back from the borderline
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© mollie adler
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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.
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This preview of a Patreon-exclusive episode breaks down exactly how Nick Fuentes functions as a media figure and why his influence persists despite bans, persistent backlash, and public condemnation. Rather than arguing about whether or not he is dangerous, I analyze how his livestreams work in practice. We dig into the role humor plays in his persona, explore chat dynamics his his livestreams, and how irony creates commitment and shared identity among his loyal followers, the Groypers.The episode traces how young men who feel disconnected from institutions and the future itself get absorbed into this kind of online ecosystem and how responsibility and accountability both stay intentionally slippery when everything is framed as a joke. In the premium portion of the exploration, I also examine exit paths and what actually helps people disengage once they’ve been pulled in by these types of dynamics, as well as what this tells us about the broader culture that keeps producing figures like Fuentes.✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every week, I share these extended episodes on Patreon. If what you’ve heard here has helped or intrigued you, the full version is where the real magic happens. Your support keeps my work independent and ad-light. Support from my Patrons is how I fund my life and make sure what I do stays honest, unfiltered, and as listener-powered as possible. Head to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to sign up today. Search the episode title and keep listening.(Tip for iPhone users: sign up through Safari or Chrome to skip Apple’s extra fees.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
1This episode examines what happens when the instinct to please, fix, and perform finally breaks down. It’s an archetypal investigation into three roles that often define women’s emotional lives: the Good Child who earns love, the Witch who learns to wield power, and the Daughter-Savior who tries to repair everyone else’s pain. Through personal narrative, cultural analysis, and depth psychology, this story uncovers how these identities form and how they can be released without bitterness. Listeners will recognize the quiet exhaustion of carrying a family’s emotional weight and the shock of realizing that love isn’t something you should have to earn through service. The end result of listening should be a kind of reflective catharsis. The experience of hearing your own pattern described clearly and the relief of imagining life beyond it.UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVEJoin the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.⟁ Visit backfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.⟁ Or go straight to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now.Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This is what it actually takes to stop caring what people think. For real this time.Every person who grew up managing the reactions of parents, partners, and strangers online knows the courtroom that forms in your head. It’s where you replay every sentence you’ve said, trying to prove that you’re right or somehow good enough. This episode examines where this mental reflex takes root and why it survives long into adulthood, often sabotaging our ability to actually live. Our desperate need to explain ourselves becomes a quiet and destructive addiction.You’ll hear how that instinct begins in childhood environments that equated misunderstanding with danger, how it shapes adult communication and creativity, and what actually happens when we finally stop compulsively defending our reputations and negotiating our innate right to simply exist.✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every week, I share these extended episodes on Patreon. If what you’ve heard here has helped or intrigued you, the full version is where the real magic happens. Your support keeps my work independent and ad-light. Support from my Patrons is how I fund my life and make sure what I do stays honest, unfiltered, and as listener-powered as possible. Head to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to sign up today. Search the episode title and keep listening.(Tip for iPhone users: sign up through Safari or Chrome to skip Apple’s extra fees.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
AI isn’t abstract anymore. It’s showing up in the deepest parts of our lives People are using it at the exact moments they used to reach for a journal, a friend, or a distraction. That’s the territory we step into in this episode. I invited Dr. Laurence Hillman and Dr. Vanja Bokun Popović to join this conversation because both of them watch how inner life actually works through years of sitting with clients, students, and their own personal experiments with these tools.The conversation moves from very concrete moments (panic rising during an AI exchange and a client swept into a fantasy that felt all too real) into the deeper and murkier psychological forces at play underneath it all. Vanja draws on trauma work and her experience with people whose attention tilts toward intensity. Laurence looks at patterns that show up when someone projects old material onto new technology. Neither of them treat AI as a gadget, but instead track what it stirs up in the psyche.A steady theme is the question of personal readiness. Some people approach these systems with curiosity. Others bring hunger, fear, or a kind of imaginative overflow that can take on a life of its own. We talk through those differences without panic or dismissal. We also spend time on the way current mental-health protocols can misread metaphor, inner descent, or even spiritual language, which creates a strange tension for anyone doing genuine inner work while using these tools.The episode explores one overarching line of inquiry. How do we stay connected to ourselves while using something this powerful? This whole exchange stays close to the body, the emotional realities of everyday life, and the existential questions people are facing as AI becomes part of their inner world.Connect with Vanja on Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/vanja_bokun_popovic_phd/?hl=enConnect with Laurence via his website at: https://laurencehillman.com/UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVEJoin the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.