Built Different: Why Boundaries, Not Therapy, Are the True Antidote to Narcissism, Perimenopause, and Emotional Collapse

This special Friday episode of PrecisionCycle is not for the faint-hearted. Enrique delivers a raw, grounded, and methodically explosive breakdown of why boundaries—not therapy—are the only reliable defense against narcissism, perimenopause-driven emotional collapse, and modern culture's disintegration of masculine structure. After a triggering encounter with someone close, Enrique chose not to spiral. He chose to anchor. He explains how PrecisionCycle's principles allowed him to regulate in real time, avoid histrionic self-sabotage, and reclaim authority through surgical emotional clarity.

We explore:

• The narcissism-shame-cognitive dissonance triangle that hijacks relationships
• How American therapy culture enables dysfunction instead of recalibrating it
• Why the Dutch model of boundary hygiene should replace white coat codependency
• The emotional and physiological truth of perimenopause that most men (and women) are unequipped to handle
• What it means to be a PrecisionCycle-calibrated operator in a collapsing emotional economy

Boundaries aren't trendy wellness language. They're the only tool that works when you're being baited into collapse. Press play, take notes, and remember: being calm under fire doesn't make you passive. It makes you lethal. elevate.epo

Transcript

Built Different: Why Boundaries, Not Therapy, Are the True Antidote to Narcissism, Perimenopause, and Emotional Collapse
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Enrique: [00:00:00] Last night I had an incident with someone who, was generally pretty close. I was activated emotionally and. Utilize the skills precision cycle and all the other tools that have amassed throughout the years.

to self calibrate, bring myself back into the field as my integrated self, and then started to vocalize my boundaries. what I found was that situation was. Interpreted a certain way, and it began this cycle within myself where I felt my own narcissism being activated.

this is often the thing that happens when we have arguments with people we don't realize the malignant nature of people's, psychological defenses, the extreme position they are in oftentimes. And the ways they look to self-soothe, which may include dysregulating, a partner or someone else in a relationship to [00:01:00] obtain that level of comfort to satiate whatever's happening internally that has activated this personality function disorder, ultimately they're feeling shame, that shame. Kicks in cognitive dissonance. The cognitive dissonance then if we're going back to the tennis court metaphor, plays the ball over to narcissism narcissism will then start to activate primitive defenses to offload the shame and discomfort that's felt from, this thing that activated them.

that's really in a nutshell what's happening, and the reality is that this activation is happening, because it's out of their control. These are the things I'm trying to really stress and put forward one of the things that mental health professionals don't necessarily do primarily is illustrate that these behaviors are innate.

They are natural, things that people do naturally [00:02:00] because it's a learned reflex. until we realize that learned reflex is bad for us, we're not gonna change that as partners in any relationship. We walk a very thin line between our appropriateness when it comes to pointing these things out, 

And when we look at the physiological changes that occur in perimenopause and just the life cycle in general, when we look at boundary culture as it's defined in places like the Netherlands and how the Dutch people utilize boundaries as relationship hygiene as opposed to clinical tools, we start to see that.

Boundaries are the thing that is oftentimes missing from people's self-care routine. We will pay hundreds and thousands of dollars for practitioners that practice alternative medicines, Eastern [00:03:00] medicines, all types of weekend getaways at retreats, tantric focused, seminars, everything except.

Face the thing that you're avoiding and that is ultimately the role of the partner here to literally be built different and to be the person that is stopping that cycle in its tracks. You talk about ending generational trauma as a man, as a partner, as somebody who is supporting somebody who is currently going through personality issues, whether that's because they've developed it through a lifetime of experience, which includes abuse, or because they're developing it due to physiological changes in the body.

Regardless, we have to understand that these things are happening automatically, and if we don't maintain a mindful presentation [00:04:00] and we don't respect the fact that we have to implement boundaries, not only to protect ourselves, but to model them the relationship and ultimately bring this containment, then we have to.

Really focus on how we just don't get boundaries, right? And how boundaries is something that literally is the thing that will save you. You don't need magic pills. You don't need influencers of Instagram to prescribe this. What you need is simply to start. Practicing and enforcing some simple boundaries, what's happening here is a lack of framework and that lack of framework is leaving you disorganized, discombobulated in many ways, fragmented.

And by definition we're talking about fragmentation as part of. Personality issues. These are the things I'm trying to get people to understand. We all have these elements, but it's a product of our [00:05:00] upbringing. It's a product of our environment. It's a product of our experience, and it's not a pathology.

It is something that we do because it makes us feel good. We cope with whatever sets us off by doing this thing that we do. Whether that's substances, whether that's. Relationships, whether that's eating disorders, whether that's all kinds of other things that we do to avoid and offload shame.

