What If Protecting Yourself Is the Honest Thing to Do?

Cycle breakers are often raised to believe that honesty = full disclosure and transparency… even when the other person has a history of weaponizing that honesty against them.

In this episode of You’re Not Crazy, we’re digging into the messy middle between brutal honesty and self-abandonment—especially when it comes to dealing with parents who have borderline personality disorder (BPD) or narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

So many of us value being open and real because we didn’t get that growing up. But when it comes to setting boundaries with toxic parents, that same desire to be transparent can backfire—leaving us feeling overexposed, manipulated, and unsafe.

In this episode, I’m sharing:

• The difference between honesty and over-disclosure
• How I decide what to share (and not share) on this podcast and in my own life
• Why you don’t owe anyone—not even your parent—access to your most vulnerable truths
• And the underrated boundary no one talks about: walking away when you're being mistreated

→Ready to learn why your boundaries haven’t been working—and what to do instead? Grab my free mini-course at confidentboundaries.com/course

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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 Welcome and Personal Update
• 2:22 The Honesty Dilemma for Cycle Breakers
• 4:40 Reframing Honesty: Finding the Gray Area
• 7:20 Setting Boundaries Around Your Information
• 10:21 You Can Walk Away from Mistreatment
• 14:02 Episode Wrap and Free Course Promotion

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.

Torie Wiksell: 0:23

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. I am so excited to be back with you. If you can hear it in my voice, I'm still trying to get over this cold, or COVID, or whatever it was, that I picked up from my toddler two weeks ago. It is happening. It is just a slow process. I ended up losing my voice completely for three or four days last week. That was a journey in and of itself, since I talk all day long, both personally and professionally, so that was quite the experience. But, as you can hear, my personally and professionally, so that was quite the experience. But, as you can hear, my voice is back. It's just not back to 100%. So hopefully by this time next week I will be sounding like myself again. I wanted to let you know that I will be recording a bonus episode of the You're Not Crazy podcast. It will be posted for all of the Confident Boundary members and bonus podcast episode subscribers. Over the last week or two, I've asked people in the membership to send me their questions and they've sent some really great ones in, so I'm really excited and I think I'm going to start doing this every so often. I think I'm going to devote one of the two monthly bonus podcast episodes to a question answer session. So if you're interested in checking those out, check the show notes. Everyone in the Confident Boundaries membership gets access to bonus podcast episodes, or you can subscribe just to the bonus podcast episodes as well, so definitely check that out. It's going to be a great episode. I will probably still be sounding like this when I record it, so bear with me, but I promise I will get it out to you ASAP. Let's jump into the episode.

Torie Wiksell: 2:22

One thing I want to talk about today is honesty. For so many of the people that I have worked with throughout the years. For myself, honesty is very important in being an authentic human being who is truthful and dependable and reliable. These are really important values to a lot of cycle breakers. I have noticed quite often people get really stuck on this idea that they do not want to lie to their parent. They don't want to withhold information from their parent because that feels dishonest, and so I think this is worth talking about on the podcast, because this is a place where people really struggle with boundaries. There is a very black and white belief system around this that, I think, gets in the way a lot of times. Not surprising we grew up in a black and white world. It is unshocking that we would hit a roadblock in our healing journey due to viewing things through a black and white lens.

Torie Wiksell: 3:38

Before you turn your vodcast off and say, tori, I'm not interested in you telling me I should start lying, hear me out. Let me explain. I value honesty as well. I consider myself a pretty honest person and I try to be truthful.

Torie Wiksell: 4:08

What I want to say is that there is a big difference between being 100% honest about every aspect of your life, with every person in your life, and being someone who is intentionally a deceptive person. Those are very extremes right. Never telling a lie and always sharing every honest, detailed answer to anything you're ever asked by anyone. That's a very extreme version of honesty. Being someone who is intentionally deceitful and manipulative is the polar end of the spectrum. Where we need to be on our healing journey when it comes to most things, is somewhere in the gray area, and by that I'm not telling you that you need to be deceptive at all. I don't think that you have to lie at all. I also want to reframe the way that you're looking at being honest. You're not required to provide the same amount of disclosure around your life to everyone in your life, including your parents.

Torie Wiksell: 5:15

It is not dishonest to only share details that you are comfortable sharing with the person that you're sharing them with, and I know that that sounds like such a simple idea, but for so many of us it's really not. Because we weren't allowed to have thoughts that were our own growing up, we were not allowed to have our own opinions or views or desires or plans that differed from what our parent wanted for us, and the idea of standing firm in our truth and our voice and our opinions is something that we've had to work really hard for, and so I get it, because I've lived it too, and I still do. I still live this. I want to be authentically me. I want to be the version of me that I always wanted my family to know and to see and to understand. I want to be myself. I don't want to be plain, pretend that feels awful, and just the last thing I want to do.