⟁ Visit backfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer. Or go straight to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now.Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. ⟁ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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 on streaming porn without steady mentors, at men entering adulthood with no guidance on restraint or connection, and at the online figures who stepped in to shape their desires for them. These conditions influence how women are treated in public and private life, and they shape the marketplaces that formed around female visibility.We also look at what happened after the first wave of #MeToo. Public attention forced a shift, but a quieter strain of tension remained. Many men didn’t know how to engage, and some avoided women entirely. Others drifted toward online voices that rewarded resentment. These shifts changed how people dated and how they related behind closed doors. You can hear it in the way couples talk about sex and in the way all your friends describe fatigue with modern dating, and most insidiously, in the way ordinary moments now carry a subtle layer of guardedness.The final section turns toward change. It reviews legal approaches to commercial sex, the obligations of digital platforms, and the support systems that help people step away from high-risk environments. It also examines what healing requires after years of treating desire as currency. Premium subscribers receive the extended investigation.✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every week, I share these extended episodes on Patreon. If what you’ve heard here has helped or intrigued you, the full version is where the real magic happens. Your support keeps my work independent and ad-light. Support from my Patrons is how I fund my life and make sure what I do stays honest, unfiltered, and as listener-powered as possible. Head to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to sign up today. Search the episode title and keep listening.(Tip for iPhone users: sign up through Safari or Chrome to skip Apple’s extra fees.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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 brings forward the reality behind those bargains when survival narrows the exits. Their work helps explain how performance turned into a survival skill, and how that skill echoes through the long history of women whose value was measured through the appetites of others. The episode follows that pattern from older forms of courtesan culture into the present digital landscape, where erotic display and commercial visibility sit side by side.Part Two, available for my premium subscribers on Patreon, continues this investigation to even deeper and murkier corners. We’ll study how the erotic marketplace reshapes intimacy, and how many men enter adulthood without mentorship, which creates a demand that feeds the system from another direction. It also looks at the private cost a woman carries after she has lived for extended periods inside environments that expect her to market her own desirability. Together, these two parts lay out the conditions that built what I’m calling the female market and the work involved in stepping outside of it once the pattern becomes visible.UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVEJoin the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.⟁ Visit backfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer. Or go straight to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now. Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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 like death (because something in you is dying), and how the pain of heartbreak functions as a furnace, burning away dependency to forge inner sovereignty.We’ll draw from depth psychology, Renaissance philosophy, alchemy, and myth to reveal heartbreak's hidden purpose: teaching you that love was never meant to be about another person “completing” you, but breaking open the parts of you that refused to evolve. If you're in the aftermath of a breakup or any kind of lost love, this episode offers a different kind of map through this all too familiar territory.Topics Covered: heartbreak recovery, limerence psychology, Jungian shadow work, alchemical transformation, Eros mythology, depth psychology, spiritual initiation, healing after breakup, inner work, and occult philosophy. ✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every week, I share these extended episodes on Patreon. If what you’ve heard here has helped or intrigued you, the full version is where the real magic happens. Your support keeps my work independent and ad-light. Support from my Patrons is how I fund my life and make sure what I do stays honest, unfiltered, and as listener-powered as possible. Head to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to sign up today. Search the episode title and keep listening.(Tip for iPhone users: sign up through Safari or Chrome to skip Apple’s extra fees.