Transcription
We completely blind ourselves to the growing prevalence. We don't want to admit how easily certain temperaments go out of control. What happens when they're left untamed? What happens when excessively neurotic women are not taught to emotionally regulate? We're trained to think that women are so harmless. They're just, you know, they're just innocent creatures just full of good impulses. No, they can wreak havoc. And we're not doing anything to prevent them to spiral into pathology.
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Welcome back to PsychoBabel, where we expose bad therapy and the narratives that contribute to our poor mental health. I'm Hannah Spear. Today we're going to talk about pathological female behavior, the cluster B pathologies, because we are surrounded by the wreckage they cause.
I don't know what you want from me. >> All over the internet, you can see viral videos of grown women throwing tantrums in public. >> Okay, go. LET GO. YOU DIDN'T LET ME GET MY MOMENT. So I want to say my name is Patty and I'm graduating today. >> And whenever I speak about this people come out and they say this is exactly my sister, my partner, my children. There's so many people suffering from this. And the irony is that the prevalence of all the different mental disorders is rising. We hear about it all the time. We're in a mental health crisis. uh but somehow the rise in cluster B pathologies that we feel all around us is not reflected in the research. Somehow the official prevalence of cluster B has not been updated for two decades. The irony is that psychiatrists and psychologists are very quick to diagnose high functioning individuals with mental health disorders, but they remain very reluctant to recognize cluster B conditions. And I'm going to explain now how exactly ideology clouds the roots of these of these dysfunctions and how it's possible that we avoid discovering the true prevalence of cluster B pathologies. And I I will focus on the on the female presentations here because the male version, the antisocial is widely recognized, widely studied. And these individuals you will find, prosecuted and incarcerated. But the female coded form, it's far more likely to be excused and misinterpreted and framed as other types of mental disorders because we hesitate to be judgmental about female behavior. So that's why I'll talk about women here. And that doesn't mean there aren't men with cluster B disorders is that uh that's not the problem I want to discuss.
First very quickly, personality disorders are they are conditions classified in cluster A, B and C. We can talk about clusters A and C another time. These are inflexible patterns of thinking and behavior that lead to significant impairment, dysfunction in all areas of your life. The cluster B personality disorders, so that's borderline, histrionic, narcissism, and antisocial. uh they are categorized by erratic dramatic behavior, manipulation, impulsivity, uh very high negative emotion. The histrionics are are are very they're seeking admiration. They want to be the center of attention all the time. >> Why don't you just take the picture on your camera roll and keep it there? No, because you feel you when you take a picture and you and you look at it, you feel, wow, like this would be good for my Instagram or >> and so then can you you can imagine how social media feeds into that. And these are these are adaptive traits that are formed and and the boundaries between these are very porous. So that's why I like to say cluster B conditions or cluster B pathologies because no one is just one thing.
And to illustrate what this is for you, I've I found a video. This uh went viral this year. It's a 32year-old woman who had a complete borderline meltdown on a plane and had to be taken off and zip ties. You can see this is not just drunken irritability. She had had alcohol, but this that just amplifies this type of behavior that it doesn't cause all of this. So you see the contempt. She wants to establish dominance and she's entitled. You she expects everyone to accommodate her not and not the other way around. And now she proceeds to grab her seatmate's hair and uh while still clutching it, she insists, "I'm not even touching her. >> I'm not. Andre, I'm not even touching your hair. [ __ ] you need the cool. >> You need to let go right now. >> We need those 911. >> You need to let go. >> 911. >> You need to let go right now. You can see how she smirks. There's pleasure in the chaos. >> [ __ ] fat lady. >> Go over here. >> You guys are already pass. >> We see here not just impulsivity, but belief in causing another person discomfort and and receiving attention from the opposite sex. I mean, you see how she has males around her. They're usually very charismatic, attractive women who use that to get the attention they want from men. >> Sad ass [ __ ] Hilarious. You can't even show your mouth cuz you're embarrassed. >> And now she escalates. She taunts the victim with sexual insult. So your boyfriend's dick is 2 in and she's laughing while doing it. And her behavior is like I mean it's like a schoolyard bully. There's sadistic satisfaction in causing humiliation of the people around her. >> You can't see it because you're embarrassed. Shut the [ __ ] up. >> Who is Alana? >> You can see her smiling here. Pay attention to her face. >> He's never going to again. >> Okay. I'm sorry, black guy. My boyfriend's black, so shut the [ __ ] My boyfriend's [ __ ] a black guy. My boyfriend's black. >> Now she's flame. She's screaming. I can't breathe. And what comes next is very interesting. She shifts into victim mode, which is classic manipulative strategy. She weaponizes vulnerability to escape accountability. And it's not it's not genuine distress. You feel it. If you look at her, you feel it doesn't elicit the same reaction in you as someone who's genuinely in distress. It's attacking. My >> boyfriend's a [ __ ] black guy. You're joking. Oh my god. >> We're not doing all that. We're not doing >> Shut the [ __ ] up. Shut the [ __ ] up. >> Shut the [ __ ] up. >> Shut the [ __ ] up. >> Shut the [ __ ] up. >> She has two women and two big men around her. They're they they all >> ugly ass. >> You never got laid in your life. Your bourbon's dick is like 2 in big. That's embarrassing. >> I'm so sorry about your boyfriend. >> You're corny as [ __ ] >> Nobody's letting me go. >> I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. >> Okay, >> let me go. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. Shut the [ __ ] up. I can't breathe. [ __ ] it. >> And she's kicking and screaming. She's very violent. And you while smirking. So, you can see how this is um this is causing her you can tell that this is not her first encounter with being violent or or being being touched in a in a in a violent way. This is um this is something that she can control. I'm sorry. >> And now you see she she changes tactic. So she there's a man he crouches down. He speaks slowly to her and she tries to elicit sympathy from him. So she knows exactly how to handle males. And when that doesn't work, she goes back right away to kicking and shouting and screaming profanities. This this pivot is like a from a desperate child to violent aggressor. It's not disorganized. This is this is patterned. She's done this before. And it really it reveals a style of maneuvering others through emotional coercion if you know cry if it works and rage if it doesn't. And here you see she's wheeled out. So this illustrates the core features of borderline personality disorder which is emotional instability, impulsive behavior, manipulation and harm to yourself and to others.
And so why do I say that this is the female form of antisocial personality disorder? This is evolutionary psychologists have established that females tend to cloak their aggression in um in subtler forms like moral outrage. >> How dare you? >> Because they're physically more vulnerable and they they have an existential need to keep uh to preserve social cohesion. And now you see that that that moral outrage is tied to progressive causes. So, like I'm such a good person. I'm so I'm all about justice and compassion. Uh so, I'm going to pour paint over this uh Van Go painting because I'm just so good and so moral. You see the same on on university c campuses in riots. You see the traits, the borderline and histrionic traits play out there with this the rapid shifts of emotional of emotion. You see them going from one moment they're a tearful victim and the next moment they're a violent aggressive aggressor shouting in your face sometimes while crying. And of course you also see the narcissism how they present themselves as a as a sort of moral authorities over issues they know nothing about. And uh a very f a very interesting thing this uh how they are so interested in wi women's oppression in the west and and talk about that at length while showing absolutely no sympathy for how women are treated in the the regimes they defend. So they cloak their own aggression while exhibiting grandiosity, lack of empathy, and massive entitlement. And of course, like I mentioned before, you see the histrionic traits all over social media. You see there was an excellent example of this. You had a woman named Natalie Reynolds. She manipulated a homeless woman to jump into a lake and to film it and post it on Tik Tok. And she was then subsequently banned from from Tik Tok. Um, and then she went to the company's headquarters with the camera, did a a tearful display, demanded reinstatement, showing absolutely no remorse for what she had done, only this very practiced I'm the I'm the victim. And of course the need for admiration which is the the histrionicism and a complete refusal for account um refusing accountability. God won't let me in. I need my Tik Tok account unbanned. I have so many fans waiting. I just want my account unbanned. I can't do this anymore.
I think to understand why we're seeing a rise in these traits, because we are, we need to understand how they develop. And um because these aren't like other mental illnesses. They they um they don't appear after an unpredictable or extraordinary event. They they develop slowly over time. When in adolescence the the groundwork for this these uh disorders are already laid there. They are they are shaped by temperament by attachment patterns and environment. And at the core of this uh is a lack of consistent maternal presence. because it's no secret that at the root of this these disorders uh are attachment um needs that aren't fulfilled. And I I I saw this with the girls I treated. It was always about the mother. That was the relationship where they had the most wounds and they would come Monday morning if if if they'd had a fight over the weekend with their mother and they would have started a humongous tattoo like things like this gone. they go pierce themselves after a fight with their mother. This is also why we see that you have a sibling who develops something like this and another sibling who doesn't because the different lies in the personality traits. The personality traits are 40 to 60% heritable. We're pretty much set with the personality that we develop. And depending on what kind of personality you have, you'd need a different kind of parenting. you have to adjust yourself as a parent to the personality of your child. So that's why you can see this these variations in siblings and humans are just as responsive to their environment as animals are. You see in um depending on your environment you can down or upregulate these these traits. So you see, for example, in high predation environments, birds will produce more anxious offspring than in a low predation environment. If you think about it, it's completely logical. And the same with us. And so I think this can really explain why we're seeing a slow drift into more maladaptive traits, the traits that define personality disorders.
