mollie adler

Back from the Borderline

Religion EN ↓ 349 episodes

Back From The Borderline is a podcast about depth psychology, symbolism, spirituality, consciousness, and the search for a more meaningful life. I started this show years ago while trying to understand my own mind. Somewhere along the way, the questions became much bigger than me. They led into Carl Jung, mythology, Christian mysticism, dreams, tarot, philosophy, esotericism, religious history, artificial intelligence, and the symbolic patterns that quietly shape the way we see ourselves and the world around us. The word borderline has taken on its own meaning over the years. It speaks to the...

Author

mollie adler

Category

Religion

Podcast website

backfromtheborderline.com

Latest episode

Jul 7, 2026

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Episodes

religious trauma and the silent toll on female emotional development (a roundtable with stephanie ann and alyssa grenfell) 26.08.2025

This episode brings together two former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Stephanie Ann and Alyssa Grenfell) for a direct conversation about the psychological, emotional, and ritual structures of Mormonism and its lasting impact on women. Both guests were deeply embedded in the church for most of their lives and made the decision to leave, but their paths diverge in many...

the 1000-year-old tibetan secret that makes western psychology look like child's play 21.08.2025

Discover the ancient Tibetan practice of Chöd that's revolutionizing how we approach inner work, trauma healing, and shadow integration. While Western psychology teaches you to fight your demons, this 1000-year-old wisdom tradition reveals why feeding them creates profound transformation that traditional therapy often cannot achieve. In this deep-dive episode, we explore how Machig Labdrön, an 11t...

selective spiritual technophobia: why mystics and scientists are both getting AI wrong 19.08.2025

Why are so many spiritual teachers and thinkers panicking about AI? Some are calling it demonic, while others say it’s the Antichrist, but almost no one is asking the deeper questions about how AI actually reflects the human psyche and what that reflection can do to us. This episode breaks down the real risks of using AI for inner work. We look at how it can speed up psychological and spiritual in...

why shadow work is making you worse 14.08.2025

You've been doing everything right. Journaling about your triggers. Embracing your darkness. Loving your inner demons. Yet somehow your anxiety is worse, your patterns are stronger, and you're more fragmented than when you started. The entire shadow work industry has been teaching you to feed the very parasites it claims to heal. Medieval Jewish mystics identified a phenomenon they called the Sitr...

meme magic, hot mess eras, and digital disappearance with aiden arata 12.08.2025

If you’ve spent any time on Instagram’s weird, wonderful and niche corners, chances are high that you’ve seen one of Aiden Arata’s memes. Her work moves past the usual surface-level social media irony and plunges into the intersection where humor, psychic distress, and cultural commentary meet. Aiden’s debut book You Have a New Memory has been making waves, and for good reason. It’s hard to descri...

the death of the people-pleaser: how self-abandonment becomes a survival strategy 05.08.2025

This episode is a deep dive into the psychological, spiritual, and mythic roots of people-pleasing and why this pattern exists in the first place. We explore how early childhood conditioning teaches us that love must be earned through caretaking, emotional labor, and self-erasure. From there, we dissect the roles many of us take on - empath, gifted child, good daughter - and trace how these i...

TDC_21: the secret sauce to awakening? paradox. 02.08.2025

There are some episodes that meet you where you are. This is not one of those.  This episode is for those standing at the threshold where healing is no longer purely about “symptom relief” and starts becoming a deeper confrontation with reality itself. If you’re beginning to sense that “the work” isn’t as simple as a life-long unpacking of what happened to you, but instead a process of becomi...

cutting the cord, keeping the thread: how to stop repeating your parents’ coping mechanisms in adult life 31.07.2025

Family dynamics shape us long after we’ve left home, but not always in ways we can see.  This episode examines what happens when we internalize the unresolved patterns of our caregivers and carry them into adulthood as unconscious coping mechanisms. Through a personal story about a mother’s metaphor for surviving paternal rage, we look closely at how well-meaning messages can become long-term...

why age gap relationships aren’t normal: grooming, power, and emotional maturity 29.07.2025

Age-gap relationships have been romanticized, normalized, and quietly accepted across pop culture, media, and even personal memory. But at what cost?  In this episode, I take you into the psychological and emotional undercurrent of adult–teen relationships and age-gap dynamics, unpacking how power, control, fantasy, and arrested development often hide beneath the surface of what gets labeled...

the emotional cost of always being available (why you’re drowning in unread messages) 24.07.2025

In a world where the day begins with blinking notifications and ends with unanswered messages, many of us are carrying an invisible weight. This episode examines the psychological and physiological cost of always being available and why the pressure to respond is quietly rewiring our nervous systems. From the dopamine mechanics of unread messages to the guilt spiral of delayed replies, we explore...

you can’t domesticate venus: sex, power, and the archetypes running your life with dr. laurence hillman 22.07.2025

Psychological astrologer Dr. Laurence Hillman returns to the podcast for a rare, unfiltered conversation on desire, danger, and the archetypal forces that shape our lives beneath the surface. We dive deep into the myth of Persephone, the shadow of the lover archetype, and the cultural fear of Hades from both a literal and symbolic perspective. We also explore why we are drawn to unsafe situations...

your whole childhood wasn’t bad: the danger of “all-trauma” narratives 17.07.2025

Many of us find healing through learning about trauma - especially childhood emotional neglect, dysfunctional family systems, and the lasting impact of parental misattunement. That language can bring relief, perspective, and a sense of validation. But over time, it can also shape how we remember the past in ways we don’t always notice. In this episode, I explore how the process of trauma recovery...