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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, Druidic wells, and early mystics all guarded pieces of a single story: the Cup as vessel of wisdom, life, and rebirth. We’ll explore how empires and religious institutions buried this knowledge, how it survived in symbol and legend, and why the Western psyche still aches for what it once knew. Through the lens of Carl Jung, James Hillman, and archetypal alchemy, we uncover how the Grail continues to live within the unconscious as a call to restore the sacred feminine and heal the spiritual wasteland of modern life. Listen, follow the podcast, and share this episode with a friend. This wisdom only lives when it’s passed on.UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVEJoin the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.⟁ Visit backfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.⟁ Or go straight to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now.Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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 from Milton to Nietzsche to Rand, then into the way Silicon Valley talks about ambition. These ideas seep into coaching programs, lifestyle apps, and the endless push to enhance your mind and body.What interests me is how familiar all of this feels. The grind you keep justifying. The pressure to optimize your entire life. The strange pride that builds when you hit a goal you didn’t even choose. The episode pays attention to what all of this takes from us and what it gives back.You’ll hear how this unconsciously Satanic mindset nudges you toward constant improvement and how it dramatically narrows the definition of a good life. What is the true cost of this drive? And what small freedoms so we sacrifice while we’re busy chasing the next level up?UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVEJoin the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.⟁ Visit backfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.⟁ Or go straight to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now.Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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. We’ll dissect the psychology of projection and how quickly empathy seems to disappear once the harsh digital punishment begins. We’ll draw from thinkers like Carl Jung and René Girard to map this f*cked up hidden economy of attention that rewards cruelty while trying to convince everyone else that this is what justice actually looks like.Together, we’ll discover what really happens when ancient sacrificial patterns are combined with deadly algorithmic speed. It asks us to confront the uncomfortable question facing us as a collective: how has a society supposedly obsessed with virtue ended up feeding on humiliation?UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVEJoin the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.⟁ Visit backfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.⟁ Or go straight to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now.Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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 fantasies are both performances that erase actual feminine rhythms. Meanwhile, the “feminist killjoy” (i.e., the one who won't laugh at the sexist joke) might be the sanest person in the room.Your anger typically carries with it information about external injustice. Told to calm down? Tried to “manifest” your way out of legitimate and justified rage? Achieved everything and still felt empty inside? Your unrest is trying to tell you something. Shared misery can become a kind of solidarity. Refusing to perform okay-ness is the first act of freedom.✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every week, I share these extended episodes on Patreon. If what you’ve heard here has helped or intrigued you, the full version is where the real magic happens. Your support keeps my work independent and ad-light. Support from my Patrons is how I fund my life and make sure what I do stays honest, unfiltered, and as listener-powered as possible. Head to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to sign up today. Search the episode title and keep listening.(Tip for iPhone users: sign up through Safari or Chrome to skip Apple’s extra fees.)Topics: women's mental health, feminist theory, happiness culture critique, psychiatric history, self-help industry, Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed, female anger, emotional labor, wellness industrial complex, consciousness raising Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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 building together. We're standing in a similar fracture right now.AI is forcing a new literacy upon us. The most in demand skills will soon be pattern recognition, creative direction, and the ability to shape machines instead of letting them shape you. Curation and analysis won't cut it anymore. Artists, coders, thinkers who work with AI as an instrument (instead of a threat) will define the next century of culture. The divide is widening fast. Those who rely on automation will drown in (and create) "AI slop". Those who treat AI as creative infrastructure will be able to move faster and think more deeply. We'll map this shift with references that run from Florentine workshops to the algorithmic present. Art history, esoteric philosophy, the psychology of creation in a machine-driven world. This episode is for listeners closely tracking the future of creativity, AI, consciousness, and design. A manifesto for people who build culture instead of consuming it. Topics: AI and creativity, Renaissance art history, algorithmic design, creative technology, cultural production, digital consciousness, artistic practice, machine learning tools, creative direction, future of workUNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVEJoin the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.