{"podcast":{"title":"Back from the Borderline","slug":"back-from-the-borderline-4079851","podcast_index_feed_id":4079851,"rss_url":"https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/60e8deaefb090f0013116d69","website_url":"http://backfromtheborderline.com","image_url":"https://assets.pippa.io/shows/60e8deaefb090f0013116d69/1735679446378-b2e8272f-396f-4979-a13e-2172ecffa88e.jpeg","author":"mollie adler","episode_count":358,"summary":"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 edge almost all of us eventually reach. That place where our old explanations stop working and we’re asked to learn an entirely different way of seeing. That’s the space my work inhabits. Some episodes are conversations with researchers, psychologists, philosophers, historians, and spiritual teachers. Others are long-form essays where I follow a question wherever it leads. Lately I’ve been especially interested in symbolic literacy, the way images, myths, dreams, and archetypes quietly organize human life, often long before we’re consciously aware of them. I’m not very interested in being “ce…","last_synced_at":"2026-09-08T16:23:45.590679+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/back-from-the-borderline-4079851"},"episode":{"title":"What Do We Do With a Broken Spiritual Inheritance?","slug":"what-do-we-do-with-a-broken-spiritual-inheritance","published_at":"2026-07-21T09:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/back-from-the-borderline-4079851/what-do-we-do-with-a-broken-spiritual-inheritance","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/back-from-the-borderline-4079851","url":"https://shows.acast.com/back-from-the-borderline/episodes/what-do-we-do-with-a-broken-spiritual-inheritance","audio_url":"https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/60e8deaefb090f0013116d69/e/6a4e73411c8f5a97d864d872/media.mp3","summary":"A lot of us are walking around with religious trauma and a God-shaped hole. I was raised inside a version of Christianity, and I know what it can leave in the body. Shame, fear, sexual repression, homophobia, spiritual surveillance, and the feeling that your body itself was a problem. Leaving can honestly sometimes be the only answer. For some people, atheism feels better than trying to rescue anything with Jesus attached to it. Others move toward witchcraft, occultism, or a private spiritual life built from candles, books, rituals, and scraps. At the same time, plenty of people are running back to traditional Christianity because the modern world feels hollow, lonely, and stripped of beauty. Both responses make sense. Burning the whole thing down can feel like the only honest answer when religion harmed you. Returning to the old Church can make sense when the alternative looks like “buy things, optimize yourself, and die.” At least the Church has ritual, saints, feast days, candles, moral demands, and a story larger than the self. But neither response heals the wound on its own. This episode is about the broken spiritual inheritance of the West, especially Christianity, and why we keep swinging between rejection and return. We leave the Church and lose old languages for grief, prayer, beauty, and moral life. Or we return and pretend the harm was exaggerated, as if shame, control, misogyny, homophobia, and fear of the body were just minor details. The Church absolutely preserved beauty, but it also caused immeasurable harm. I’m interested in what happens after you’ve left, told the truth, stopped pretending the harm/abuse was acceptable, and still have to decide what you’ll carry forward. This episode moves through religious trauma, Christianity, Mary Magdalene, the Gr…","meta_description":"A lot of us are walking around with religious trauma and a God-shaped hole. I was raised inside a version of Christianity, and I know what it can leave in…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3848,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/back-from-the-borderline-4079851/episodes/what-do-we-do-with-a-broken-spiritual-inheritance/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/back-from-the-borderline-4079851/what-do-we-do-with-a-broken-spiritual-inheritance.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}