And when I say traits, the best way to understand that is the five factor model. I know some people don't like it but it is we don't have a lot of good research in psychology. Uh but this is one of them. It cated crossculturally ve it's very good research and they describe traits along five dimensions. We've talked about this before. It's neuroticism, extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness. And under these traits lie a deeper system alarm. So you have threat detection, reward seeking, bonding and affiliation and control and need to regulate everything. And these are evolutionary action systems that tell us when to flee, fight, when to attach to other people and when to take risks. And all they do is want to guide us towards reproduction and survival. And so I think a very good way of thinking about personality disorders is uh when one or more of these systems are thrown into overdrive or left underdeveloped. And cluster B traits, they often reflect a a hyperactive alarm system. So they're very sensitive to negative emotions. They're very afraid all the time and a very underdeveloped affiliation system. So they have this extreme need for attachment. And so it's then obvious then when we that when we outsource so much maternal presence, people with an excess of these action systems, the excess need for attachment and and security, they will suffer more than others. And they learn very early in childhood that only through extreme emotional displays will I get what I need to be calm. And then the next question is when does this become a pathology. So over time these maladaptive patterns will will lead to them not being able to lead a normal life. And that is by definition um a psychiatric pathology.
You can imagine how vulnerable this diagnosis is to um the bias of the observer. You know, for for example, what are we to take as markers of impulsivity? For example, markers of an inability to think long term, right? It used to be that tattoos would be that or or or piercing your nose. If you go on TikTok, you know, all of these girls have pierced nose. And and and to me, I will take that as a marker of you not being able to think long term, but others won't. And today, these things are so normalized that we no longer see them as clinically relevant at all. And um you know, a lot of therapists themselves have uh tattoos everywhere. And and this is problematic because they serve the same psychological function. You know, it a tattoo is a way of coping with emotional pain in a physical way. It distracts from emotional pain. That's why they go that's why they cut themselves. That's why, you know, they put their fingers down their throats to throw up their food. That's um you know, that's that's why we have the selfharm evidence element of the disorder. It comes from a place of not being able to do to not being able to know what to do with your emotional pain. So you turn to physical pain. But if you are so uh ideologically biased that you refuse to see piercings and tattoos and and uh other forms of or you taking lesbian dance theory as a degree. Um, if you refuse to see that as a a a [gasps and laughter] dysfunction, dysfunctional long-term planning, you know, of course, a lot of women are going to go undiagnosed. So, that's one element um of why the the why the prevalence rate isn't officially recognized.
Another is the the ideological gymnastics that researchers do around this topic. The most uh the most commonly cited uh prevalence rate they use 5.9% comes from this um Nesark study uh 2000 to this is 2008 where they ignore people who are just below the threshold. Um they ignore those who have intermittent symptoms that still cause major dysfunction. They exclude overlapping symptoms with mood or substance issues. I mean, I don't think I've really seen any patients with this who don't turn to some substance abuse or another. Um, and and you can really make a good argument that substance issues are a is central to cluster B. These interviews, they're done by lay people who aren't used to talking to to to borderliners or histrionics. So they very easily miss uh nuance or they mi they they don't know how to recognize the patterns and worst of all they rely on on lifetime recall of these people who are known for their lack of insights. We do have other studies which show actually show a rise in these traits. The research of Gene Twangi which I've talked about a lot of a lot here on the show. She reports rising narcissism among among college students. And here's another study uh which fi found measurable rise in certain traits over just five years particularly among female students. Now they f choose to focus only on self harm and alcohol abuse and they specifically leave out common behavioral markers like tattoos, piercings and impulsivity. So this shows how easily psychiatric criteria bend with culture. So these the this study this this last study shows two things that these traits can increase over over a short period of time. So they can upregulate and the other thing is that they show how easily they leave out key symptoms of the disorder. I mean, it's just ridiculous how they can just choose to leave out tattoos, piercings, and impulsivity. I mean, you do that if your intention is to obscure the the the true prevalence rate.
