way that they go about getting their needs met. It's a very manipulative way and it is a way that is very damaging, and that is why I have to step in and do something to change.

Torie Wiksell: 8:10

Because if the way your parent was going about their life and their relationship with you wasn't damaging, it wasn't causing you harm, it wasn't negatively impacting your physical or mental health or your emotional health or your other relationships or your career. Why would you bother trying to make a change? You wouldn't. It's exhausting. Change is hard. It takes time and energy and effort and, honestly often, financial resources to seek out support and information and knowledge on what to do to go about making that change. And why would anyone do that if they didn't need to? The reason why change is so integral is because of the negative impact that your parents' behavior has on you, and so really looking at accepting that their behavior is the way it is empowers you to reflect on what you want to do about that.

Torie Wiksell: 9:20

My biggest thing whether it's through this podcast, whether it's me as a therapist with my therapy clients, whether it's me with my coaching clients, whether it's talking with people in the community my biggest thing is that when you grow up with a parent like this, your autonomy is taken from you. You are told you are this person. You are allowed to behave in these ways. You are allowed to be this particular version of yourself that your parent approves of, and you don't get a say in whether or not that is true to who you are. You are punished if you don't behave in that way and you are rewarded when you behave in a way that your parent approves of and that completely strips you of the autonomy to make decisions for yourself and your life. And that is what I want for you. That's what I want for everyone listening to this podcast. That is what I want for you. That's what I want for everyone listening to this podcast. That is what I want for everyone who takes the Boundaries Roadmap online course. That is what I want for everyone in the online community. That's what I want for all of my therapy and coaching clients is for them to really believe that they have the autonomy to make the choices that they want to make over their own lives, because that is where we go from feeling trapped in an abuse cycle to feeling empowered.

Torie Wiksell: 10:55

To start setting boundaries and putting ourselves. First is when we believe that we have the autonomy to make our own decisions and we have the knowledge and resources available to us to be able to execute those decisions and execute those boundaries. And this all comes back to accepting reality for what it is accepting the fact that this story that we've grown up around who our parent is, who they aren't, who our family is, who they are not, the healthiness of our family unit, the healthiness of our relationship with our parent. Regardless of all of the stories that we've been told growing up and throughout our life, this is the reality and this pattern that we've been exposed to, this pattern of behavior, is not healthy. This pattern of behavior is negatively impacting us. It's negatively impacting our life and we have no control over that. How they engage with us. We don't have any control over that.

Torie Wiksell: 12:04

Even when we're talking about setting boundaries, there are ways that we can approach boundaries that make it more likely for a parent with BPD or narcissistic personality disorder to engage and comply with our boundaries and respect them and I talk about that in the boundaries roadmap and at the same time, we have no control over whether or not someone is going to respect a boundary that we set or acknowledge who we are and our pain and our hurt and our desire to make a change for ourselves or our lives. We have no control over the way someone responds to us. We have no control over someone else's behaviors and that is a major fallacy that we are ingrained with when we grow up in a family like this is that we have more control over other people than we actually do. We believe that if we walk on eggshells, if we don't say or do the wrong thing, that we can prevent our parent from becoming upset with us, that we can prevent our parent from lashing out or exploding or punishing us or withholding love or threatening to abandon us in some way, either emotionally or physically. We don't have control over those things. Those are our parents' things. We have control over ourselves. We have control over who we are, how we behave and what we do. And what we can redirect focus to is my parent. They are the only one in control of how they behave, how they respond to me, what they do when they are feeling different emotions. I know what their pattern of behavior is, because I accept reality for what it is. Then I can choose how I want to respond to the things that they ask of me, the things that they demand of me, the expectations that they have of me, in a way that aligns with my own personal value system, my own personal needs. That aligns with my own personal value system, my own personal needs. None of that includes forgiveness. Right, forgiveness is a tough one and forgiveness is so layered and it's complicated and depending on who you ask or what their philosophy is on forgiveness or their belief system. You might get a variety of answers from them whether it's important to forgive other people, or why it's important or who it benefits, forgiveness.

Torie Wiksell: 14:54

I think if we're talking about a relationship like with a partner, forgiveness is a different story that is completely different than what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here is that, in order to heal, to move forward, to have any sort of future where you are not spending an unreasonable amount of time and energy in financial resources, etc, etc. On dealing with the chaos and the drama around your relationship with your parent, in order for that to be true, you do not have to forgive. You can, but you don't have to. That's not part of the requirement. But you do have to accept the reality of your situation and your relationship and you have to accept that because if you're not operating within the realm of what things actually look like versus how you wish they were, then you're going to continue the cycle because you're not operating in reality. And I don't want you to continue this cycle because the cycle doesn't feel good, it feels icky and awful and stressful and time consuming, and yeah.

Torie Wiksell: 16:25

So if you're hung up on this idea of forgiveness.

Torie Wiksell: 16:30

I want you to really take a step back and ask yourself is that necessary for me to figure out right now? Is that somewhere I need to focus my time and energy? Or is that something I can table for the moment and just say, yeah, I don't know if I forgive them. Maybe I forgive them for some stuff, maybe I don't, maybe I don't forgive them for anything? How do I not get stuck there? How do I keep moving forward in taking back control of my life, because that is the only thing that I actually have control over. That is how you take back your life. That is how you take back control of your life is by taking back your autonomy to make your own decisions, and that really does rely on your willingness to accept reality for what it is, so forgiveness is unnecessary.

Torie Wiksell: 17:32

Another hot take from me. With all of that said, have a great rest of your week next, guys, and I'll see you next Tuesday. 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.