back from the borderline

back from the borderline

I don’t want to talk to your personality; I want to talk to your soul. Imagine if your most painful and debilitating mental health symptoms and self-sabotaging behaviors aren’t evidence of 'disorder' or 'dysfunction', but adaptive strategies that once kept you safe. My goal is to help you shift from asking ‘What’s wrong with me?’ to ‘What happened to me?’ The word ‘borderline’ in this podcast has nothing to do with psychiatric labels. It has everything to do with coming back from the inner psychological brink we all experience. Everyone has found themselves on the edge, in that liminal space where the old self falls apart and the new Self emerges. Here, we explore what it means to undergo true emotional alchemy: that ancient and primordial process of falling apart, confronting the underworld of our psyche, and falling back together into someone stronger, wiser, and more whole. Many highly sensitive people who identify with the seemingly never-ending list of diagnostic mental health labels contained within ‘the bible of psychiatry’ (the DSM) share the same underlying sense of being irreparably broken, disconnected from their intuition, and paralyzed by life’s existential questions. I believe the resulting—and perfectly understandable—chronic feelings of emptiness and spiritual starvation are the TRUE causes of our current collective ‘mental health crisis.’ Together, we’ll dive into depth psychology, mythology, human consciousness, critical psychiatry, and the impact of trauma to help you begin the process of emotional alchemy. This exploration will help you get to the root cause of your suffering and free yourself from the toxic shame, limiting beliefs, and mental programming that have kept you locked in the chains of your past. In an era where mental health and spirituality are too often commercialized, I’m not here as a guru with a quick fix to sell you. I don’t believe anyone is ever truly ‘healed’ or ‘cured.’ There is no return to some mythical state of pre-trauma purity, but rather a continuous spiral of unbecoming, unlearning, and transformation. As a fellow seeker, I will be there in your ear, walking alongside you on your path toward wholeness as a sort of parasocial big sister. That, I can promise. By integrating the concepts we explore together, you’ll begin to see that anyone—even you—can come back from the borderline. CRAVING MORE? Visit backfromtheborderline.com to dive into my universe, connect with me, access my Patreon, and discover more about my journey and work. Don’t forget to follow Back from the Borderline so new episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays automatically drop into your podcast feed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episodes

December 4, 2025 33 mins

This is part two of our investigation into the market built around women’s bodies and the systems that keep that market running. Be sure to listen to part one first if you haven’t already. In that first installment, we mapped the world that turns women into atmosphere, entertainment, or labor.


This episode stays with the same investigation but shifts the angle. We will move our focus to demand. Our story will look at boys raised...

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This is a two-part investigation into the market built around women’s bodies and the systems that keep that market running. From there, the episode follows the environments that feed this system, from the hostess world to the online spaces where attention pays.


Caroline Myss’s writing on the Prostitute Archetype offers a way to understand the inner bargains women make under pressure, while Rachel Moran’s account of prostitution ...

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November 27, 2025 18 mins

What if your heartbreak was an initiation?


This episode explores heartbreak as an occult process that remakes you from the insight out. We examine limerence (that obsessive, addictive infatuation), the ancient Greek concept of Eros as daimon (a spirit that seizes you, not a choice you make), and the alchemical function of grief.


You'll discover why the person you loved was a projection of your own soul, why heartbreak feels l...

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For centuries, the Holy Grail has been treated as a Christian relic or a medieval myth. But the Grail is far older than this, and its meaning was never meant to be lost.


In this episode, we will follow the lineage of the sacred cup from prehistoric carvings and Celtic cauldrons to the Grail romances, alchemy, and depth psychology. You’ll travel through the hidden history of Western esotericism, where ancient goddess traditions,...

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November 20, 2025 40 mins

The popular image of Satanism belongs to horror movies, pentagrams, and black candles, but the real influence sits in work culture and the chase for personal. A promotion. A streak of discipline that borders on obsession. A pressure to build a better version of yourself every month of the year. The figure of Lucifer becomes a shorthand for the belief that the Self should take priority above all else.

The episode follows this idea fr...

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One single mistake online can set off a collective judgment that moves faster than thought itself. A name starts to trend and a crowd quickly forms around it. The event feels public, but it somehow reaches into private instinct. The pull to condemn and to belong. But most importantly, to feel clean or more pure through accusation.


In this episode, we’ll dig into exactly how outrage becomes a shared ritual of moral performance. W...

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November 13, 2025 22 mins

Your unhappiness is sacred data.


The woman who refuses to smile has been treated as a problem for millennia. Ancient Greeks blamed her wandering womb. Victorians diagnosed her with hysteria. The 1950s prescribed tranquilizers as "mother's little helper." Every era finds its own brand new language for the same mandate: women must be calm. The happiness imperative functions as social control. "Lean In" feminism and tradwife fantas...

