Transcription
And so by by the age of 12, 13, if you've not managed to contain that temperament, what you will have instead is a very effective operator in an environment that will only encourage the worst traits. Today we're going to solve the final piece of the puzzle regarding borderline, and it's how parents can prevent this from developing. And to answer that, we also need to look at the broader picture, at culture, and we're going to also answer the question, what needs to change?
Now, if you are a parent, you know that every child is different because temperament is at the bottom, that's genetically heritable. So, at the bottom, before borderline pathology can develop, there has to be a predisposition, a constellation of traits. So you have extremely high neuroticism, and that is sensitivity to negative emotion, which is then the predisposition for this chronic emptiness, the volatility, the impulsivity, this unstable sense of self. And then you have very low agreeableness, which then leads to them breaking norms.
>> Oh, we're being rude. Awesome. Cool. My [ __ ] turn.
And, uh, prioritizing the self over cooperation. This increased use of leverage, using other people, exploiting other people to get what they want, and taking from relationships more than you are giving, and so on. And then when that's paired with the last piece, the low conscientiousness comes this desire for those outcomes to happen fast. And that adds the impulsivity, the very poor follow-through.
Color my hair red, and, um, it might turn orange, it might turn yellow. I have no idea, but that's what I'm add. So, let's see what happens.
>> The self-damaging acts and the complete inability to to reach long-term goals, to form long-term commitments. So, those three things have to be at the bottom. And then add to that the nurture element, and what we look at as manipulation. It's really someone that has learned that certain behaviors produce results. And, um, we had a very instructive moment the other day. Um, me and my husband, we were, um, and this is just to illustrate that that that behaviors they learn, which behaviors produce results. And that's different for for boys than for girls, where boys will then, if they're if they have very masculine traits, then that aggression, that low agreeableness, that will turn outwards. And with girls, they quickly, quickly learn how they can use their emotions and their fragility to produce those results.
So, we were on vacation. And I told you, we're in Norway, and we're there for two weeks. And our kids were playing with a bunch of other kids, and they were getting a lot of attention from everyone around. And, um, and that really, that changes them, all of that attention. And, um, um, and they observe then, when they're with other kids who do different things, they observe their behavior. And, uh, at the tail end of this vacation, are are our kids. Uh, so I have, we have a girl, the oldest, the eldest is a girl, and the other two are quite rowdy boys. They were playing, playing in the garden, and they were playing really nicely, and we were, we were watching them the entire time. And our 8-year-old girl, she comes in suddenly and goes to her her her daddy and says, "Daddy, I'm scared." And sort of is trembling, but it's not how she usually is when she's scared. And my husband, he, he's very sensitive to fake displays of emotions. He's very, um, good at at at, um, seeing what's BS. And he just shut that down immediately. He said, "That is not you. Um, I know when you're scared. This is not you being scared. You're trying to have me intervene on your behalf in the game that you are currently not winning, and it's not going to work." And he was quite strict with her. She admitted that, yeah, she wasn't really scared, but the kids were the boys were playing so wild, and she went out there again, and they played nicely. It didn't work what she was trying to do, but that was clearly something that was put on. She's never done that before, and she didn't do it since, but it was so strange to us that that suddenly happened. It was something that she'd then wore as a costume to see if this works. And if that had worked, that would have become a strategy she would have done again and again.
And now we're lucky because she doesn't have those three traits. She's quite agreeable. She's a very, she's very kind and very likable, and, uh, she internalizes rules very quickly. She has a lot of respect for authority. So, I, I don't worry that any sort of pathology will develop with her. But that's just to show that how even an a very agreeable girl will try on how she can leverage her emotions, how she can sort of game the system that is so clearly, uh, rigged against little boys. We, her default instinct is always to go in and protect the girl, and she wanted us to intervene on her behalf because she'd observed other girls on that vacation doing the same thing.