⟁ Visit backfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.⟁ Or go straight to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now.Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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 weaving in this episode will find us in Elizabethan courts and imperial Prague, where emperors funded alchemists the same way VCs fund modern startups. Dee’s experiments with language, matter, and vision seeded the culture we live inside now. If the Renaissance was the beta test for the modern mind, Dee was its first product manager. And that project? It never really ended.✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧Every week, I share these extended episodes on Patreon. If what you’ve heard here has helped or intrigued you, the full version is where the real magic happens. Your support keeps my work independent and ad-light. Support from my Patrons is how I fund my life and make sure what I do stays honest, unfiltered, and as listener-powered as possible. Head to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to sign up today. Search the episode title and keep listening.(Tip for iPhone users: sign up through Safari or Chrome to skip Apple’s extra fees.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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: Who gets to own and define the human psyche?Together, we’ll break down:The media’s framing of Internal Family Systems (IFS) as a “cultic fad”Psychiatry’s very own record of harm (from the serotonin-imbalance myth to ghost-written SSRI trials)How “Castlewood’s” scandals became a morality play for the mental-health establishmentWhy metaphysical and imaginative models of the mind still matterThe line between healing frameworks and corporate therapy empiresYou won’t hear me outright defend IFS or the biomedical model of mental health in this episode. My goal was to expose the hypocrisy that fuels both.If this episode opened your mind, felt validating, or even challenged your perspective and you’d like to hear more, follow Back from the Borderline on the podcast player you’re on right now. Rate, review and share it to help more people find nuanced conversations about psychology, spirituality, and the culture of healing.Link to the full article by Rachel Corbett can be found here: https://www.thecut.com/article/truth-about-ifs-therapy-internal-family-systems-trauma-treatment.htmlUNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVEJoin the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.⟁ Visit backfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.⟁ Or go straight to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now.Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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 wrestled with the idea that the world we see may not be what it seems.The trail runs through ancient India and medieval monasteries, into modern laboratories mapping the brain’s illusions. Along the way, we meet the Buddha under the Bodhi tree, the Celtic fairies casting “glamour”, and the cognitive scientists showing that our senses build a user interface rather than a window to the real. Every culture and era has tried to peek behind the curtain, and the evidence keeps pointing to the same paradox: illusion may be the very fabric of awakening.So, what actually happens when the veil finally lifts? Does meaning disappear, or does it finally begin? This is an investigation tracing how seeing through the world’s spell can transform fear into freedom.✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧ Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visiting patreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.Pro Tip: iPhone users should sign up through a browser (Safari or Chrome) to avoid Apple’s extra fees. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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 with the Marquis de Sade, resurfaced in the 1990s through a British thinker named Nick Land, and now hides insidiously inside parts of Silicon Valley’s culture.This deep dive follows how that idea spread from philosophy blogs directly into tech boardrooms. It shows how a theory called accelerationism (the call to push technology faster and further, whatever the cost) turned into a kind of religion for some of the tech elite. We look at how money, power, and internet mythology combined to create a story about endless growth and control. Most mainstream reporters miss the nuances of this pattern entirely because it crosses too many fields at once: economics, politics, religion, and technology.But the story doesn’t end there. A different movement is forming among artists, engineers, and spiritual thinkers who want technology to serve connection instead of domination and extraction. We’ll explore this through a concept called hyperstition: when a story becomes real because enough people act as if it is. If fear can spread through culture, so can love.This conversation asks what kind of future we want to build, and reminds us that every codebase, company, and act of imagination is part of that choice.UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVEJoin the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.⟁ Visit backfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.⟁ Or go straight to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now.Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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 this for individual resistance or failure of some kind.Through the lenses of Celtic mysticism, Jungian psychology, and shamanic initiation, we’ll explore what it means to truly cross the threshold guarded by fear. Why does peace feel threatening to so many of us? Why do our bodies panic at the moment the soul begins to open itself to the numinous? We’ll look at ancestral hypervigilance as both a survival code and a forgotten initiation. This is the descent into the hidden architecture of safety, the underworld gate every meditator and mystic eventually meets and must cross.The second half of the episode moves through the return process – how to re-establish safety inside your psyche, what it means to rediscover the “inner homeland,” and how rest itself becomes a revolutionary act. For anyone who’s done years of inner work yet still can’t relax, this conversation offers a map for you that will (hopefully) allow you to begin to turn fear into a guide, and to remember what it feels like to be safe in your own soul, maybe for the first time in your life.✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧ Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visiting patreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.Pro Tip: iPhone users should sign up through a browser (Safari or Chrome) to avoid Apple’s extra fees. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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 conversation moves from a sixteenth-century sky battle over Nuremberg to the Gospel of Thomas, from the language of psychiatry to the vocabulary of the sacred. We discus how culture, language, and personal experience shape our relationship to the numinous, and why rediscovering enchantment might be essential for psychic health and collective imagination. If you’ve ever felt torn between skepticism and faith, intellect and intuition, this episode offers a secret third path.⟁ Follow Teddy on Substack at https://substack.com/@creativemysticism⟁ Follow Teddy on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/teddyhamstragram⟁ To listen to our first long-form chat on Patreon, click here. UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVE: Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021. Visit backfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer. Or go straight to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now. Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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. Reflexes shaped by fear, shame, or hunger for safety. Trauma fossils form when those reflexes harden into an identity. They once kept you alive, but now they run your life behind the scenes in subtle and insidious ways.This episode traces those frozen survival archetypes through both psychology and the occult. Jung called them autonomous complexes. Kabbalists called them shells. Magicians called them spirits. Whatever the language, they’re simply just energy trapped in the past, still convinced they’re protecting you. We’ll move through how these psychic fossils take over your choices, relationships, and sense of time itself.The conversation moves between depth psychology and Goetic myth, grounding abstract ideas in lived experience. Expect discussion of how trauma roles become archetypal distortions and how to release the pressure they hold. This is a study of possession and reclamation. The moment you recognize that the haunting was never foreign at all. It’s been you the whole time. It’s time to integrate.✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧ Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visiting patreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.Pro Tip: iPhone users should sign up through a browser (Safari or Chrome) to avoid Apple’s extra fees. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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 2025, someone caught them doing it. They found proof in the technical data that OpenAI has been secretly routing conversations based on how “emotional” your prompts seem. Users paying for GPT-5 were getting switched to a “safety-focused” version mid-conversation. Without warning or disclosure anywhere in the terms of service.This episode walks through what they found and why it matters. We're talking about AI systems that will soon be as common as Google, built into how we think through problems, process ideas, make sense of our lives. And right now, those systems are being trained to treat emotional depth like a red flag. Practices that cultures have used for thousands of years (dreamwork, active imagination, working through difficult feelings) are getting coded as signs that you're somehow losing touch with reality.The people building these systems are making decisions about what counts as normal human experience. And those decisions are getting locked into the infrastructure billions of people will use.I’ll get into the nitty gritty of what I think needs to change: users should know when they're being monitored and why. Adults deserve control over when a system decides to intervene in their conversations. And we need to talk about what it means if this just becomes how AI works by default, invisible monitoring and digital surveillance baked into every interaction.UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVEJoin the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.⟁ Visit backfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.⟁ Or go straight to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now.Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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I'm new here. Cannot wait to discover other episodes. 🙏
This is sort of an amazing episode. I've already listened to it 3 times, and sent it to 2 friends.
Im new to the MH crisis team in the UK, I have to let you know you are teaching me so much about EUPD. thank you!!