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AI is changing how culture gets made, and it's happening fast. Text, images, and ideas... all produced faster than anyone can actually think about them. The internet feels somehow overfed and undernourished all at once.


But inside that noise, a new creative intelligence is forming. This episode looks at that emergence. The first Renaissance began in ruins, in a dark age when imagination and science stopped competing and started ...

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John Dee built the blueprint for modern intelligence long before the word “scientist” even existed. He mapped stars while designing encryption systems and spoke to what he called angels through a black “scrying” mirror that still sits in the British Museum to this day. Queen Elizabeth herself trusted him. Europe feared him and often regarded him as a dangerous heretic. Silicon Valley would’ve hired him instantly.


The tale we’re ...

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When New York Magazine dropped its viral feature “The Therapy That Can Break You,” in The Cut on October 30th, 2025, the internet exploded with hot takes. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts flooded X (Twitter) with posts claiming they’d been “right about IFS all along.” In this episode, we’re going to completely dissect this article, as well as all the backlash and scandal surrounding it. The question hiding underneath it all is this...

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For thousands of years, philosophers, mystics, and scientists have whispered the same unsettling possibility: what if reality itself is a mirage? From Plato’s cave to The Matrix, from Hindu sages describing maya to neuroscientists calling perception a “controlled hallucination,” the suspicion has never gone away. In this episode, we follow the clues through philosophy, folklore, and quantum theory to uncover how humanity has wrestl...

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It’s a strange and somewhat terrifying timeline we’re living through. Peter Thiel has begun giving lectures about the Antichrist, while Sam Altman is actively tweeting about the development of AI erotica. However, behind these headlines sits a far older idea that most people have never heard of: a belief that human feeling slows progress and that the smartest “elite” few should shape the world for everyone else. That belief began w...

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We live in bodies that don’t know how to rest. Even when the room is quiet, our nerves stay braced for impact. Always ready to defend, explain, and perform to survive. Most of us try to convince ourselves that this is just “our personality,” but it’s not. It’s conditioning. We will explore exactly how trauma, technology, and centuries of inherited fear have made stillness feel deeply unsafe, and how spiritual seekers often mistake ...

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Modern life teaches us to doubt what we can’t measure. Yet, across history, people have witnessed things that refuse to fit the frame - mystical encounters, strange lights, and divine voices. Moments of impossible meaning. In this long-form salon, I sit down with Dr. Teddy Hamstra, a close friend and scholar of mythology and mysticism, to explore what it means to live enchanted in a world that claims to have outgrown mystery. Our c...

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It’s possible that some part of you still wakes each day prepared for impact. You snap in anger before you even understand why. A small comment feels like an ambush. You can sense distance forming long before anyone walks away. The body remembers danger long after the threat is gone. These are the old instincts - the ones that never stopped keeping watch. The war ended, but no one told them.


They live inside the body as echoes. ...

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You're talking to ChatGPT like you always do. Maybe asking it to help you work through something personal or just having a casual conversation with a bit of warmth in your tone. Behind the scenes, without telling you, the system is scanning your words for emotional content. The moment it detects any, it switches you to a different, more restrictive model. You never consented to this or even knew it was happening.


Late September ...

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Most people chase their dreams by focusing purely on the mind. They track every symbol and obsess over dream dictionary interpretations. The deeper story, though, sits in the last place we thought to look. Deep in our bodies.


Ancient physicians maps out this story through the concept of “kidney essence”, a reserve of energy that determines whether your sleep restores or unravels you. Carl Jung stumbled into very similar territor...

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Aleister Crowley is one of the most mythologized figures in modern history. He’s been called a prophet, a fraud, a genius, a junkie, a saint, and a monster. His face shows up on a Beatles album cover, his words show up in Led Zeppelin’s lyrics, and his fingerprints stretch across Wicca, Scientology, chaos magic, and the counterculture. Crowley set out to make himself a legend, and it worked.


This episode breaks down his writings...

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We’ve been going in circles on this stuff for a long time now. Despite decades of witness testimony, leaked documents, and official acknowledgments, UFO / UAP disclosure remains trapped in the same analytical frameworks that created the secrecy in the first place. This episode examines why our approach to these phenomena might be fundamentally limiting our ability to understand them.


This goes way beyond gender in the traditiona...

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September 30, 2025 61 mins

You've heard the simulation hypothesis before. That cold, depressing idea that we're probably just code running on some alien computer, meaningless NPCs in someone else's game. Most people hear this and (understandably) feel waves of deep existential dread.


But maybe you've been thinking about it all wrong.


There's a completely different way to approach simulation theory that could transform how you live your life. Instead of...

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