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

The Good Mom vs. The Punishing Mom: Reflections on My Childhood with My Narcissist Mother

• Torie Wiksell • Episode 34

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Growing up with a narcissistic or borderline parent means constantly navigating two versions of them—the loving, "good" parent and the punishing, unpredictable one. In this episode, I reflect on how caring for my sick daughter brought up memories of my own childhood—where empathy was absent, and love often came with conditions.

I’ll explore how these experiences shaped my understanding of parenting, the emotional complexity of breaking the cycle, and the self-gaslighting that happens when you’ve been conditioned to question your own reality. If you’re working to parent differently than you were raised, or are working through gaslighting yourself about your own childhood, this episode is for you!

In this episode, we’ll discuss:
✔ How parenting can trigger childhood trauma and unresolved emotions
✔ The duality of love and cruelty in a relationship with a BPD/NPD parent
✔ Why emotional neglect leaves lasting scars—and how to heal
✔ Overcoming self-doubt and breaking the cycle of generational trauma
✔ The role of empathy and accountability in healthy parenting
✔ Creating the safe, loving environment you never had as a child

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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:

Hi guys, welcome back to the podcast this week. I want to start by apologizing If this episode happens to be a little bit late. This weekend has been quite the wild ride at my house. My poor, sweet two-year-old daughter got some sort of stomach bug and so I'll spare you the details, but it was a wild weekend which concluded with me being at the laundromat to mass wash everything in our home, basically, basically until late last night, and so I am recording this on Monday morning, where I normally record it over the weekend. So I am going to try my best to get it out to you first thing Tuesday, but it might be coming out a little bit later in the day on Tuesday. So thank you for your patience and your well wishes. Everyone in our house is, at this point in time, happy and healthy, so for that I'm grateful.

Torie Wiksell:

With that said, it's so interesting how being a parent has made me really view my own experience of growing up with my mom in such a different way and through such a different lens. Today I wanted to talk a little bit about that experience of being a parent to a sick child and how that makes me reflect on my own childhood, and I'm hoping that you find this conversation and this episode relevant, regardless if you're a parent or not, or if you ever intend on or want to become a parent or not, because I think it's just. It's always interesting to think about our experiences from both the lens with which we viewed it as we were growing up and then also reflecting back as an adult. So, a little aside, I've only read the first half of the book but I'm glad my Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy did a really good job of illustrating what I just talked about, of really thinking about our experiences growing up through the lens in which we live them and then also reflecting back as an adult on those experiences. So if you haven't read that book, I definitely recommend it. I intend to finish it one day.

Torie Wiksell:

It just hit way. I may have mentioned this or not on the podcast before, I can't recall, but it hit way too close to home for me. I wasn't expecting expecting it. Jeanette also has OCD, like I do, and there are a lot of similarities between our two lives and our stories that I did not anticipate when I started the book. So it was a little too close for comfort when I was reading it. But one day I will circle back and finish it, but obviously I'm not a child actor, nor was I, but the dynamics definitely strike a lot of similar chords, as I know hearing from you guys too. Obviously you and I are very different people, our families are different, and yet there are so many similarities between our experiences and our struggles, just given this family dynamic that we grew up with.

Torie Wiksell:

So, thinking back to my own childhood, something that really came up for me a lot this weekend as I was taking care of my sweet little, perfect daughter, was just how confusing it can still be in my brain sometimes to think back of all of these moments in which my mom was a very supportive mom, and that's where the self-gaslighting comes in for me is growing up. I do remember my mom making my favorite comfort food when I was sick mashed potatoes. That was like my go-to. And I do have memories of my mom showing up for me and being a quote-unquote good mom. And that's a very hard thing to reconcile with these moments and these numerous memories that I have of just zero empathy, maliciousness, anger, aggression, you name it, you call it the punishment, the cruelty, and I think when you have a parent who exhibits both these seemingly kind and compassionate and caring behaviors as you're growing up and also can be the most cruel and punishing and really abandoning in so many ways person. It's really really hard for our brains to make sense of that. It's so hard to say how can both of these things exist and how could this one person be such extremes? And that's, you know, really interesting in why I've thought so long growing up and as an adult that my mom had BPD is there were a lot of moments when my mom seemed to really show up for me and seemed to be a really good mom. And the longer I really process my experiences as a kid, the less empathy I really see and I really reflect on there's. Just when I look at the totality of my upbringing and my experiences growing up, there is such a pronounced lack of empathy in so much of my relationship with my mom and so much of my life and my experiences growing up and that is really jarring.