What we ultimately need to look at is how do we build boundaries so that we're not doing the things that create self-harm? How do we create frameworks so that I am moving forward successfully? And even when I'm having evenings, when I'm being dysregulated to the point where I'm not able to sleep at night because I'm carrying all of that emotional anxiety,

being part of the precision cycle methodology and understanding its essence and capabilities presents You with continued [00:06:00] motivation to maintain your process and move forward and to keep doing the things in your life that you've identified that will get you to that place where you need to be.

The Lacanian drive that gets us to where Carl Yung writes about. Is our ultimate destiny fulfilling our archetypes? when we're truly happy and when we're not doing that, we're stuck in some nether world in our head, because we don't have the boundaries to get ourselves out.

And so maintaining a lifestyle where boundaries become automatic, innate, non-negotiable. You become built different because nobody nowadays has the fortitude to practice and maintain boundaries. Everyone's too scared of losing friends. too scared of abandonment.

That's what this society, 58% divorce rates have led us to fear [00:07:00] of abandonment, and because of that, we maintain relationships we know are bad for us. We fail to. Seek out other people that are better for our wellbeing. We ghost people that can give us what we want, but because we're so lost in ourselves, we give ourselves imposter syndrome and opt out 

Really being appreciated, noticed, seen, loved the way that we know we can be and the way we know others can to us. And so this is the thing that we see clinically is there is no right side up and down. There's no left, there's no right. We're so discombobulated at times that we literally don't know which direction we're facing.

And the reality is that grounding boundaries, these are not just trite words. These are actual tools that work.

Thank you for joining me on a special Friday. I'm Enrique. This is Elevate epo. Let's open it [00:08:00] up.

What makes a precision cycle operator, we talk a lot about what is . Precision cycle is a therapy. No. Is it coaching? No, it's optimization. What exactly is that? It's teaching you the frameworks to live your life the way you wanna live. That's the short version. But what does that mean actually in practice?

Enrique: We teach the anchoring, right? we teach the regulated nervous system, the tactical, emotional literacy, the vision that [00:09:00] extends beyond the moment we're creating the person that can. Understand the field, read the situation, calibrate it. And just like Peyton Manning or Tom Brady or one of these quarterbacks that is brilliant in what they do, we're able to read the defenses that are presented, those defenses being other people that are preventing us at times from obtaining the things that we want to obtain in life Happiness.

And if you look at those types of situations, a lot of this becomes clear because we don't want to make things adversarial. That is just the way society has created it. People compare themselves to others all the time. We go and we watch sports and we wanna see one team beat another team.

We look at politics and it's a red team versus blue team. Everything becomes about tribalism

and when we're not anchored, we get lost in all these positions that we put ourselves in and we become [00:10:00] paralyzed. we have to understand what the field is telling us. The game itself is rigged, the game is gonna put an opponent in front of you. We want to talk about relationships or partnerships, the reality is because of the stress, because of the trauma, because of the oppression, because of all the things that happen.

We're not in true partnerships at times. We are in very adversarial states and in those states, we need to understand they're not looking to hurt us consciously. but they are looking to advance their narcissism unconsciously. when that happens, it is appropriate to look at it as a football field and understand the defenses that someone is throwing at you.

And so we've looked at perimenopause. Perimenopause itself is a critical life changing position in the body, physiologically. Skeletal muscle. structures are changing. Hormonal chemistry is changing. Body is actively going through a process, and in many ways there is a quiet [00:11:00] grieving that occurs, an infinite sadness that's presented. This in many ways is that natural depression that will begin this tennis court match between existential dread and the need to not be abandoned. And so when we see that and we understand that the person across from us, which we love very much, which we wanna support, they can't help the way that they're behaving because they're behaving in a way that is clinically, in many ways, similar to personality disorders as they're partners, as people who are here to support.

We get frustrated because we feel like we're not being appreciated. We're not being seen, we're not being welcomed. But the reality is that we're working through internal structures, psychological structures that are creating psychotic adjacent behaviors. we have to understand that we can't get mad at people for behaving the way they do because they're going through a certain thing.

If he had, if someone had [00:12:00] broken their leg, you wouldn't be mad at them for not running the marathon if someone had just suffered a heart attack. You wouldn't be mad at them for not getting on the treadmill. And if someone is going through a life altering situation, you can't be mad at them for not knowing how to express themselves in a clear, consistent, cohesive manner.

Thus, it is upon us to be that voice of reason. To be that anchor, to be that center, to be that boundary, to be that floor that establishes reality and maintains it in an empathetic stance, and understands that there's activation occurring that needs to be worked through and processed.

That's utilizing patience, utilizing empathy. Utilizing active listening,

creating the space. We need to make sure that we're not punishing people for having the beliefs they have in that moment, but we are [00:13:00] redirecting to reality and we are enforcing boundaries, and those boundaries are, I suffer myself with regulating my own emotions. When you present in this way. I need to ask you as a person here, is supporting you.

