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

Guilt-Tripped Again? How Toxic Parents Keep You Under Control

• Torie Wiksell • Episode 49

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If you’ve ever felt a pit in your stomach after setting a boundary… or a wave of guilt for saying no to your parent’s last-minute demand… this episode is for you.

Guilt has been weaponized in toxic families for generations—and if you grew up with a toxic parent or narcissistic parent, chances are you’ve been conditioned to confuse manipulative guilt with a healthy conscience. But here’s the truth: that guilt you feel? It’s not because you’ve done something wrong. It’s because your parent taught you that their comfort matters more than your well-being.

In this episode, we break down:

  • The difference between healthy guilt and the kind that keeps you stuck in people-pleasing mode
  • Why you don’t need to prove your parent is “trying” to manipulate you for the guilt to be real and harmful

This is a must-listen for any adult child of emotionally immature, narcissistic, or borderline parents who’s ready to break the cycle and stop abandoning themselves to keep the peace.

Ready to find out why your boundaries aren’t working with your toxic parent? Take my free mini-course at confidentboundaries.com/course

And for a limited time, join the Confident Boundaries membership for just $38 your first month with code BIRTHDAY

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

Want more episodes of You're Not Crazy? Sign up for Bonus Episodes:
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Follow me on Instagram:
instagram.com/torieatconfidentboundaries

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.

Speaker 1:

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. Welcome back to the podcast this week. I know last week I had mentioned that I was having pretty bad allergies, and while it is pollen season in the Pacific Northwest, it turns out that I had actually caught some sort of bug from my daughter, and so I am quite nasally today. I'm not sure if you can hear it, but my voice is a bit raspy, so bear with me. Today I'm going to do my best to get through this without my voice cracking too much. So a couple of things right off the top. If you're on my email list or if you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen that this weekend I sent out a little blurb that I'm running a short sale. It actually ends Tuesday. You can hop on over to confidentboundariescom. I'm turning 38 next weekend and so if you use code birthday, you can get your first month in the Confident Boundaries membership for only $38. Also, I have one spot left for a coaching client to start either this week or next week in my practice. If you have been on the fence about working together one-on-one, hop on over to confidentboundariescom slash coaching and you can sign up right there and grab that last spot. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out, dm me, email me. When that spot gets filled I'll throw up a waitlist form on my website. So if you see the option to sign up, that means I still have that spot available.

Speaker 1:

Other fun thing if you follow me on Instagram, as a birthday present to myself ordered some You're Not Crazy merch for myself I got a baseball cap and a sweatshirt. You're Not Crazy merch for myself I got a baseball cap and a sweatshirt and I'm really excited about it. We're coming up on a year of the podcast. We'll be hitting our one-year anniversary in July and I just can't really wrap my head around what a powerhouse this podcast has really turned into. It has been so cool being able to record it each week and talk to all of you and grow the Confident Boundaries membership and work with so many of you individually in coaching and in group coaching in the membership. It's just been a really cool experience. It's really incredible that I get to do what I do for a living, and that is largely thanks to you guys.

Speaker 1:

I really love helping people learn about their family dynamics and feel less alone and understand why things are so hard and how to navigate toxic family dynamics in a way that actually makes sense. This is really something that I not only enjoy doing but I find so incredibly meaningful, because if we can work on becoming emotionally healthy adults ourselves, it has a ripple effect to everyone we encounter in our life. If we're parents, there's a positive ripple effect there. If we're friends, there's a positive ripple effect there. If we go out in the community and interact with people, there's a positive ripple effect there. I truly believe that by being a cycle breaker, by healing ourselves, by learning how to regulate our own emotions and handle conflict in a healthy way, I think we're really making and this is going to sound cheesy, but I really do think we're making the world a better place. I think that it is such important work and I love doing it so much, and I'm so grateful for all of you who listen to me talk and show up and read the blogs and sub stacks that I write, and I just am so grateful and appreciative. So, heading into my 38th birthday. I have so much to be grateful for my 38th birthday. I have so much to be grateful for, but I really wanted to just say a quick thanks before we dive into the heart of today's episode, because I really am so grateful for all of you.

Speaker 1:

Okay, today I want to talk a bit about guilts. I did a workshop in the Confident Boundaries membership a couple of months ago, all about guilt tripping, because this is a big one that comes up when We've grown up with a parent who might have borderline or narcissistic personality disorder. This is a huge one. In dysfunctional families, guilt is a very effective although very dysfunctional, but very effective way of your parent getting you to do what they want you to do, and it doesn't matter if it's conscious or not that I want you to just take note of. So many times we get really stuck on. Is my parent meaning to do this? Is this their intention? And these relationships are so complicated. In a healthy relationship, that would matter, right, it really would. If you were talking about a healthy relationship with another emotionally healthy person, intention would matter and we would want to give that person the benefit of the doubt. That's true in relationships where people take accountability for their errors and they take responsibility for figuring out how to not cause further harm to other people or the relationship.