The worst the worst thing about this is that there is a push to erase the disorder, the diagnosis altogether because of the judgment on female behavior. There's a recent uh Guardian article that illustrates exactly this. They're they're interviewing leading psychiatrists in the field and they're openly proposing advocating for replacing the borderline personality disorder diagnosis with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, CPTTSD. And they justify this by citing studies showing that borderline um is associated with childhood abuse and neglect more than any other personality disorder. Fine. They say it the rate of child abuse in these disorders range from 30 to 90%. But they refuse to address this gap. there's it's it's a pretty big difference between 30 and 90%. And they just gloss over that completely. They show that there's um and there's an analysis of 97 studies where 71.1% of those diagnosed report at least one traumatic childhood event. But these are self- reports. There's self-reports of um a a group of people who have a skewed perception of reality who are are extremely emotionally volatile and and prone to manipulate others. So this is all based on self-reports from those kind of people and we have to when you talk about uh child this is called adverse child experiences as there's a report and then a scale called uh adverse child experiences scale. 61% of Americans they score positively on this scale just to it's meant as a research tool to um to see you know how we can how we can apply preventive measure. It was never meant in a clinical sort of way and you know if you've ever been bullied at school you'll score on on on this. So it doesn't really prove anything at all. And I think the worst thing here is that they don't distinguish between perceived abuse and neglect um and verified abuse and neglect.
Another thing is that when uh borderline p when borderline women uh say you know when they say I've been abused what they largely mean is psychological abuse. Many many things can qualify as psychological abuse. Normal discipline can't qualify as psychological abuse if it's told in a certain way. And it's very comfortable. It's very palatable to say that they have a trauma. Um I think absolutely they have a perceived trauma. If you need more from your parents than they gave you, you're going to feel very negatively about your childhood. But when you say I have a trauma, that is automatically something that was done to you. Um, and not something in your behavior, in your pattern, in your personality that you do again and again that leads to you not having a normal life. So it's much more palatable to say I have a trauma disorder than I have a borderline personality disorder. So, of course, uh, ideologically possessed psychiatrists and psychologists are going to want to say that, uh, trauma broke this woman rather than admit that she's problem with her emotional regulation. Uh, she has narcissistic entitlement, she has relational aggression, she's manipulative, but they have no hesitation in saying that about men. we've no problem saying, "He's so antisocial. He's a psychopath." We hear it all the time about men who are nowhere near that disorder. Now, these these pe these clinicians, they explicitly claim that borderline personality disorder is a gendered diagnosis and unfairly judge female behavior. They're right. They judge female behavior, but not unfairly. and they claim there's no symptom that a borderline personality disordered person has that a PTSD patient doesn't also have. And so this is how they just collapse the BPD diagnosis into a trauma category. And the slight of hand is that they don't mention the traits that are unique to borderline personality disorder. Identity disturbance, manipulation, impulsivity, self harm, splitting, chronic emptiness. But these are fishly difficult to define and very easy to overlook and they are often left completely to a clinician's subjective judgment.
And what really concerns me is that when we reduce cluster B pathologies to tra mere trauma responses, we completely blind ourselves to the growing prevalence. We don't want to admit how easily certain temperaments go out of control. What happens when they're left untamed? What happens when excessively neurotic women are not taught to emotionally regulate? We're trained to think that women are so harmless. They're just, you know, they're just innocent creatures just full of good impulses. No, they can wreak havoc. and we're not doing anything to prevent them to spiral into pathology. So when we shift when we shift the focus from misbehavior to trauma, responsibility and accountability completely fades and those are the things they already have trouble with. And what concerns me a lot is that when they then receive trauma therapy for their trauma, supposed trauma, then um [snorts] um treatment will be about excavating uh presumed memories and and sheltering them rather than helping them learn to make better choices, learn to behave differently.
And so now that we know all of this, uh the question is what's the antidote? What can we do? So if you've enjoyed this, if you found found this interesting, follow me over to Substack. Go and subscribe there and uh and then we'll go into that. Also, I hope you I hope you will turn and also I hope you will tune in on Saturday uh at 100 p.m. uh Eastern. We'll do a live access, a live video on this. you can ask all of your questions if you had some if you if you feel that I didn't cover anything or you have questions about I don't know a relative then I'll address that on the live video on Saturday 1:00 p.m. Eastern. So I hope to see you there. Have a nice day.