Torie Wiksell:

I think back to taking care of my sweet angel daughter this weekend and there's no world in which I can fathom ever targeting my anger at her. That doesn't mean that I don't get angry right. It doesn't mean that I don't get irrationally angry at times. I'm human and I've experienced a profound amount of trauma and I'm a complicated human being who has to work really hard at being the healthiest version of myself that I can. And yet I can't fathom a reality in which I didn't work to make sure that I don't misdirect anger at her and I, even when I catch myself acting the right word isn't impulsive, but for lack of a better word right now, I'll say impulsively, where I guess reacting right rather than responding.

Torie Wiksell:

If I, you know, say something that sounds a little harsh or comes across in a way that I don't really intend, there's no world in which I can see myself doing anything except catching myself and taking a step back and just saying to her whoa, like that was not what mommy meant at all and I'm so sorry that mommy said that. I'm so sorry. Mommy, you know, is feeling frustrated. Mommy is upset and that doesn't have to do with you and who you are and what you're doing. By no means am I a perfect mother at all, nor do I claim to be. In fact, I think I stumble through motherhood in a lot of respects and I'm so grateful for my other mom friends who are so honest about their reality of also stumbling through motherhood. And yet it is not lost on me that, although my mom had these moments where she did show up for me and comfort me, she also had such a pattern of behavior of being secretively punishing to me.

Torie Wiksell:

I know I've told a few stories about my childhood and my upbringing on this podcast, but today's going to be more storytelling day so I don't know that I've actually shared these stories on here. If I have, I apologize but bear with me. This weekend was quite the weekend. I am a tad bit sleep deprived and basically stumbling through life today, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself. So I think what really stands out to me when I think about growing up and when I reflect on my own childhood is really a the cruelness, the cruelty that was demonstrated towards me by my mom as I was growing up and how intentionally secretive that was. It never happened publicly and that's really important to recognize. Right.

Torie Wiksell:

There was very much an awareness of how she presented herself publicly in front of other people and what she was willing to do differently behind closed doors. That is very jarring and that is very significant because it shows that there's an awareness of these behaviors being inappropriate and if she were to demonstrate them publicly, they would change people's perceptions of her. So to give you some examples of that you know I'm thinking back and I think I have mentioned this on the podcast but just how you know, as a kid wanting a friend to come over, asking in front of the other friend's parent can so-and-so come over to our house to play, and my mom sitting down and typing up like a 10-page contract because she was so angry that I put her on the spot in front of my friend's parents that I needed to sign this contract. My mom chasing me around the house trying to spank me. My mom telling a friend of mine who admitted to accidentally breaking a figurine of my mom's while we were playing, telling her, oh, it's absolutely fine, not a problem at all. Thank you so much for telling me and me overhearing this conversation as my friend is leaving, thinking, oh my god, this is bad, this is so bad. I really wish my friend would have just been quiet.

Torie Wiksell:

I was probably like seven, I don't know, six, seven and then my mom closing the door as that friend and her parent left and turning to me and just having her face change, and I imagine you guys know what I mean by that of the face everyone else sees and then literally like behind closed doors, like that face and just the rage and the anger and the yelling and the punishing and telling me what a horrible person I am and what a liar and how honesty is always the most important thing, and me thinking, even as a kid, like, well, I can't be honest, because if I'm honest like honesty is not the most important thing in this house and with my mom, if I'm honest with what happens, if I make a mistake, it is bad news, it is not something that is encouraged or rewarded, and so it just goes into that whole walking on eggshells, right, trying to read the situation, read my mom's mind. You know, know that what she was saying to me being honest, being most important, was not what she really meant at all and constantly the mental gymnastics, the exhaustion, the trying to be five steps ahead. And it's just such an interesting experience now being a parent to really think about how exhausting it was growing up, constantly trying to live in these two dualities, these two worlds, where sometimes I had this version of my mom in private that other people saw right. Sometimes I had this caring version who would sit with me and make me my favorite food, and sometimes I didn't. And when I didn't which was more than sometimes, which was a lot of the times it was such a dark and mean and angry and vengeful version and she never apologized ever, never took accountability, never apologized. It was always warranted.