disordered desire: performing connection, numbing pleasure, forgetting yourself 15.07.2025

Desire is meant to be a creative force. Something within us that fuels connection, expression, intimacy, and imagination. But for many of us, that force has been warped and inverted. That means instead of feeling energized by what we want, we chase it compulsively. We convince ourselves that attention + intensity = love. In the process, we end up exhausted, numb, or locked into patterns that THINK...

what they're hiding about your mind 10.07.2025

In this episode, we explore the deeper truths that may be hiding beneath the surface of today’s “Disclosure” discourse. While headlines focus on UFO sightings, UAP whistleblowers, and NHI (non-human intelligence), the real story may be something much more unsettling and much more important . What if the biggest secret isn’t “recovered craft”, but the nature of reality itself? Drawing on current ev...

why psychiatry failed her: laura delano on misdiagnosis, medication, and coming back to life 08.07.2025

What is the cost of being a “good patient”? For Laura, it was nearly her life. Join me as I sit down with Laura Delano, author of the groundbreaking memoir Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance . A former “professional psychiatry patient” turned fierce advocate for psychiatric liberation, Laura brings her unique and deeply courageous voice to one of the most urgent conversations of...

the real reason you’re afraid of the devil (you’re possessed, and it looks nothing like the movies) 03.07.2025

This episode plunges into the most feared symbols in the Western imagination: Lilith, Lucifer, the Devil, the Serpent, and the Dragon, and asks what we’ve buried, projected, or misunderstood in our efforts to exile them. Even the mere mention of these names makes many people look away. We’ve been taught, almost reflexively, that these figures are dangerous, evil, or untouchable. But that reflex di...

the psychology of love island USA S7: why it broke the internet (and what it says about us) 01.07.2025

This is an in-depth psychological breakdown of Love Island USA Season 7, one of the most viral and culturally polarizing seasons in the franchise’s history. Drawing from attachment theory, nervous system insight, and cultural analysis, the episode offers a detailed look at how cast members like Huda, Jeremiah, Amaya, Taylor, Nic, Olandria, and Cierra reflect deeper dynamics playing out in dating,...

you’re NOT crazy, you’re remembering the real world. 26.06.2025

We’ve all had moments that totally flipped our idea of reality on its head. Maybe it was an image from a dream that stayed with you for weeks, a phrase that popped into your head out of nowhere that led you somewhere unexpected, or maybe a pattern of synchronicities that couldn’t have just been coincidences. Like all of us, you’ve probably tried to explain them away or forced yourself to believe t...

why personality ISN'T a prison (unless you let it be) 24.06.2025

If you were to believe the dominant frameworks of modern psychology, psychiatry, and popular self-help, you might assume that personality is a fixed structure. An inherited configuration of traits, disorders, or diagnoses that define who you are and what you are capable of becoming. In this episode, we trace the deeper story of how that idea came to take root. Long before the invention of the DSM...

what you're calling a breakdown might be a dark baptism 17.06.2025

Some people call it a breakdown. Others call it trauma. But when you look closely, these moments often follow a pattern. These moments come at a threshold (whether it’s psychologically, spiritually, emotionally) and they leave you changed forever.  In this episode, we’ll get into what happens when life initiates you before you’re ready. When you’re too young, too unprotected, or too unsupport...

let them cook: shadow work, shame, and the stew of self 12.06.2025

You’ve probably seen the phrase: let him cook . It gets used online when someone’s deep in a process that looks weird from the outside. Messy, maybe misguided… but people step back and give it space. The idea is simple: something’s happening . Don’t interrupt. That phrase has been stuck in my head for months, and this episode is what came out of sitting with it. We’ll talk about what it actually m...

dancing with the devil part 2: the return (how to grow the f*ck up and quit calling red flags soulmates) 10.06.2025

This is Part Two of a two-part series. In Part One, we talked about what it feels like to override your gut instinct and confuse danger with connection. We became conscious of the pattern, and I shared a story I’ve never told before about a night I ignored every warning sign and walked straight into a situation that could’ve ended very differently. If episode one traced the descent , this one mark...

motherhood as death ritual (a rite of passage for women with or without children) 05.06.2025

This episode is not just for mothers. It’s for any woman who has ever felt the pull to grow up — psychologically, spiritually, mythically — and wasn’t given a roadmap. Whether you have children or not, if you carry unresolved pain around your own mother, feel caught between the girl you were and the woman you’re becoming, or have struggled to hold both freedom and responsibility at once, this conv...

dancing with the devil part 1: the descent (why you keep ignoring your gut instinct and mistaking danger for ‘chemistry’) 03.06.2025

Cassie Ventura recently testified against Sean “Diddy” Combs, and as the coverage picked up, so did the usual commentary. People are asking the same questions they always do: Why didn’t she leave? Why stay that long? Why ignore the red flags? This episode opens up the actual reasons. Not just in Cassie’s case, but in situations a lot of us have lived through. We talk about what happens when your g...

psychic hygiene in the age of AI 29.05.2025

If you’ve been feeling scattered, foggy, or emotionally off after using AI tools or spending time online, you’re not imagining it. There’s something happening under the surface of digital life that most people don’t have language for. This episode gives it a name. Psychic hygiene is the forgotten foundation of spiritual practice. It’s not an aesthetic or TikTok trend. It’s the daily work of tendin...

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