And now, for parents who have a child who have a girl who's very high in neuroticism, it looks different. You very quickly start to lose ground because that, you know, that sustained emotional intensity that they're capable of creates doubts in the adults around because, you know, they'll rage, and they'll, um, you know, be in tears, and they'll have these dramatic displays of distress for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour. And you then quickly think, is the boundary I put too harsh? Is, is this just a very fragile child? And that intensity will have you doubt the very boundaries that will prevent this development, when what is it, what it's actually telling you, that strength, that emotional intensity is telling you that the boundary you're setting is probably exactly where it needs to be.
And so, it's easy for us to talk about, you have to set boundaries, and you have to enforce those boundaries, but when a child is so neurotic and so intense, that it's very difficult for parents to enforce those boundaries. But it's all the more important because you need to teach your child to emotionally stabilize because they're emotionally unstable by nature. And think about it like this. If you have a negative emotion, a very, very negative emotion, you have sort of two choices. You can, um, you can turn inward. You can say, "Okay, I need to wait it out. I need to go for a walk. I need to punch a pillow. I need to do something to change this emotion." And learn to do that. Or you can turn outwards. You can try to control the environment around you to sort of soothe you, to stabilize for you. And the borderline, uh, girls, they learn how to do that instead of learning how to emotionally stabilize within.
>> Have diagnosed borderline personality disorder. And today I want to talk about how our brain uses anger to cope with the world around us. We are not able to calm ourselves down naturally. That's the core of the.
That's how they develop this sort of quote unquote fragile self that you hear talk about in cluster B/borderline. Fragile self is really just code for neuroticism. But it's that I don't know how to do that inward, so I'm going to have the environment stabilize me instead. And that's exactly what our daughter tried to do. She tried to have us, she tried to move her environment to to fix this difficult situation she was in, uh, instead of dealing with that frustration she experienced in the game.
And so, if you have a child who's very high in neuroticism, what you need to do is teach them frustration tolerance. And that's okay if your child is, uh, is is conscientious or just a little bit conscientious because that's the, that's the endurance part. But when that high neuroticism is like in in the borderline cluster B pathology, paired with low conscientiousness, that is very difficult for them to do. And so they need a lot of help, uh, with that from parents. It's so difficult to parent, uh, this temperament. It's, uh, really my heart goes out to you. It's very difficult.
And lo, the conscientiousness trait is the, the hardest trait to address, but it's the most important. It's the one that is the most consequential for long-term functioning. Because with conscientiousness, you can be able to keep those feelings in check and create a buffer between the emotion and the action. And because these kids, they will escalate further. They will persist until you cave.
>> Are you ready to be nice?
>> We're going to sit out here until you're ready to be nice.
>> We don't need to heal. Hey, no. Hands are not for hitting.
>> Calmness is setting a great example.
>> Are you ready to be nice?
>> No.
>> Okay. Well, then we're going to stay out here until you're ready.
So, you need to hold that line. It is so important. Gradually training conscientiousness in itself by being persistent. No whining. It means no whining every single time. And it's what you can't do this alone. You have to be two parents, and you have to let the father, uh, stand behind you. If, and it's why with single mothers, you see these extreme behaviors more in the kids. You need to let the father in to do what he's instinctually better at doing, which is hold that line against the neuroticism. Train the conscientiousness. And you do that by teaching delay. Teach them to wait, to hold. And by creating that gap, you teach the child that even though they feel something strongly, they don't have to act on it. There's a different path. There is that second path that we talked about, that you can solve your emotions within. You don't have to move the environment to soothe you. And if you are able to to train some discipline, to train that, to create that gap, that can really be a lifeline for this, this temperament, for to to contain the high neuroticism. That, and that is why we have a lot of neurotic people who don't end up developing any borderline pathology.
But there is a third element to this, and that is the low agreeableness. You just triggered my fight-or-flight response, and I am a flightless bird.
The tendency to break norms. And that is when a child is very low in agreeableness, they don't internalize rules. They don't naturally defer to authority. They aren't cooperative in nature. They're competitive. They're self-prioritizing. And so that also needs to to be trained. And now, sadly, I see the parenting philosophy is with girls to confuse rudeness for confidence. "I just tell the truth, and telling the truth is crazy in a world full of lies."
>> This, I'm just being real, and I'm, I'm just being authentic.
