Boundary Culture: What the Dutch Teach Us About Recalibration, Containment, and Respect

After Monday’s episode on Nancy McWilliams and perimenopause, I got a flood of messages—mostly asking the same thing: What does actual support look like?

This episode answers that. But not with affirmations or coping strategies. With boundaries.

We break down how modern therapy fails at structural support, how clinicians often confuse “holding space” with enabling avoidance, and why Dutch culture offers a real blueprint for field clarity, relational integrity, and post-therapy recalibration.

We’ll cover:

• Why American therapists often avoid confrontation and fail to deliver intervention
• How Dutch communication models make boundaries normal, not dramatic
• The 7 measurable dimensions of PrecisionCycle that track psychological movement
• Why your people-pleasing is actually narcissistic
• What real support during perimenopause actually looks like

If you’ve ever felt guilty for setting boundaries… if you’ve outgrown your environment but still feel the pull to over-explain yourself… this episode is for you. elevate.epo

Transcript

Boundary Culture: What the Dutch Teach Us About Recalibration, Containment, and Respect
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[00:00:00] Hello, and thank you for joining us for a Wednesday episode of Precision Cycle Elevate dot EPO. I received some feedback after Monday's. Podcast when we spoke about Nancy McWilliams and how we could utilize some of the things that she writes about to help ourselves and our partners going through perimenopause, a lot of the feedback I got was, what does that support actually look like?

I've been to therapy. I've been asking therapists and other people. I've tried engaging psychology, self-help, and I still can't find. anyone to give me an actual sort of hard intervention. What can I do to really help support, my partner myself, through this process and really any process when we're going through some kind of metabolic change?

Currently in the United States, it's very difficult to find practitioners to give actual interventions because a lot of it is, protected by paywalls and those types of structures, which, look to actively continue to find ways to [00:01:00] monetize, human technology.

And that's appropriate because we live in a society that is. What it is, and ultimately we're here to advance ourselves whichever way possible. But that is a long way of saying that yes, there is a lot of gatekeeping, there's a lot of therapy that is kept behind, closed doors and oftentimes is masked behind jargon and hidden behind, other types of decorum and process.

But ultimately what we end up coming to having been in the industry for a while is most therapists are trained actually in interventions. And when you ask them, what can I do? The reality is a lot of them don't know, C-B-T-D-B-T, these are things that you have to pay to get credentialed in. and the reality is that they don't even cover a lot of what the industry, would prescribe.

when trying to help people going through these changes. one of the things that I always look to do, is to look internationally to see if there's any [00:02:00] models out there that we can help implement here. And part of that has already been done with looking towards Brazil and South America with part of the liberation aspects what we offer here through Elevate dot epo. I wanted to also acknowledge, the influence of the Netherlands in mental health, progressive mental health in recent years. To break away from that licensure model, the gate kept, model where you have that white coat intervention, perspective, you have a client that goes in and they talk to someone who, positions themselves as a professional, as an expert, as a doctor.

That's what you have here in the United States when you go to the Netherlands. they have elements of that, but they also have other elements where it's seen more as, two people coming together, creating a relationship, and understanding the transference and countertransference that occurs in that relationship, And that's really the model that Precision Cycle has always looked to bring and adopt, how do we create therapy in therapeutic [00:03:00] models that allow for the ability to be collaborators as opposed to, the traditional pharma medical model, which ultimately I don't think has yielded a lot of positive results for people.

Americans. to that point, the thing that the Dutch can really teach us is how to actually use boundaries as effective mechanisms for, creating frameworks in our relationships that protect us, not only from, narcissists, but protect us from our own sanity at times.

and here's the thing in America, we still get hung up on words oftentimes, and we treat boundaries oftentimes, like trauma itself. whereas the Dutch, they'll treat Boundaries as actual relationship hygiene as something that is critical to the dynamic between two people who are trying to have relationship because it, it gives a very clear rule of the road of what's the expectation what will be tolerated and what won't be [00:04:00] tolerated.