Torie Wiksell: 6:33

At the same time, I'm also super intentional about what information I share about my life and with whom I share that information. Let's just look at the podcast. I talk a lot about my life and my journey on the podcast. There are also things about my life and my journey that I will never share on the podcast. There are details, there are experiences, there are things that I have dealt with throughout my life many of them, but not all of them in regards to the relationship with my mom growing up, and there are a lot of things that I would never tell anyone outside my closest, most intimate circle of people. Those are people like therapists, my spouse, my closest girlfriends. I would never share that information with people outside of my most intimate circle because that information, those experiences that I've lived, these things are very emotionally vulnerable for me. There are things that I'm still working on healing because I'm human. We never cross a finish line when it comes to that. There are things where, if I were to share it and people were to take that and misconstrue it or criticize me for it, these are things that I would feel a ton of pain around. It would be really hard for me to deal with. The things that I share on this podcast are things that I have done a lot of healing work around.

Torie Wiksell: 8:25

If someone were to listen to this podcast and have something negative or critical to say about it, I mean to be honest it would make me feel sad, but not because I expose part of my trauma. It wouldn't lead to me being further traumatized. It makes me sad when I see someone ranks the podcast one star. That makes me sad because I love this podcast and I put a lot of time and energy into it and I care about it and I want it to be helpful. So those things make me sad, but they don't make me sad because I have given someone access to a part of me and my story that I'm still figuring out and I'm still working out, and that is a really roundabout way of saying that.

Torie Wiksell: 9:17

I think it's so important that when we look at honesty and being honest with people, including, but not limited to, our parents we need to really look at it through this lens of. It's not about telling everything that I'm asked or nothing at all. It's about creating boundaries around how much of my personal world, how much of my life and my feelings and my plans and my actions and my goals do they get access to, and only you get to decide that for yourself. Only I get to decide that for myself. But that should be an active decision. That is a big part of healing. It is looking at healing through this really gray lens, this very flexible lens of I can withhold parts of myself that are not safe with my parent, and that is not a deceitful or a dishonest thing to do. I can just say no if they ask me something that I don't want to share with them. If they ask me for information and I don't want their feedback on it, I can just decline to answer.

Torie Wiksell: 10:40

Something came up during a group coaching call last week and this was such a great point. One of the people in the coaching call had said if your parent is mistreating you, you are allowed to get up and walk away, no matter where you are. Even if you're in a family therapy session, you're allowed to get up and leave. That is something you are allowed to do, and I think this is such an important thing to call out and to say out loud, because it is so true you do not have to be an audience for your parent while they are mistreating you. You don't have to give them that audience. Yeah, it's going to piss them off if you don't, but okay, that's their journey. They're already pissed off. You do not have to give them an audience to go through their drama situation, their berating you, their criticizing you, their shaming you. You don't have to take it. When you were a kid, you didn't have a choice, but as an adult, you very much have a choice now and you don't have to give them that audience. You don't have to tell them aspects of your life that you don't trust them with respecting or treating kindly you know.

Torie Wiksell: 12:08

Again, coming back to my close circle, these are people who I trust completely. These are people who I've lived a lot of life with, I've known for a very long time, who have shown me that they are worthy of my trust because they don't throw things back in my face when they're upset with me. They don't threaten me, they don't misuse vulnerable information that I've shared with them. These are safe people who care about me and respect me and want the best for me, and so I think, when you're really looking at being a truthful and honest person and figuring out how to be that person in your relationship with your parent, that it's really important to remember your parent that it's really important to remember. Your parent is not a safe person to be open and honest about with everything. If they were, you wouldn't be here listening to my podcast right now. You're here because they're not a safe person, and so I really want you to think about creating boundaries around honesty that respect your well-being and prioritize your sense of safety. That is my philosophy on honesty when it comes to being a cycle breaker and looking at things through a more flexible lens that offers self-protection, so that we can heal and get out of this cycle of meeting our parents' needs before we meet our own, because we all deserve so much better than that.

Torie Wiksell: 14:02

Thank you so much, as always, for joining me for this episode of the You're Not Crazy podcast. If you haven't already, hop on over to confidentboundariescom slash course and sign up for my free mini course why your Boundaries Aren't Working With your Toxic Parent. When you sign up, you'll get access to a super easy to breeze through mini course. There's a 15-minute video, which is the meat of the course, a couple shorter videos that are one or two minutes each, and a mini workbook with two worksheets that are really going to help give you clarity as to why your boundaries haven't worked thus far. This is the step one before you're ready to take my boundaries workshop. So head on over there, sign up and I'll see you next week. Bye.

Torie Wiksell: 14:54

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.