Torie Wiksell:

Because I was such a hard child and I am such, so, so hard to love and to be around. And looking at again my sweet, sweet daughter, I just can't ever imagine a world in which I looked at her with such rage and anger. I can't imagine a world in which I hated her, because in a lot of realities my mom hated me. She let that be known to me throughout my life and it's just such a bizarre experience. It's such a bizarre way of looking at life and looking at the world and it's so confusing and it's so complicated. And what it really taught me was that people who love you also mistreat you and you are a really hard person to love. You are a really hard person to be around and you are too much and you're lucky that anyone puts up with you and it doesn't matter how hard you try, because, my God, did I try? Did I try to walk on eggshells? Did I try to anticipate what I quote unquote should be doing? It doesn't matter how hard you try, because you're going to do it wrong.

Torie Wiksell:

And it's just such an interesting thing to reflect on now, after all of the work that I've done in therapy, after all of the work I've done outside of therapy throughout the years. It's really really interesting to just think about that, to just reflect on that and to just look at how dysfunctional and abusive it was that I was expected to have any sort of sanity or ability to successfully live my life in a healthy way and develop healthy relationships, given that I was living this life of growing up with a Jekyll or Hyde parent and one day in a future podcast episode I'll talk a bit more about losing my mom in my early 20s and I think it's important to talk about that at some point on the podcast because in some ways it has made my life easier and in a lot of ways it's made it harder. It is still that duality right. When you grow up with a parent who is so abusive emotionally, psychologically abusive there is no easy road forward. Maintaining a relationship with them that's not easy. Going no contact, that's not easy. Them dying that's not easy, which probably comes as no surprise because our lives have never been easy, right.

Torie Wiksell:

But I think it is an interesting thing to talk about and I think it could be really helpful because a lot of the times we continue to subject ourselves to abuse because we think that the reality that we are used to is the easier option than doing something differently, than dealing with the backlash, than dealing with discomfort. And I think you know, on a future episode, by talking about some of my experiences with my mom passing and some of the challenges that I've encountered there, I hope to debunk some of that for you, Because the reality is, it's just hard to have a parent with borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder or some combination of these disorders and traits. It is just hard period, there is no easy. And when we can accept that and sit with it, then we can actually allow ourselves the freedom and the autonomy to make decisions based on what we really want and what we really need for ourselves versus what we feel like will be easier.

Torie Wiksell:

And that's really important and it's really powerful, because you deserve to live a life that you want to live. You deserve to live a life that makes you happy. You deserve to live a life in which you can think about and reflect on the reality of your world and who you actually are versus who you've been told you are and all of the limitations on that, all of the limitations on that. You deserve to be able to reflect back after a gross throw-up week with your child, if you are a parent, and to say I just love my child and I can't imagine a reality where my child had the experiences growing up that I did, and how sad for me and how lucky I am to be able to live such a different life with my own child than I lived as a child growing up.

Torie Wiksell:

And I think these things are so complicated and so nuanced and it's so healing in so many ways for me to look at my child, looking at me through the lens of our relationship, and just really acknowledging the fact that I don't think I am that hard to love and sure I'm not perfect and sure I make mistakes and sure I have to try really hard to be an emotionally healthy person.

Torie Wiksell:

And I think that's part of the human experience and I think yeah, you know, those of us who have experienced profound amounts of trauma, have to work hard to learn the things that we weren't taught and to help our brains process through things that we've experienced that we shouldn't have ever had to, and, at the same time, there is so much healing in all of this too, and so I know that this was a little bit of a rambly podcast and I probably repeated a few things, if you've been a longtime listener, that you've heard me talk about before, but, like I said, it's been quite the weekend over here in my home, and so I appreciate you bearing with me. Thank you for your patience in getting this episode out, and I'll see you guys next week. Bye.

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