The Night Jane Broke the Frame: Borderline Collapse and the Origins of elevate.epo

It started as an after-work drink—until it became a clinical rupture.

In this raw, field-based episode, Enrique walks us through the night “Jane” spiraled into a live narcissistic attack—weaponizing sex, triangulation, and emotional chaos to annihilate the containment that threatened her false self.

But this isn’t gossip. It’s data.
This is the night that shaped the EROS doctrine and formalized the PrecisionCycle model.

We introduce three borderline subtypes—The Siren, The Mirror, and The Flame—and show how their real-world collapses exposed the deeper mechanics of failed attachment, erotic miscalibration, and the urgent need for structured recalibration.

If you’ve ever asked, “Why did they do that?”

This is the episode that answers it—with clinical clarity, field insight, and unapologetic precision. elevate.epo

Transcript

The Night Jane Broke the Frame: Three Borderline Archetypes and the Origins of elevate.epo
===

[00:00:00] It started as an after work drink. That was all it was supposed to be. A simple wind down between the client, her coworker, and her boyfriend. But what unfolded that night became one of the clearest real time case studies of female borderline personalities and narcissistic collapse. That I have witnessed in clinical experience, we'll call her Jane, two coworkers, one boyfriend, one bar, 

One emotionally unregulated storm that took everyone down It began with triangulation. Jane weaponized the hinge date to punish her boyfriend in public. Then as things started to settle containment was possible. She detonated. She used sex impulsively, aggressively and unconsciously as a way to destroy what little emotional structure remained.

Not with a man, but with the same sex coworker. This wasn't about desire. It was about [00:01:00] dominance and control. about regulating her own narcissistic wounds by annihilating someone else's center of gravity. Peter Fana wrote that certain personality structures don't just fear intimacy, they destroy it the second it gets close. This isn't about gossip. This is clinical data. what happened that night shaped the precision cycle framework and deepened the entire Eros doctrine because you can't help someone regulate what you're afraid to name tonight.

We name it. We name the patterns. The structures, the damage, and we show you how Elevate EPO doesn't just diagnose the collapse. We build a way out had Jane had that way out that evening, all three of those people wouldn't have their lives ruined and reality could be different. I'm Enrique.

Thank you for joining us on a special Friday episode of Precision Cycle. This is Elevate dot epo. Let's open it [00:02:00] up. This episode isn't about blame. It's a blueprint because behind every well-functioning human being, there's a series of failed emotional equations. Each one necessary, each one painful, each one precise. Today we're gonna look at three personality types that come across in clinical practice.

These personality types embody some of the issues you see a lot in society when it comes to relational, [00:03:00] dynamics. hopefully you see yourself or someone you know in these. Archetypes and you send them this video and you present to them this podcast and they listen to themselves in these descriptions because if they do, then we'll be able to properly get to a place where we can really work to understand why these symptoms happen, why these behaviors occur, and how we can lessen them.

we're gonna begin with one archetype. We are gonna, call her the borderline siren. this is a person who is very sweet and longing. They're somebody who always wants to present with that very forward love dynamic in their presentation as if constantly seeking love.

and so when they enter in relationships, they'll enter into. The usual dynamics of loving relationships. that'll be evident in the way they engage in public displays of affection and the softness in their eyes. But underneath, there's an [00:04:00] emotional flooding.

there's an emotional, chaotic rupture that's occurring making them go out and do things like, offer up these loyalty tests and break down to see if their partners are receptive.

Not because they're consciously looking to do that, but because they're in survival mode, love itself is survival mode. The attachment and ambivalence meets romantic idealization in these cases. people who have very. Traumatic experiences have developed very troubled attachment styles.

And what ends up happening is that those attachment styles, get morphed with idealization. That happens with, romance. People come in, you meet them you fall in love, quote unquote, and then they. Present this thing for you to obsess about in your personality 

But then what happens is that because you were never really structured with any type of real attachment style, which was rooted in actual, foundational grounding, that ambivalence ends up. [00:05:00] coming back. And then you see that romanticism fade away. The idealization now turn into devaluation in the relationship.

And this, is why one minute everything is fine and people are happy and everyone seems to be on the same page when it comes to being in relationship. And then the next minute. The next day, there's a completely different change and you can see it, and feel it in the text and phone calls.

There's an intensity switch that occurs, and that's because this ambivalence has kicked in. now the attachment style is struggling to find a clear footing struggling to gain some kind of purchase. usually it's going to defer to what it. Feels is comfortable and natural, and that has been the usual cycle of dis attachment.