And that's not what that is. That's poor socialization. And I, I see parents fail to encourage this trait. If you have a child with low agreeableness, insist on politeness. It needs to be trained. Say it properly. Do it again. Do it anyway. It's not your turn to speak. Or how many times I've sat next to people at at a dinner party with our with our kids, and they go, "No, no, no. She's speaking. She's speaking to. I can't, I can't. She's speaking to me." No, you are a child. You wait. You respect adults. If an adult is speaking, you wait.
So, those are the three really important things. If we have to nail it down, is that teach them that emotions are temporary, that they can stabilize within through their own actions, and you do that by training conscientiousness, holding the line, creating that gap between emotion and action, and, and that they can endure discomfort, and, and, and training politeness. Uh, creating such a stable external structure that can contain their worst impulses. And that's exactly it. This temperament has always existed. What has changed is the environment that does no longer constrain them. And we are all at fault because it takes a village. It's, you know, even very strong parenting can be, uh, undermined if the if the culture is pulling the other way, and it has been for decades. Like, for example, you know, parents have, they say parents have two meals a day to model good eating habits, good healthy eating habits. If the kid sees 60 advertisements for junk food between those two meals, yeah, parents are fighting a losing battle. And for so long now, we've had a culture that is actively counteracting what needs to happen to control neuroticism, to heighten agreeableness, and to to train conscientiousness. And the first thing we did, we did was peer saturation. We put kids way too early in large groups for for for for too long. We've put independence on a pedestal. And why is that? Because a child who shows maturity early is easier to leave. It's easier to leave a child who doesn't cling to your leg in daycare. And if a child hesitates, if it stays too close, then we see them as lagging behind, as immature for their age. And for this temperament, that is exactly wrong because what you're doing when you're putting them in in daycare, in these large groups too early, and you're sort of forcing that maturation, what they, what they're actually doing is is social adaptation. They're learning to move their environment. And that's not real maturity. They're not learning internal emotional stabilization. They're not learning restraint. And they're certainly not learning politeness. You think the 20-year-old working in the daycare who has to oversee at least 10 kids is taking the time to say, "Do it properly. Say it politely. What's the magic word?" No. So what we end up, uh, rewarding is that development towards personality pathology because the child becomes so good at bypassing their inner development, that emotional stabilization through social maneuvering. And, and the danger here is that a child who is very oriented towards their peers becomes even more difficult to parent. So, I think if you see these temperaments in your in your kid, um, then I would really try everything I could to to have them with me as much as possible. Preventing your child from developing a personality pathology. It is the most important thing you'll ever do. But again, parents are left alone with this task. There's a reason we always said it takes a village. And, you know, earlier societies, they helped parents regulate behavior. They had, we had expectations around conduct, around modesty, and, and reputation. Um, there was, there was communal judgment and, um, shame that also helped us regulate behavior. And especially for girls, you know, they were expected to dress in a certain way, show restraint. They, um, to understand that attention-seeking and sexual display and public volatility would carry consequences. And everyone was expected to speak respectfully to adults and to internalize rules and show consideration. So, there would be help from society in, um, encouraging agreeableness. And you can say, maybe, maybe, uh, those restrictions weren't always fair, maybe they were, um, excessive. At the same time, they, they were a very, um, they performed a very important psychological function. They, they were those external regulators that supported parents in shaping difficult temperaments. We also used to penalize, um, these displays, excessive displays of emotion, right? We used to say, "Oh, don't be such a crybaby." "Oh, he's such a hothead." We still say those things about men, but with women, it was, "Oh, drama queen." Those things used to be, um, you know, names we would avoid. And then, you know, over the past century, centuries, what we see in the West is that we've completely dismantled that layer of of containment. We want autonomy and self-expression, and we, we're suspicious of judgment itself. That's the worst thing you can be now. Oh, oh, I'm not judging. Oh, you're so judgmental. That's like, that's the worst thing you can do. And this is especially true in the domains of sexuality, relationships, female conduct. All of those things have become unfair judgment on female behavior. And in reality, those were the things that helped us shape this difficult temperament. You know, for decades, we've been telling girls, be yourself, express yourself. Uh, never, never suppress your true self. This is my favorite. You can do anything you want to do. You know, so for girls, agreeableness itself is called a weakness. It's, you know, if girls defer to authority or or accommodate others or behave cooperatively, they, they're shrinking themselves. And so any, you know, any form of behavioral restraint is automatically oppression or or worse, emotional invalidation. And that is exactly what they, you know, what Marshall Linehan, uh, said causes borderline pathology, invalidation. And my point is that these temperaments will interpret almost everything as invalidation. And now culture, on top of that, is telling them exactly how they are being invalidated if they try to train the traits they don't naturally have.
