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

A Year of Reflection: Boundaries, Burnout, and What I’m Taking Into 2026

December 31, 2025·38 min·2 clips

This is a year-end exhale. Tori starts with the basics: therapist, boundaries coach, adult child of a narcissistic mom, and host of a show for people who know how scrambled these family systems can make you feel. She sounds tired, but not lost. The final 2025 episode turns into a look at what happens when work matters, more people are watching, and personal limits start getting tested at the same time. She changed the intro. It sounds small, but it clearly was not small to her, because she had wanted to do it for a while and life kept moving too fast to catch up. There is no glossy victory lap here. She talks about making the podcast for a year and a half with real disbelief, then gets into the harder part of being visible online. Some reviews have been unkind. The bigger drain, though, seems to be the churn around social media comments and direct outreach, especially when it gets disturbing, upsetting, time consuming, and emotionally expensive. The podcast still feels different. It gives her room to talk about narcissistic, emotionally immature, and toxic family dynamics without the same immediate crush of visibility and reaction. TikTok changed the pressure. She says she went viral in July or August, after never picturing herself as a social media therapist. Her goal was specific: reach adult cycle breakers, especially people raised by parents with narcissistic traits or unmanaged borderline personality disorder. That group can be hard to find and easy to misunderstand. The growth brought kindness. It also brought cruelty and criticism, enough to make her ask where her energy belongs now. This episode is about overwhelm, yes, but it is also about choosing the place where the work can stay human enough to keep going.

As heard by us

A candid year-end reset about boundaries, cycle breaking, and protecting energy.

This final 2025 episode has Tori Wixel looking back on a messy year and trying to make 2026 feel smaller, simpler, and easier to hold. The conversation stays close to the work that has always mattered here: boundaries, breaking old cycles, and what it takes to reach adults…

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Why you'd press play

You want a boundary reset before 2026 starts making demands.

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