And this was something that you could very much see in this client. she didn't want love. She wanted to be rescued. the classic archetypal need here is the siren. Emotionally magnetic, chaotic. But she's childlike in [00:06:00] her seduction.

Very forward and direct. her love procurement style is based upon what she's gathered from. romcoms and all those types of media that present this and paint this portrait of what love looks like, but never actually, knowing what love is.

and so that seduction element is gone and you see a lot of just, childlike traits in the way they present in relationships, always trying to defer to, what she would call daddy figures, people who are significantly older than her. how she could fall in and be safe with them because they would catch her 

In that space, which she unconsciously went to because that was coping mechanism. Clinically, she's borderline with covert depressive streaks. this was something after a lot of diagnostics, I was able to come to the conclusion with, along with, proper supervision.

We understood that this person was struggling with a borderline position presented out of significant, child abuse and [00:07:00] other types of trauma. we came to recognize that there was this personality issue here. The key lesson with this particular archetype is that containment without absorbing is a thing.

she trained the field containment. Capacity of arrows, but never really got the full mechanisms down. And this was the part where we need to focus on the reps. Anything else, you go to the gym, you go practice, you learn new skill, you need to put the work in.

Daily to make sure that these skills are, not only developed and now automatic in their presentation. This was an example of how you can have containment in the field, but ultimately they're gonna still absorb it and in their moments of weakness, those stimulations will come back. And create these ruptures tells you how there's more work to be done.

But it does give you insight into the archetype and somebody who is very classically a borderline personality, because they do play into those childlike [00:08:00] features of their personality. the second archetype that we came identify and utilize as a foundational piece for Precision Cycle.

Here was the narcissistic mirror and. the story that we heard in the, intro, this client, is someone who reflected the potential back to you until she couldn't. that was the prime feature here somebody you could engage with and have these qualitative moments and therapeutic alliance,

lots of insights. Somebody who has a very well structured. personality organization on paper go to work. And they're the model, employee. they value how people and their peers see them how professionally they are viewed. but her gaze said that you're finally the man I always wanted.

When she engaged in relationships with people. The way that people came out of that interaction, especially men, she was very good with giving them, reflecting back to them what they wanted to see, until her own masks slipped. you saw this [00:09:00] in, the coping mechanisms she would utilize.

This person also had a very significant substance use disorder, as a single mother, and she would often. Lose herself in the substance when it was difficult to balance out a lot of her anxiety, 

When she presented herself in relationships, She was always giving off the vibe to men, that this was the man she always wanted. she would project that to them and they would fall in love even more.

then she would take the mask off. And really show the archetype control, the curated collapse of the poor me victimhood mentality, the everyone is out to get me. the, I cannot catch a break because, I've suffered and I continue to suffer, yet all the time not looking at or understanding all of the personal bad behavior that they're engaged in.

This is the classic archetype of the mirror, the seductive, affirming, but withholding individual, somebody who is actively toggling between these [00:10:00] three positions. clinically you see this as a narcissistic, adaptive, performative empathy, and a collapsed true self.

There was, A lot of adaptation to the whims of her personality and a lot of accommodation by others required for her to maintain some level of satiation and regulation. the performative empathy came, in aspects when, she would describe her partner breaking down and having these very real emotional breakthroughs and breakdowns oftentimes with her.

And, just unable to tap into any real emotions that would move her to offer up any empathy. When she did, it was fake, as she would say. It was forced. It was stuff that didn't come natural to her, and that was something that she not only prided herself on, but ultimately also said it wasn't that big of a deal because.

she could be a chameleon. the key lesson here is that we can't confuse validation for connection. This particular [00:11:00] client forged the emotional precision required to unhook the fantasy of her partners. she would validate, 

Almost reflexively. And, these were forged in the emotional precision that she brought to the relationship. oftentimes. That was very calculated 

Yes, a lot of this was planned and orchestrated, her personality was very orchestrated, to achieve a outcome. And that outcome was personal satisfaction at the expense of self-destruction This person did end up destroying that relationship with the boyfriend.

She did end up destroying the relationship with the coworker. She did end up destroying relationships with other people who were close to that dynamic. Ultimately we see how people's own narcissism ultimately implicated in their own isolation.