And then agreeable girls, like my daughter, and I, I have this conversation with her often nowadays when she says, "I'm never called upon in class." You know, they're not, when I say something, nobody's listening because she's such a, a, a shy and, and polite girl. She, she looks at some of the girls in her class, and they're all very demanding and very provocative, and they, they make themselves be listened to, very, they're relentlessly self-prioritizing, I know, rude, and they're being praised as confidence, as as confident, as empowered. And she, she looks upon them and thinks, "I want to be like that." And I try to tell her, "It's good that you're not like that." But from the school, I'm being told, "She needs to stand up for herself, and she needs to fight." Like that is not a good thing. So, we, even when parents are, are doing the right thing, they're being told by the environment that you should do the opposite. And feminism played a huge role in making this happen, making, uh, female behavior unjudable. It's completely shielded the, these borderline adjacent traits, these precursors to borderline pathology because what feminism called oppression, and by that I mean modesty, um, reputational vetting, um, social shame, shame is a very good biological signal, just like guilt, right? It, it moves us in, um, in a direction that might help us achieve long-term goals. And so, you know, they called all those things, and, and behavioral judgment as well, uh, oppressive. And I think we should rather look at it as guardrails for difficult temperaments. And so, by by by shaming shame, we are, we have removed, like, one of the oldest breaks that we had, breaks on self-centered behavior. And we recognize this already with boys. There's, there's an analogy there. We know that fatherlessness and, and, um, and weakened authority, it correlates with, uh, conduct problems, with antisocial traits in boys. And so pathology will equally develop in girls as in boys when those boundaries aren't there. It's just expressed in a, in a, in a feminine way. It's emotional and relational aggression rather than physical aggression. And so, I would say for the temperament in question, high neuroticism, low agreeableness, low conscientiousness, this is very far from female liberation. It's incubation. It's like you're leaving an egg salad out uncovered, and they're completely left to the mercy of their worst impulses.
Like, let's, let's take a concrete example. Let's say you have a 12-year-old girl, and she's really emotionally intense, very bright, and she's already aware that she can get attention. So, she comes downstairs, and she's dressed in a way that's, let's say, a little bit too mature for her age. And you say, you're, you're the father. You say, "No, that's not appropriate. Go change." And, you know, then she becomes sweet, "Why, why are you being so strict? And all the other girls dress like this." And if that, um, if that works, that will be stored, and she'll do it again, obviously. And if it doesn't, if he holds the line, then she'll do an emotional shift. "You don't trust me. I love this outfit. It's so me. Don't you want me to feel confident and good? And you know how much I've struggled?" It's therapy language. That's an escalation. And then, if that doesn't work, then tears, withdrawal, to go upstairs and slam the door. And, you know, that's great. And then the parent starts doubting, doubting himself. "Was it too harsh?" You, first of all, what, what used to happen was that both of the parents would have shown a united front and held the boundary together for the long-term good, and then they would have been supported by the broader norm. They would have been backing the parents up. And, and now, because culture isn't doing this, the environment around isn't supporting the parents, the parents are thinking, not not that the boundary is wrong, but they're questioning the right to even enforce it. It feels sort of socially risky. And so that's exactly how ideology has entered the home, disrupting the parenting. And they're, they're teaching the child that this emotional pressure can change, if, if it's paired with a, with sort of moral language, that it can change reality.