And when we look at it from that perspective, we see in this society here in the United States everyone wants to be liked, because of social media people don't want to be criticized, we often don't want to engage in those boundaries because.

It oftentimes leads to people separating, it triggers our own abandonment. But the reality is that the boundary itself is your biggest tool towards maintaining your frame so that your field stays consistent and doesn't become intolerable.

And so today we're gonna talk about the field, the Dutch. How cool orange is, all of it. Precision cycle, and we're going to really understand the value of boundaries. I was known as the boundary king at residential and today I stake my claim and plant my flag as the boundary king of Instagram, YouTube, [00:05:00] Spotify podcast world.

It's about boundaries. It's about how we build them. It's about how we enforce them. It's about how we use them to help us build the lives we want for ourselves. I'm Enrique. This is Elevate Dot epo. Let's open it up.

And so we come to the understanding that boundaries often fail because we're not able to properly model them. We've already spoken about lacanian models and what that says about our society when we don't have male presence in a [00:06:00] family, and how we don't end up. Creating the safe spaces to really understand the limits of our personality, our boundary regimes.

then we get into, the world where we seek out a clinician to help us recalibrate in a way that will Deliver psychoeducation and practice, we get met with, breathing techniques and dear man, forms and all kinds of other sort of distraction as opposed to like how do I actually build a boundary?

And so you sit there, you talk about boundaries with people, and you start talking about yeah, boundaries are I just block you on my phone or a boundary is, I just don't answer the text or a boundary is I just, turn away, and not engage. No, that's not a boundary, that's avoidance.

At the end of the day, what you're doing ultimately is just putting up pretense, the illusion of a boundary, but ultimately that boundary's never been communicated. you'd be surprised how many times people came into residential. Having never actually placed a [00:07:00] real boundary. And when people ask where do I start?

The place where you always start is I statements, right? Nobody likes to be told that they're doing horrible things. So if you tell somebody you really do this, and when you do this, I react this way, people are gonna feel attacked and not wanna engage, as opposed to, I felt belittled.

When you said what you did, that then puts a very clear boundary down. I felt X because you did Y. Regardless of all that, I felt this way and that was the end result. you can't deny that, and the reality that boundary is placed every time you act that way again in the future.

Understand that is going to make me react this way. That is how we start placing boundaries. notice how I didn't say anything negative about the other person. I just said, I feel dysregulated. I feel scared. I feel angry. I feel frustrated. I feel [00:08:00] unable to control my anger

when this happens. what we're doing there is signaling, a real activation that occurs and I have trouble controlling that, but that's on me to control. at the very least I am putting it out there that I am trying to control this as a result of your behavior. That is a boundary and one that ultimately illustrates that I am having to work to regulate.

Due to your action. And because of that kind of thing can't be tolerated. I'm doing too much work here in the relationship, and that's how we start getting into relational equity when we're able have those clear discussions, and understand that yes, we're not gonna vilify and shame people for the way they behave.

But I do wanna let you know that your behavior does have a consequence. And that's really where the boundary foundation starts. 

the thing that modern therapists are trained in is. holding space and not delivering the structure where those boundaries are offloaded onto the client. what ends up [00:09:00] happening is the emotional offloading is mistaken for healing. Oftentimes, we sit there and get rid of this process.

We talk because we have the verbal, word salad to get everything out. But then we're not shown how to protect ourselves moving forward, and when it happens again, we're right back in the same cycle. This is the thing about how we tie it to perimenopause. The assertiveness often gets labeled as mood instability, right?

They're just narcissistic, they're being histrionic. They're being borderline right now in, their presentation clinically. Regardless. and in relationships you would also probably say seems a little narcissistic.

That seems a little borderline. Absolutely. But we have to understand, just like clinicians have to understand that we can't just sit there and stay curious about it. We have to keep holding our line what do I mean by that? I have had a lot of experience where I have had a client sit [00:10:00] there and process in front of me, a interaction with their partner.