Speaker 1:

That's not what we're talking about in the parent-child dynamics that we talk about here on the show. We're talking about situations that are not only toxic and dysfunctional, but they're frankly abusive. Intent doesn't matter when it comes to repeated abusive behaviors, because the damage is there regardless. It doesn't matter if there is ill intent. If someone is being abusive, they need to adjust their behavior and figure out how to not be abusive. That's not your job. To make sure that the intent here is unimportant, because the behavior is repeated and your parent isn't doing anything to try to figure out how to stop that, and they're likely not even acknowledging or taking accountability for the fact that this cycle is happening, or they might be blaming you. That's always fun too right To be the quote unquote cause of this dysfunction. So no, we're not going to give them the benefit of the doubt, because we know better and we have seen this pattern and this cycle throughout your life, and it doesn't really matter what the intent is, because the result is that it's very harmful to you and your emotional health and well-being and stress levels.

Speaker 1:

So how does this tie in with guilt? With guilt and with guilt tripping it is so tough because it is a really, really hard emotion to sit with. I mean, if we're going to be honest, when you grow up with a toxic parent, pretty much any emotion can be hard to sit with, even sometimes. I've had a lot of therapy and coaching. Clients tell me that even some of their more joyful emotions are hard to sit with because they weren't allowed to really embrace that or have joyful things for themselves when they were growing up. Emotions are just so tricky when we grow up with a toxic parent, but guilt is an especially uncomfortable one because so many toxic parents use guilt to get their kids to do what they want them to do and it's oftentimes minimized in dysfunctional families. I know, growing up I heard a lot of comments about Catholic guilt I grew up Catholic, by the way but a lot of comments about Catholic guilt just being a thing, as if one could not control this. It was just a part of life. There is healthy guilt and then there is the guilt that we feel when we're being guilt tripped by a toxic parent.

Speaker 1:

Healthy guilt is us feeling guilty because we've behaved in a way that violates our value system. Somehow. Maybe we feel guilty because we're being dishonest, or maybe we feel guilty because we didn't prioritize someone who was important to us. There are a lot of reasons why we feel healthy guilt. There are a lot of reasons why we feel healthy guilt, and essentially, the role of healthy guilt is to call our attention to the fact that our behavior is violating something that we care about, whether that's our relationships or integrity or honesty, whatever it is. Guilt is there to say, hey, this action really doesn't align with who I see myself as and who I want to be, and so I need to not only take note of this, but try to figure out what happened here. So, moving forward, I can approach things differently. That's healthy guilt.

Speaker 1:

What you feel when it comes to your relationship with your parent, and what I have felt growing up with my own parent, is not healthy guilt. It's controlling, it is manipulative, it is very dysfunctional and the funny thing is it feels the same. Whether it's healthy guilt or controlling guilt, the emotion feels the same in my body. I still identify it as the same thing, but when it comes to toxic family dynamics and guilt tripping and feeling guilty for saying no, drawing a boundary, declining an invitation to a family gathering, not answering a phone call or not returning a text right away.

Speaker 1:

Whatever the guilt there is, it's not that healthy guilt that is useful and helpful. It is a lifetime of being conditioned to think that I'm responsible for other people's emotions. It's my job to make sure that other people especially my parent, but other people in general should never be upset or unhappy. Truly, that's what you were raised to think, right? That is the narrative that so many of us are told throughout our childhoods. And if our parent is upset, what that means is I've done something bad, I'm a bad person and I'm solely responsible for fixing it. This is the abuse cycle, this is toxic manipulation. That is what that guilt is.

Speaker 1:

And so, when it comes to addressing guilt in these types of family dynamics, it is so important that you understand all guilt is not the same. You're not feeling guilty in this relationship with your parent because you're doing something wrong. You're not feeling guilty in this relationship with your parent because you're doing something wrong. You're feeling guilty because you've been trained to feel guilty. This doesn't have to be a conscious behavior in order for it to be a problem. Do not get lost in the spiral of trying to figure out if your parent means to hurt you or not. It is not helpful and it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, it really doesn't. It is not about getting rid of the guilt, because we're humans and we're going to have an array of emotions, but it's about learning how to interact with the guilt in a different way than we've been trained to throughout our lives.

Speaker 1:

Like I said, that full guilt workshop is in the membership library. If you're interested in checking that out, it's there. Just a quick reminder you can go on to confidentboundariescom slash membership. Use code birthday at checkout and you can sign up for the first month of the community for only $38 with that code birthday and that disappears after Tuesday. So hop on over there. If that's something you've been thinking about, make sure to use that code. And if you are interested in working together one-on-one again, the site is confidentboundariescom slash coaching and you can sign up to work with me as a coach over there.

Speaker 1:

Oh, also I forgot to mention oh, my gosh, this is the illness. Trying to understand this dynamic is exhausting, and trying to figure out is my parent really that bad? They can't really be that bad. Other people don't think they're that bad, maybe it is just me. When we go down that thought spiral, it takes our time and energy and it leads us nowhere further than we are in the moment. If anything, it pulls us back into the dysfunction because we start doubting the validity of our feelings.

Speaker 1:

So I created a free mini course where I go over what it actually means to have a parent with BPD or MPD. I talk about what those characteristics are so you can finally feel reassured that you in fact are not crazy and you can understand some of the complicated nuances that go on in this type of relationship. And so this mini course is called why your Boundaries Aren't Working with your Toxic Parent. It goes into what it actually means to have a parent with BPD or MPD and it talks about how this is important and helpful information, even if you will never necessarily get a clear diagnosis or not. So head on over to confidentboundariescom slash course and check it out, and I'll see you next week. 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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