Signs You Need Better Boundaries with Your Parent

Struggling to set boundaries with a parent who has borderline or narcissistic personality disorder? In this episode of You're Not Crazy, I break down five key signs that you need stronger boundaries—and share practical strategies to help you establish them.

If any of these sound familiar, it’s time to rethink your boundaries:

 ✔️ You feel completely drained after interacting with your parent—or even just thinking about them.
✔️ You’re constantly walking on eggshells, afraid of triggering an emotional meltdown.
✔️ You keep getting sucked into their chaos and drama (even when you try to stay out of it).
✔️ You avoid setting boundaries because you’re scared of rejection or abandonment.
✔️ Your parent interferes with your relationship and disrupts your peace.

Want step-by-step guidance on how to set and enforce boundaries with a BPD or NPD parent? Join me for my live workshop, How to Set Boundaries with a BPD or NPD Parent! 

Register now at confidentboundaries.com/boundaries-workshop and get my Boundaries Cheatsheet—with 9 scripts for enforcing boundaries with a BPD or NPD parent just for showing up and hanging out! 

Can’t make it live? Sign up anyway, and I’ll send you the recording!

Register for my FREE mini-course, Why Your Boundaries Aren't Working With Your Toxic Parent:
confidentboundaries.com/course

Learn more about the Confident Boundaries Membership: confidentboundaries.com/membership

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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

• 0:00 Introduction & Workshop Announcement
• 2:57 Signs You Need Healthier Boundaries
• 4:10 Feeling Drained by Parent Interactions
• 5:24 Walking on Eggshells Constantly
• 7:20 Getting Sucked Into Their Drama
• 9:36 Fear of Rejection Preventing Boundaries
• 13:37 Parent Interfering with Current Family
• 14:32 Closing & Workshop Reminder

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. Today is a really exciting day because tonight, tuesday, march 18th, at 5 pm Pacific time, I will be doing the live workshop how to set boundaries with a bpd or mpd parent. If you haven't already, hop on over to confidentboundariescom slash boundaries workshop and make sure to sign up because that is happening tonight. So quick question answered around that boundaries workshop I I really encourage you to attend live if you can. It'll be about 45 minutes long, less than an hour. I'll hang out for a little bit with questions anyone has and if you attend live, I'm giving you a copy of my boundaries cheat sheet, which includes nine examples of really common boundaries that have to be enforced with parents with borderline and narcissistic personality disorder. If you attend live, you get a copy of that. If you are in the Confident Boundaries online community, there is also a copy in our Confident Boundaries library, so check that out over there. But if you attend the workshop tonight live. You will get a copy there. If you can't attend live, still sign up because I will send you the recording to watch and I think you have like 24 hours or something to view it. So make sure to hop on over to confidentboundariescom. Slash boundaries workshop, save your spot and I'll see you tonight.

Torie Wiksell: 2:01

So now let's dive into today's episode, which is very timely. It's about boundaries. We're going to talk about signs that you need healthier boundaries with your parent. This is really important to talk about, because awareness is not something that we are all just born with. We are not aware of dysfunction in our lives and how that dysfunction shows up until something brings it to our attention. It can feel awkward, kind of normal, even though it can feel bad, it can feel normal, and I know that that's not everyone's experience. Sometimes, when you're a kid growing up in this situation, you think this is not normal, this is weird, this is something is not right here. But sometimes it does feel normal because that's what you know. When you're aware of something, then you can make a choice to do something about it. If you're not aware of it, of course you're not going to change it, because that's just the way things are going. You don't have that ability to make a decision to do something different because you're not even aware there's a problem.

Torie Wiksell: 3:04

Let's go into signs you need or let's say signs you probably need healthier boundaries with your parent. The first one is you feel completely drained after spending time with your parent. And I'm going to say in addition to that, you feel completely drained after thinking about spending time with your parent. Every time you're thinking about seeing your parent talking to your parent, you're thinking about them texting, you needing to text them, you're feeling exhausted. It's just the act of having to entertain this thought of your relationship with them, whether it is actually being around them or just thinking about it. When you are exerting this much emotional energy, you want to make sure that you are very intentional about the amount of time that you're spending with your parent. You want to be very intentional about the amount of access that they have to you, about how often you're interacting with them, how long those interactions are. Are those in person? Are they over text? Are they over the phone?

Torie Wiksell: 4:14

There are so many boundaries that can be set with a parent if you're feeling completely drained just even thinking about that relationship. But the first thing is being aware that that is happening. Next one you are constantly walking on eggshells around your parent. You're afraid to trigger them to do or say something that's going to open up a can of worms or lead to a total meltdown. If you constantly are trying to regulate your parents' emotions for them by tiptoeing around things that are going to set them off, you need a boundary. You need stronger boundaries with them. It is not your job, nor is it possible to regulate emotions for someone who refuses to regulate them for themselves. Now, my guess is your parent probably lacks the skill set to regulate their own emotions. That doesn't make it any more possible for you to do it for them. So if you feel like you're constantly walking on eggshells around your parent, there are a couple of boundaries that can be really helpful with that. One is you could identify for yourself what are your.