That leaves them always asking, why do they do this? That is in many ways the same type of dynamic that a psychoanalyst will utilize in their clinical work. Staying curious, why did they do this? Because in clinical observation, we don't wanna make the assumptions for the client. We don't want to really put the words in their mouth.

And we wanna see where that goes and ultimately leads them in the field. Absolutely. the curiosity is definitely something that in deep psychoanalysis is a very genuine, methodology. But the reality is we know why they're doing this. that question is often answered with because they have a borderline personality, or because they're narcissists or because they're depressed.

why do they keep doing this? We have to hold the line of our boundaries. We know they're going to do this, so it becomes a matter of [00:11:00] us, because we're the ones that have to ultimately decide if we're gonna interact with them or not, to hold the line and establish frameworks both internally and externally this is how we operate and protect ourselves. Ultimately, we heal relationships is through boundaries and relationships. And if you can't name and force or maintain a boundary, then you don't know therapy. That's really ultimately the thing I want people to take away from that because you're playing in containment, cosplay.

At the end of the day, if you're not teaching people to take this. Experience reframe it and ultimately apply a corrective, you're doing a disservice. And so what do Dutch ultimately bring to the table in our analysis and how can the Netherlands tell us a lot about, how we should structure mental health system moving forward. The Dutch to begin with are, have always been really great [00:12:00] progressive advanced society, which values human technology and it values human efficiency, and it is very direct. And respects that. So the thing we really have to understand first and foremost is that directness that they offer just in the language itself, that's clarity.

That's not cruelty. They are doing people favors by being direct and telling them exactly what they mean. Because here's the thing, in the United States, we have this epidemic where a lot of people are ultimately immature. We like to call them narcissists, borderlines. But when we're saying that, what we're really saying is people need to grow up and find ways gain resiliency and hold containment.

the thing is, we oftentimes assume people are already more intellectually advanced than they are. The directness oftentimes helps cut through. Primitive defenses, which protect against cognitive dissonance, that is something that as a society, the [00:13:00] Dutch have really figured out, is a very efficient way of communicating intent.

Because once you're able to really just have the other person recognize. The words that are coming outta your mouth. This goes to what Paul Lo Ferrero was saying in pedagogy of the oppressed. Giving people the language and letting them understand the context. That is how you free people from their oppression.

So yes, absolutely freeing us from the fake decorum of society of having to always use euphemisms rather than directly challenging. That is one way we can really start to. Change the way mental health is practiced, we're getting to a post therapy model, and that is where Precision Cycle really has its value.

Proposition is in that post therapy model where you've done the therapy and now you actually have to do the work. Emotional boundaries are culturally expected. in the [00:14:00] Netherlands, they're not therapeutically achieved. Saying no is normal. Withholding is strategic. It's not repressive, and they don't do it to be mean.

They do it to ultimately, be respectful of themselves and the other person. Boundaries are not explained. They are implemented. Ultimately, that is the model we should walk away with because here in the United States, I don't need to sit here and explain why my boundary exists.

It should just speak for itself. that is a sign of the narcissists and that is a manipulation that starts coming in, and that's really what as a society, the Dutch have started to push back against, It's this idea that they have to over explain themselves when it is just what it is, it's my way or the highway, but I'm respectfully putting it that way because. Ultimately, I'm the one that has to navigate this world, but I want to do it in a respectful manner. So what are some examples here? [00:15:00] just from a boundary perspective on the ethics of the Dutch, if you think about Dutch thinkers like Hans Israels, and I know I'm not doing the name justice Have long understood what American therapy still can't metabolize, which is containment is structure. It's not suppression. thinkers like Verage from Belgium. show us the Psychologizing systemic disconnect. that's one of the things he writes a lot about, And then when we look at Dutch Psycho Analyst, yap, von Hoik, he once wrote that containment is not the absence of expression, it's the architecture of permission 

Again, another word for boundary. and that line itself, it stuck with me because in American therapy, containment is often mistaken for repression. I felt this very viscerally, with my own supervision. Van Hoick, Was speaking from a cultural context where boundaries weren't negotiated, they were assumed, as opposed to here where boundaries are still novel and, things that a lot of practitioners [00:16:00] still don't like to travel into.