And, their poor me victimhood that they retreat to. This is [00:12:00] the real world receipt for how that's not accurate. And how they retreat to that, mostly as a guard against shame. Our third archetype,

we're gonna call them the histrionic flame because they're people that come in, they have a lot of heat, they give off a lot of sparks. They play, usually because they're younger and then they pull away. And the reality is that the moment you got too real for them.

The moment that things became the real world dynamics and outcomes and consequences, that's when they vanish they always wanna play. Usually with older men, because they feel like they're exploring the world and their own personalities and sexuality And what ends up happening is that they fall into situations where they meet people who have, significant experience they engage relationships, whether appropriate or not. it scares them to the point where they vanish and turn into completely different people 

Making up stories and not being truthful about what their [00:13:00] relationship was and attempts to hurt others. But this is the thing we see in this personality type, the histrionic flame. the flirtation wasn't about desire, it was about distraction. the archetype here is the flame.

It's lives in tension. it's deliberate. They want to cause chaos, like Tasmanian Devils. It dies in depth. The flame is surface level. they will be very upfront, casually, burn smolder hot. once the relationship gets too deep, they fizzle out and run away.

Not because they can't handle the relationship, it's because they can't handle what's happening internally. Because of the relationship. clinically we look at this as the histrionic traits with somatic insecurity and erotic compensation. this is something the FJ talks a lot about, writes a lot about, this is a lot of what Berg writes about, the inability to balance out, the passion we have our own, aggression.

oftentimes it gets presented in a way where, we attach ourselves to more powerful, [00:14:00] personalities as an attempt to gain something from that and then realize that they're in over their head and have to escape. the key lesson here is you have to be the fire, not the moth, 

You have to calibrate them. So they hold erotic charge without performing for it. that's really the key lesson. we just presented three archetypes. three different women, three different clients, three different situations, three different ways of responding to stress and relational dynamics.

I'm doing this so that you can take a look at yourself for your significant other, and you can see, yes, this person has a borderline personality. at least, traits. disorders are diagnosed by professionals and you can get that done by a therapist.

the Elevate that EPO framework, doesn't treat any of that as pathology. You go to a therapist and they're gonna take all that, what I just described, even the story at the beginning as pathology. to explain why this person, is motivated and driven to do the things they do, and how we [00:15:00] can get some cognitive behavioral differences in their, response set.

that's a method and it usually is slow and painful and people usually lose, Their desire to continue in it because it is, a very long and arduous process. oftentimes you're dealing with therapists who themselves are not very good at holding space for these types of, pointed interventions.

or we could utilize that information like we do here at Elevate dot epo, where we take it as part of a response set. You survived something and the way you survived it was by. Performing this behavior, this behavior exists, almost automatically. our job is to point out that it's not necessarily a good behavior, so that it's no longer automatic becomes ego dystonic, which is ego alien.

we don't treat it as pathology. we take that in as information. we attach it to your response styles. Your response styles are dictated by your traumatic [00:16:00] experience and how you survived it.

That served the purpose. Outta things that are less self-destructive out of things that are just as equally satisfactory, but don't necessarily cause the rifts and ruptures and your personality that have you using the substances that have you destroying the relationships that have you testing your significant others and friends that's the work because we take that data and utilize it as you do this thing and here's the reason why you do it. at this point you have the choice to either do it or not. the way we not do it is by practicing and implementing this other behavior that we've already identified, we already uncovered, we've already statistically measured, will help you.

And we're not grasping at straws. This is targeted, precise. [00:17:00] I hate to use the word intervention, but ultimately a recalibration to your personality that takes you from that siren personality, where you're instinctively looking to be childlike in relationships to being a well-grounded individual who understands adult human dynamics, adult human communication, and is able to balance out the apprehension that exists when silence is present.

we take that information and the active erotic discon contain that a person undergoes under extreme stress.

And how that then manifests itself in the field. We saw it as a direct narcissistic attack but that then tells us that we need to. Utilize that information in a way that sort of speaks to what's happening here? The lashing out physically somatically is a bid for some type of reality, some type of reality [00:18:00] testing, some type of understanding that this person who's currently undergoing this very psychotically, dis calibrating and deregulating event, 

Is trying to achieve some kind of reality in themselves. And the only way they know how is by hypersexuality. That's why sex gets weird sometimes with borderline personalities because in many ways, it's the only time they've ever felt anything. and that's saying a lot because you think about what emotions are needed just to generate intimacy.

in order for people to sometimes feel anything, and to understand that this occurred because they were trying to feel something in themselves rather than actually commit some kind of attack, that's part of the work because that person isn't a bad person. That person just needs to find ways to control their personality and the way that they seek out, satisfaction.

