your pain is real but your suffering is a story

Your shoulders and jaw have been tight for months. Shit, maybe for your entire life. You wake up already thinking about the thing that might go wrong in your relationship, the conversation that could turn ugly and get you fired at work. Your mind runs worst-case scenarios in the background at all times. This happens to you even when the day is totally fine with no real evidence that everything will fall apart. You're living in next week's problems while this week - and the present moment - slips away from you totally unnoticed.There's a difference between the sharp and clean pain of something that actually happens and this other thing. The dull ache of imagining loss and rehearsing rejection and abandonment before it even happens. One comes when it comes, but the other moves in early and sets up camp in your brain and won’t leave. Your nervous system treats both the same way, though. It floods your body with the same chemicals whether the threat is walking through your door or just racing thoughts. Most of us learned this somewhere. Maybe you got blindsided once and decided you’d never risk being vulnerable again, or your family treated worry like a form of love. Or perhaps the world taught you that good things don't last, so you’re always waiting for the next shoe to drop. So you started keeping watch and you never stopped. But watching all the time means you miss what's happening right in front of you. You miss the ordinary Tuesday that turned out better than expected, or your child’s smile. You don’t even notice the jawdroppingly beautiful sunset because you're already worried about the email you might get on Monday. In this episode of the Consciousness Stream, I’ll help you come back to the present moment. I'll walk you through what your body actually needs when it's stuck in worrying-about-the-future mode. We'll look at why some kinds of preparation for pain actually can help while others just feed your toxic ambient anxiety. My hope is by the end, you’ll learn to tell the difference between useful planning and mental torture.I won’t make you any grand promises about eliminating fear completely. That’s not realistic. Pain is part of the human experience. But I will share some practical ways to stop living in the problems that haven't happened yet. Because your actual life - the one happening right NOW - deserves your attention more than anything else. ✧ 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.

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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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.