I recently sent a mass email, out to certain folk. some of them were my past colleagues at my previous psychoanalytic training center. I, noticed that five of 'em, not, five of 'em clicked through and they very graciously, gave me that piece of data.

they did click through to the link. the email provided, which was great. but then after they spent time on that site, they went and they, summarily blocked me from any future emails. That is great boundary. 

As we link that to containment is not the absence of expression, it's the architecture of permission. And how that ultimately is misrepresented here in the United States. my supervision was with someone who practiced, field theory. And, their ultimate, issue with the way that I practice and ultimately have developed precision is that, it didn't recognize that the boundary the client was putting up was not resistance, but actually, a healthy recalibration in real [00:17:00] time, to therapy itself. I was, Holding space. providing them with the tools they needed to craft boundaries, they were coming in and behaving in ways that, made me react a certain way, which then allowed them to implement that boundary.

practice it and gave them autonomy and the power, confidence to be able to utilize that. That was seen as something that was contrary to therapy. because it didn't treat that as abandonment or avoidance. 

This is the systems that we were in. The assumption there was that no, This is simply a holding space where we don't challenge people to really look at their distortions. We are ultimately here to just listen to them and hold the space and potentially reframe their thoughts into something that's a little bit more cohesively, present.

That in many ways is the [00:18:00] model. The Dutch rejected a long time ago. and the reality in the Netherlands when you say, I'm not available to hold that right now, whatever that is rupture in the relationship as a field theorist would see it that is etiquette, that is practice that is actually doing the thing that we talk about all the time. and that's the way that it should look, except that we have to sit here and really play with the calculus of do we really want boundaries or are we just being performative about it?

Because here's the thing about the Dutch, they don't embrace that trauma lifestyle. they don't embrace the labels that gives you. They move past that. the healing is in finding their own power where Americans tend to overexplain. The Dutch just disengage. That's not emotional avoidance, it's containment discipline, 

And that's the model that I'm hoping we can bring here to the United States in this post therapeutic world model. therapy itself differentiating [00:19:00] there's a place for therapy and it's for that person that's in that position where they just need to totally vent and get rid of all this negative affect.

After that though, how do we pick ourselves up? How do we recalibrate? How do we go through the reps, through the motions to give us the work? So that we can do this ourselves so that we're not collapsing and we're not dependent on others to handle the things that are difficult for us to handle. we need to bring it back to boundaries or structural integrity to any personality.

McWilliams herself writes that, You need to bound to anchor ego boundaries, to healthy narcissism. That's the good narcissism that exists because we as human beings. Have to fulfill those aspects of our personality which have, desires, which has needs, and those are the things that ultimately help develop us into better people.

This development of boundaries is the healthy narcissism. You are engaging in healthy [00:20:00] narcissism. And you're actually fighting your own narcissism when you toggle back and forth and are aware of the fact that it's challenging your people pleasing because your people pleasing is narcissism.

That's the thing that you need to understand. You're not people pleasing to people pleasing, your people pleasing to feel better about yourself. And once we disabuse ourselves of that distortion. We get to the realization that no, actually creating frameworks and boundaries is healthy narcissism letting people figure it out, is healthy narcissism, because that makes them respect boundaries boundaries shouldn't be a wall.

they're an architecture for energy distribution. they should be used as, personal assistance ways for you to understand who's calling at what time, sales funnels, marketing channels, That's the way we should look at [00:21:00] boundaries.

you have a strategy for YouTube, you have a strategy for Instagram, you have a strategy for TikTok. Boundaries should work in the same way, you have a strategy for your parents. sisters or your brothers. You have a strategy for other family. You have a strategy for people you're intimate with.