In order for me to be a hundred percent committed to this process, I need you to be more mindful of when these dysregulations and activations are occurring. That is a boundary. Notice how I didn't punish anyone. I didn't make them feel bad about themselves. I didn't kick them while they were down or pathologize them 

What I did was I spoke to how it makes me feel. I feel anxious, I feel put down. I feel frustrated. I feel like I'm not heard when you behave a certain way.

But placing the boundary down that way, that's pretty simple. I'm not accusing you of anything other than telling you how I [00:14:00] feel when you do a certain thing. And now with that knowledge, the person will hopefully go out, take that from an ego syntonic position, which is normalized to an ego dystonic or ego alien position, where now every time they engage in that behavior.

There's that little thought in their head that tells them, yeah, this might not be good because I've already been called out on it. That's how boundaries work. These are the way our fathers worked with us. They showed us love and then they reigned it in. They showed us who we are and then they showed us how to operate.

They gave us the tools to understand that we have power. But then told us how to hold it responsibly. And when that mechanism isn't there, we see how societies fall apart because there's no calibration and power dynamics within relationships. Men aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. Women are doing more than they're supposed to be doing cross [00:15:00] up energies here, feminine and masculine energies, 

Breakdowns in society, weak men that are unable to even maintain a modicum of strength.

Women who have chosen isolation, who are normalized as being quote unquote bad bees. But then ultimately what they're doing is just normalizing their histrionic personalities and really weaponizing, any type of critique.

This is where we've gone to in society, we need to understand that in order to be a serious operator and maintain our presence and be calibrated towards true north. We have to make sure that the old emotional tricks don't work anymore. 

We're aware of what's happening. We're aware of the cycle that we're being sucked into, and we're actively mindfully working to stay out of it because we're gonna be that bigger person in the room for once. be mature, be integrated.

Be the person that [00:16:00] understands that somebody comes in and they act a certain way because they can't help themselves, and rather than punishing them or punishing yourself, you're going to accept the fact that's how they are, and you're gonna implement the thing that's gonna protect you, which is your boundaries.

This is the thing that we need to understand, especially during perimenopause. Most partners are gonna collapse under this shift. real operators are gonna adapt and are not gonna be left behind. On Wednesday, we looked at the Dutch, the Netherlands, and their boundary culture, and we talked about what American can learn from them.

It was very lively discussion. One that I think is very needed because in the United States we are stuck in the white coat. licensed therapist model, which ultimately is creating safe spaces to process, but outside of that, not much. we have a world full of people who identify themselves by their trauma and who identify their therapists as their main [00:17:00] processing.

Token, another way of saying their substance to gain regulation, therapy culture has created a demographic of people who are now dependent on their own pathology and crippled by their own trauma because they've come to label it as a critical part of their personality.

Yeah, they lead with their trauma and they wonder why they don't have any friends and why things are always so negative and bleak. And maybe that's because we've never gotten to the point where there's been an active attempt to want to reconcile all of these emotions that this traumatic experience left 

I saw it all the time. Women that had gone through very serious, significant traumatic experiences that for some reason really enjoyed the fact that they could just refer to that on a daily basis as a reason for why they weren't advancing in progress, [00:18:00] why they wanted to continue doing some of the bad behaviors they wanted to do.

Why they wanted to continue wasting time and treatment as opposed to engaging in the interventions, ultimately normalizing avoidance.

And that exists because as a society here in the United States, we've gotten so accustomed to welcoming people's differences that we even welcome their dysfunction. And try to dismiss that as normal. That's why we have over pathologizing of just simple mood fluctuations. it's made by big pharma to sell you more drugs.

But B, it's also made by license therapists to give themselves this frame that they're important when in reality most of what they do is sit in the room. Listen to clients and rarely ever provide any real directive. I've sat in group supervisions for a number of years.

I've listened to the presentations. I hear the [00:19:00] instructors and what their advice is. And their advice is essentially just hold them until they collapse under the weight of their own gravity How is that a recipe for any type of society that builds value?

It's no wonder we're in a world where no one wants to go to work. Why no one's motivated? We're in a society where people complain about the smallest amount of pain that they have to endure. The least bit of discomfort becomes. an event to call the ACL U. This is how this therapy culture has really taken the teeth out of society and has really taken the masculinity out of men.

If we're gonna be quite frank, because we sit here and we talk about how men have feelings too in therapy. Yeah. But we don't process the same way. We process by doing. We process by understanding. We process by seeing, we [00:20:00] process by talking, and then we process by doing it again. How do men learn? How do men process?

They go, they talk and then they hit the squats. They go, they talk, they get it off their chest and then it goes to the bench presses. That's how men process nature tells us that you can't just sit in the room and talk about your feelings.