And now, let's say the same girl, she's on social media. She posts a picture that's provocative. She gets attention. She gets validation, comments, and likes. And now she learns that how she presents herself, it gets a reward. And now, let's say the father expresses concerns, sort of puts half a limit there. "Is, is this really appropriate? Should you be doing this?" And immediately that important language comes in. Readymade justifications from these reels that she's watching. "You're shaming me. It's my body. You don't understand how things are now." Focus, that would be the problem. And now it's the parents' response that's the problem. And so, I think if you're a parent, to the best of your ability, try to try to not obsess about that early independence. Try to preserve innocence as long as possible. Not naive, but innocence in that delaying instrumentalization. Uh, delaying the moment where she learns that relationships can can be used to produce outcomes. If they pressure, if they're in emotionally intense, if they seduce, if they do this sort of narrative control, like in my examples, the one who controls the narrative, controls the boundaries, the, the longer that doesn't happen, the better, because once she's learned those things, it is almost impossible to be undone.
And so, by by the age of 12, 13, if you've not managed to contain that temperament, what you will have instead is a very effective operator in an environment that will only encourage the worst traits. And so, I see so many parents who've just really tried their absolute best, and they're normal people. And I think that these pathologies can develop because there's a complete misalignment between, uh, parents and the the system. Parents are left completely alone to deal with different difficult temperaments. And, and that's why if we talk about what needs to change, it has to be on multiple levels. On the family level, we need to strengthen marriage because there's no way for parents to have authority if the if the relationship is weak. They need to be a united front. And for that to happen, um, you know, the father can't be chronically afraid of being divorced. That can't be something that hangs over his head because then the mother controls everything in the home. And I, I see that happening a lot now. You know, fathers don't have that authority anymore. And the next thing is the cultural level, that the reward structures, they matter enormously. And I think, you know, well, social media is always, always gets the blame because it glamorizes exhibitionism, that's fine. But I think it can also be used for good. I think, um, no, take the tradife, uh, trends, and they're incredibly faulty. Uh, you know, I, of course, they were doing it for clout and all of that, but it just shows how, but at least they were advocating for domesticity and modesty. At least there was that, at least they were pointing in the right direction. Maybe, uh, for nefarious reasons, but we see how behavior follows, uh, where there's social cache. And so, I think social media could help change what's socially rewarded. But what was so interesting with the tradife trend, I thought, was this allergic, this reaction to a reintroduction of femininity because it did advocate for feminine constraint. And the backlash, I thought, was much more interesting than the trend itself. But if we are, if we are punishing even attempting to correct it, how are we going to write the ship? And you all know, I, so many changes have to be done, uh, at the mental health level. I think they're huge culprits in this. We have created, uh, shields where pathological personalities can hide behind, like autism, like bipolarity, like trauma. And we are now, I mean, psychiatry has, um, long ago aligned themselves with postmodernism, with feminism, with the non-judgmentalism. And they are deliberately funneling destructive female behavior into trauma language and other completely unsuitable disorders, disorder categories. And that displaces responsibility and it prevents change. And I mean, I know many of you, um, disagreed when I, when I did the episode on trauma and the trauma myth. And of course, I want to say abuse and neglect can be among the reasons why this, the, this sort of the shaping of this temperament fails. It can, and it has done. But I think it's more common that the pathology arises from the failure of modern life and culture. I think that is why we're seeing the rise now because the rates of child abuse and neglect have fallen. Yet we see these behaviors increasing. I think it is more common now that it's not cruelty that distorts this sort of development. It's indulgence. It's, it's, it's permissiveness. It's, uh, parental inconsistency. Um, peer saturation, weakened authority in the home, weakened parental authority, and a culture that completely rewards what should be frowned upon. Those are the things I think is more plausible. So again, the, the trade constellation is not new, but what is new is the, the removal of the molds that shaped them into something that's functional. These, these lines, so judgment and, and, and shame and reputational vetting and modesty and, and, um, expecting them to adhere to behavioral standards. These lines are spoken of as oppression, but I think for girls, uh, who are predisposed to develop cluster B dynamics, they're developmental necessities.
So, I hope that this helped. And, uh, in the next episode, we're going to continue talking about feminism and how that's changed female psychology. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you check out the Psycho Bible Substack, where I host live streams twice a month.