And as those people start to come in orbit, they then are able to create communication lanes that you have set up in these frameworks. Thus, that efficiency model that helps us better relate to people, because then I know exactly how I need to show up for one person as opposed to another 

These are boundaries. This is why we are able to save our settings our equalization, our EQ levels On Spotify and Apple Music these are the preferences for how we like things, and relationships should be no different.

as we have this midlife transition, both female and their partners. Especially through perimenopause and, these transitions, these life changes they [00:22:00] require a resorting of who gets access and when to us, time is ultimately not our friend as we begin to age and biology starts to, catch up with us.

the client who no longer wants emotionally babysit their friend or partner, but feels guilty for not explaining it gently. the advice that I would give anybody is become that person, right?

the friend who no longer wants to babysit that friend or partner. Doesn't want to explain themselves again, gently for the thousandth time, The guilt we feel enforcing boundaries is the residue of a life spent managing other people's fragility. I want you to remember that because at the end of the day, that's why it's so hard to not do it gently.

Because we understand that the other person is so fragile that anything we say could potentially break them. That is ultimately not your responsibility. That is the responsibility of the person who [00:23:00] is dysregulated, 

We have to stop living our lives in a way where we're managing their fragility because they have to come to a realization that they have to own it for themselves. So here are the key takeaways how precision cycle measures boundaries, because really that's our market differential.

There's therapy, there's coaching. There's Elevate dot, EPO, and Precision Cycle. What is it exactly that we do? Are we therapists? No. Are we coaches? No. So what do you do? I'm the boundary king. I'm a guy who was in corporate America for a bunch of years, left to raise his kids, became an expert in human development, pursuing his id.

I'm an optimizer. I'm a human engineer. I'm somebody who takes you, understands how you work, and then looks to fix you and change you. How do we do that? We use data. We don't pathologize. We look at the situation, we look at how you present, and then we utilize that as [00:24:00] data to draw conclusions from those conclusions, we understand your level of containment.

It tracks your emotional leakage. If you're leaking all over the place, of course you're gonna be breaking down. It tracks projection awareness, disarming guilt narratives, It teaches us to understand when we're projecting. So we don't say the evil thing and feel bad about it.

What else did precision cycle measure? Execution. Alignment, enforcing values with behavior. This is an abstract. It's observable. It's trackable. It's coachable. Okay. The Dutch culture teaches boundaries intuitively. Precision cycle measures them systemically. What exactly do we measure?

Specifically, we look at emotional calibration. That's the ability to accurately name, differentiate, and locates one emotional state. We track that weekly execution alignment. The degree to which your stated values, intent, identity, and [00:25:00] goals align with your actual behavior and decision making, especially under emotional pressure.

We track that too. Delivered to you weekly as a statistic, as a number that shows you movement, projection awareness, the capacity to detect when you're externalizing internal conflict onto others. We can track that. containment, the ability to hold emotional charge.

We can show you where you're leaking, where there's areas that you need to shore up. Your personality because it's affecting you in this place, narcissism tracking score in real time, covert narcissistic patterns, guilt traps, weaponized care martyrdom. We can measure all of that from your words, and we keep track of that weekly structural grief integration.

the ability to metabolize loss, not just of people, but of roles, illusions, protection, and versions of yourself. [00:26:00] Again, we measure this, we track it. We can give you a score, give you a bar graph, all of those things delivered to an app on your phone that shows you weekly movement highlights from your session.

This is what you get. Finally, erotic containment. That's the big one. The capacity to hold relational charge, polarity and attraction, especially key during perimenopause. We track this. We show you movement. We show you that we're delivering the psychoeducation, and then you are delivering on the productive output.

To really get these skills to become part of your personality, integrate them into who you are, and we can measure how fast, how effectively you're doing that. This isn't, abstract, this isn't some theory. These are hard numbers data that I challenge any mental health professional right [00:27:00] now to challenge, 

Produce a challenge to and what benefit traditional therapeutic models over precision cycle, which can deliver to you these seven dimensions quantitatively. Because here's the thing about quantitative data, if you can quantify it, you can make it predictive.