And [00:19:00] in our last example, that person also that they're not necessarily a bad person. They came in and they would admit how they would when they were younger, go and create sock puppet accounts and. Torment people on social media. That's something that kids do. And it's unfortunate bullies do that and it's bully mentality, but that doesn't make them bad people.

That makes them, people that need parenting, people that need to have boundaries shown to them. People that need adults to show up and give them the insights they need so they don't go around doing things that are antisocial. The withdraw here indicates that this person feels a draw towards older men for a reason. And we had daddy issues last week and maybe we can revisit that and maybe that's the case. But that reason ultimately causes them to go out and try to feel extremes and then.

retreat that's not necessarily fair to them or to the partner, but it is what it is and it's a style [00:20:00] that's very attributable to this personality type. As we look to wrap up our introduction to borderline personalities.

We've introduced how, psychoanalytic needs to Gain a little bit more, rigor, we also understood the lack of mentalization and how that presents itself in borderline personalities and how that's relevant in relationships today.

We bring that home here to conclude that, borderline personalities is something that pretty much everyone is engaged in. It's something that explains a lot of the reasons why our relationships are the way they are. It explains why we often do the things we do in relationships and where we're left asking those questions.

Why did our partner say that? Why did they do that? What do they mean this, that, the other? All those questions ultimately go back to because they're borderline, because they have this thing within them that actively makes their brain afraid. they're afraid because they're guarding against [00:21:00] that fear of abandonment.

It's an existential fear of abandonment, which literally means death for the narcissist. Someone who's in that position, borderline personality. It's not because they want to be horrible human beings, it's because they've experienced things that have left them lacking self safety.

And because they're always watching for the bottom to fall out, that trap door to open up. they do things that aren't very thoughtful for other people.

They are in so much distress that all they can do is think about surviving. They can't think about you. They can't think about the love you give them. They can't even think about that last text he sent them, because in many ways they are just trying to survive and the way they survive is by flailing, reaching.

Any type of thing that they can reach out for, and if that includes someone else or you, but in some form that isn't necessarily native to you, meaning they've triggered your [00:22:00] anger and you come at them angry, they're gonna reach for that too. This is all a generation of emotions so that we get end results.

They come in, they act a certain way because they're feeling a certain way. You absorb it, you metabolize it, and then you manifest the response, which is in line with what they want to do in the first place. It's all manipulation so that they can feel what they need to feel.

To act because they've only understood how to act by having that feeling inside of them. And it's a sick and twisted thing that reality of humanity. But somebody abused us and it made us feel a certain type of way. when we feel a certain type of way like that, we need to sometimes do things as extreme.

To generate whatever it is that's gonna make us feel better about it, because that's what we had to do to survive the abuse. this isn't to pathologize, this is only to put out information and to understand. [00:23:00] Precision Cycle is here to help you identify these ruptures. And to help you recalibrate to the field because you're not sick, you don't have a personality disorder.

You have a failure in calibration. You need to develop the skills to self recalibrate so you can deliver the precise intervention yourself, and you don't have to go to a therapist to have it done. Because you're a high performer. You're not someone that's gonna sit in therapy and process for a year.

You're someone that's gonna show up. You're someone that's going to sit down. You're someone that's gonna understand the blueprints and the architectures of your personality. You're gonna understand where the inefficiency points are, and you're gonna understand how those inefficiency points need to be reworked so that we no longer are caught in these loops that are inefficient.

That's all this is. End of the day from the relationship, from the personality disorders, the people that show up that [00:24:00] are the toxic girlfriends all the way to this is how they get better. Not with therapy, but by being held in a consistent frame that implements boundaries and models them appropriately.

That's how we get back on track because in many ways, we're doing the things again that our fathers failed to do, which was to show us the limits of our personality and the frameworks by which we wanna limit and control our lives. Thank you very much for this past half hour. I am Enrique Raga 

You can reach me at enrique@elevateepo.com, elevate dot epo on Instagram and Facebook. Check out our drips, follow our podcast. Thank you to everyone who has downloaded. an episode continues to download episodes.

We really appreciate all your help as we continue to build and. Move forward here at Elevate dot epo. Have a great weekend. I'm Enrique. We'll be back on Monday.