Torie Wiksell: 5:31

I have to go. Immediate exit warning signs. What are? Absolutely? I am not discussing this with my parent. If they have x, y and z behavior, that is it. Our conversation is over. I'm ending the phone call. I'm ending the visit, I'm leaving. You don't have to verbalize to them what these things are. You can just make mental notes for yourself that if X happens, if they start screaming, crying, all of these things, I'm out. That's it for me. I'm not going to stay there and try to navigate that situation. I'm not going to try to manage it. I'm not going to put all of this pressure on myself to walk on eggshells so that it doesn't happen. It might happen, it does sometimes happen, and if it does, I know how to take care of myself. Okay, the next one.

Torie Wiksell: 6:28

You find yourself constantly getting sucked into their drama. Parents like this have a lot of drama in their lives. They have drama in their relationships. They often have drama at work. They have a lot of drama. It might be financial drama, it might be housing drama. There's a lot of drama, there's a lot of chaos and it's very time limited, typically, or rare, that there is not some level of chaos in their life, and you find that when they are chaotic, they pull you in.

Torie Wiksell: 7:07

When I talk about this with coaching or therapy clients, one visual that I like to give is they have this like emotional tornado going on and you find that whenever that emotional tornado goes on, it just kind of sucks you right up into it, because it is really easy to get sucked up into it. When someone is having this really chaotic energy, it signals that something is amiss. Fight or flight response kicks in and we often go into problem-solving action mode and then we get pulled right into it and we're a part of this problem. Now that we now feel this responsibility to solve and to fix, what we want to do is when we feel that tornado trying to pull us in, we want to go far back. We want to disconnect emotionally. You might need to disconnect physically. In order to do that, if you are physically with your parent, you might need to go for a walk, take a break. You might need to take a pause and the phone call circle back. You might need to put your phone away if it's a text message that's pulling you in. But this is a really good sign that you need more boundaries. Their drama is not your drama. Your drama is your drama, and if you find that you are always or consistently involved in their drama, that is a big red flag that you need better boundaries.

Torie Wiksell: 8:43

Okay, the next one is really tricky. You avoid setting boundaries because you're scared of their rejection, and this can look like a lot of different things. It can look like them saying fine, if you can't do this for me, then don't ever ask me for anything again. It could be financial abandonment, it could be emotional abandonment, it could be physical abandonment. I mean, ultimately, what that fear of rejection is. It's this fear that they're going to withhold love from you. This is supposed to be someone in your life that shows up consistently and that loves you unconditionally. And it can be really scary to set a boundary with a parent like this, because you know at your core that love is not unconditional. It is conditional based on a lot of things, based on how they perceive your actions, how they feel in the moment. There are so many variables there. But that hesitation is very real and it's very understandable, because no one wants to feel abandoned by their parent. That just feels horrible.

Torie Wiksell: 9:58

If you recognize that you're not setting boundaries because you're afraid of that abandonment, of that rejection, of that rejection, that is a really really good place to spend some time reflecting on. That is a really really good place to say to yourself yeah, that will and would feel very bad if my parent cuts me out, gives me the silent treatment, guilts me if they abandon me in any way, shape or form as a result of me drawing a line that will feel awful, and that will feel awful because they're choosing something over me. They're saying that this thing that I want you to do, or this thing that I feel you owe me, is more important to me than what you need from me. What you need from me as your parent is not the most important thing to me. You, as my child, you're not the most important thing to me. That is horrible to think that they could make that choice, and I think that all of us who grew up with parents like this know that that is a choice that they make sometimes and that's why we're afraid of it. That is a choice where they do punish us by giving us a silent treatment. They do punish us by cutting us off emotionally, financially, whatever it is. There are severe consequences for upsetting them and setting them off.

Torie Wiksell: 11:44

And yet the really important part here is to recognize that you not having boundaries with them, or you not having healthy boundaries with them, doesn't mean that they're not going to do that. They're going to do that regardless. This is a part of them, in this dynamic and who they are. You refusing to set boundaries only hurts you. Only hurts you. It doesn't make them less likely to abandon you, reject you, to threaten to abandon you. It doesn't make any of that less likely. It just makes it less likely in the immediate situation that you're dealing with. That is a big red flag there around boundaries dealing with. That is a big red flag there around boundaries.

Torie Wiksell: 12:33

Finally, the last one we're going to talk about today is you very well may need to look at setting some boundaries with your parent. If your parent is consistently interfering with your current relationship or your current family, with your current relationship or your current family, if you have a partner, if you have kids, if you have any sort of family life, and your parent is consistently coming into violating that space, maybe they are creating tension in your relationship with your spouse. Maybe they're ignoring the boundaries that you have set for them, around your children. If your parent is coming into your current family and disrupting the peace there, that is a big sign that you need to have some stronger boundaries with them. This is our list, trying to bring awareness to what's going on with you in your relationship with your parents this week.

Torie Wiksell: 13:40

Like I said at the beginning, today is the day, tuesday, march 18th, 5 pm Pacific time Sign on up confidentboundariescom. Slash boundariesworkshop. I hope to see you there and until next week, have a good one, you guys. 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.