And if you can make it predictive, you can have true control over it. This isn't the fake control you think you have when you do something or you don't do something or you withhold your food, or you turn to some kind of other substance. This is the type of real control real human operators in their field utilize

It shows how mature you are. how regulated you are, how integrated you are, and ultimately how much more potentially successful you'll be over someone who's not.

you can command tension. You can lead with clarity. You don't chase, you magnetize. You don't overshare, [00:28:00] you signal. So if you're close to someone in midlife, recalibration, maybe they're going perimenopause, maybe they're going through a life change, they just have to transition, re-pivot a career.

Your role isn't to comfort them, it's certainly not to collapse into them. Don't ask for emotional access because you used to have it and you have to respect the shift in symbolic gravity. 

So then utilizing boundaries. How is precision cycle different? How do we ultimately support field recalibration? If you're close to someone in midlife recalibration, your role isn't to comfort them. It's not even to collapse into them. It's just to hold frame, be that steady voice. Be the person who presents that calm energy that doesn't amplify their fear and doesn't punish them for having it.

Okay. Don't ask for emotional access because you used to have it. Understand that they are going through a [00:29:00] shift and things have changed, and now it's your job as a partner or someone who's there to support to find another way in to her safety zone. And again, with that we have to respect the shift to symbolic gravity.

Understand that they're going through a process where this idea of themselves, of who they were for the better part of half their life is now transitioning into this other version. that's a very difficult thing to balance. And the more that we're able to respect that change and not pathologize it, not weaponize it, and certainly not punish it.

Is going to ultimately help recalibrate that field a lot easier than us trying to always indirectly passive, aggressively communicate our discomfort with the change. When someone you love starts holding the field, don't panic. That's the first sign. They've stopped bleeding energy into people who never held them.[00:30:00] 

So just understand that. It's a good thing. The change is always good. as we come home and wrap this up, we need to understand that the American mental health landscape could benefit from a new cultural standard. The Dutch give us that standard boundary clarity as emotional fluency. We need to stop treating firm people as broken people and understand that they are just probably the most.

healthy versions of humans out there because a direct nature of communication is ultimately the goal. Adopt works from the Dutch containment culture and implement it into your own field. Precision cycle, we're already doing that.

You personally, listening to this, watching this right now, you should probably do this too. Look to create those direct boundaries so that you can implement them and you can start changing your field directly. Boundaries are not rejection. They're invitations to integrity. If you can't read them. The [00:31:00] problem isn't the other person. It's your fluency and your ability to

understand what is being transmitted.

if anything that was said today resonated with you, please feel free to reach out if you are a Dutch psychoanalyst. in training and practice and would like to have further discussion. Please feel free, enrique@elevateepo.com, elevate epo on Instagram, Facebook Elevate, EP on Twitter.

I think this is a great opportunity to invite different perspectives and look to our neighbors in Europe to see how progressive. Mental health is challenging, outcomes leading to the types of societies, we want what we're striving for is societies that are direct, that can really communicate their needs and have them met in ways that adds qualitative. Positivity to their lives 

and lessens the opaque nature of passive aggressiveness. Again, [00:32:00] my name is Enrique. Thank you again very much. It's been Great pleasure to speak to you over these moments. the more we can learn from our Dutch psychoanalyst brethren, the more we'll be able to potentially.

as we bring this home, we understand that boundaries are the ways in which we can support people. Going through their current life phases and journeys. Reaching out and looking at the Dutch for the model, I think is the right one. And I'd love to be able to have an opportunity to collaborate with a Dutch psychoanalyst or student to speak further about this and see how we can work together to bring America into that progressive lens of, boundaries and directness 

Really help change the conversation away from holding spaces to, recalibration. We'll be back on Friday when we bring this all home. It's been great talking to you, Thank you very much. please be [00:33:00] safe and bye.