You have to actually start moving forward and changing that, because that's the only real way that you reconcile these emotions, and you find ways to create boundaries so you don't have to feel them again. So there's a lot that we can learn from our Dutch brethren. Especially when it comes to the gatekeeping elements here in the United States.

Licensed professionals who don't wanna read the research and acknowledge the research that says lay counselors, when we look at cases in Africa and in Asia, have just as good results with trauma victims than licensed professionals. Yet they want to go on [00:21:00] LinkedIn and talk about how licensure should be the bar to entry, and that you're not even allowed to talk to people and try to help them unless you've gone through this gatekeeping process with the psychoanalyst who has never really done anything outside of their life, go to school and talk to people, in a room. that's the extent of their life skills. that's what we're trying to sell people on. This is what you need in order for you to be happy.

No, that's not what you need. you don't need to go to therapy. And talk to someone who's been in school their whole life and who's never really held a real job. You need to find someone who can show you using your words, the areas in your life that need recalibration, and then you need to go to someone that's gonna show you that data, right?

give you weekly updates on the movement of that data. And that is actually going to move you from you came in here and you're leaving here. You go to any therapist and you're gonna sit there and talk to the people for a year before you get any [00:22:00] movement.

As opposed to coming to Precision Cycle, talking to me for a couple of days and having a full workup, a seven point dimensional report that shows you exactly. Where you are and how likely you are to get dysregulated.

That's what Precision Cycle can do, and that's why we're able to have situations like last night where we get challenged and we are called to.

Implement some of the skills we utilize to be well-regulated individuals, so we can stay coherent and present and we fall back to the learnings of precision cycle, the power that we have within ourselves.

The vision, the ability to maintain boundaries. That gets you through dysregulating situations without lashing out yelling at people you don't want to yell at without saying things that you're gonna regret in the morning [00:23:00] without getting up and storming out, without doing some other type of dramatic histrionic.

Response that's gonna give the other person the ammunition they need to ultimately feel the way they want to feel. Because understand one thing, they're acting that way because they need to feel a certain type of way. So they're gonna manipulate you to make sure that you're gonna generate that feeling in them.

And when you break down and you yell and you cuss and you lose control of the field. That is when you give the other person the power to vilify you and avoid the responsibility of whatever their shame is actively projective identifying itself in you

when we're able to bring it back to, no, this is your shame to hold because I'm just here recalibrating myself. Being completely respectful, then that person has to sit there and own their dysfunction boundary. And when that starts, [00:24:00] that's when you start hearing about people. Yeah, I really need to go find help.

I really need to change. you're not gonna get your loved one to change by telling them. You keep doing this thing that really upsets me. You need to stop. You're gonna help your partner change by placing a boundary so that they mindfully then begin to change themselves.

That's how boundaries work. That is why they are non-therapeutic. They are for everybody. They're the things that Precision Cycle teaches specifically, intuitively. boundaries are the only thing protecting you from narcissistic attack, protecting you from malignant narcissistic engagement, protecting you from self harm.

So yeah, precision cycle me people that are involved in it, we are built different. We don't need therapy [00:25:00] because we're operators in this world and we understand the power that we hold. We understand that when we walk into every room, we're the most well calibrated, which makes us the most interesting person in that room.

We know that we don't have to chase people because our gravitational field is so strong. They chase us. Next week we're gonna start talking about how we start utilizing arrows to help men become the person that they wanna become, both professionally, personally.

How do we become the most well-regulated? Well-grounded. Boundary driven individual that we can, so that we're not being manipulated by the borderline narcissism of partners, people who want to deliberately challenge us and cause harm.

We will be going over that next week. This has been a special Friday [00:26:00] recap. Thank you very much for joining me. Boundaries are the one thing that are going to get you the peace of mind that you deserve, the peace of mind that you're looking for, because they're the only thing that vocalize your needs.

Thank you very much to everyone who has downloaded episodes. Precision Cycle brought to you by Elevate enrique@elevateepo.com. Elevate dot EP on Instagram and Facebook. Elevate EPO on Twitter. You could also reach us, see us on YouTube, both at Elevate epo and now at Precision Cycle tv.

We have video versions of the podcast as well as behind the scenes. videos of Precision Cycle in action. Hopefully you'll check that out and join us. We will be off Monday from the live show, but we will be having a, taped, special standup from Memorial Day, back with the live show [00:27:00] on Wednesday.

I hope you guys have a great weekend. Thank you very much for everyone who has interacted, with the show, who has downloaded, who has sent us emails and communication. Really can't do any of this without you guys, and we really appreciate all of your support. Have a great weekend. We will see you next week.

Stay safe. Enjoy Memorial Day and. Enjoy each other.