Source: Preventing the Pathological Female and the Role Feminism Played Channel: Hannah Spier, MD Published: April 30, 2026 | Archived: May 1, 2026

Video: Preventing the Pathological Female and the Role Feminism Played
Channel: Hannah Spier, MD
Published: April 30, 2026
Duration: 33:01
Views: 27,367
Category: News & Politics
Video ID: JgZS6E4GjOA

Description

Prevention matters because once these patterns are learned, they are extremely difficult to undo. I am not convinced we can confidently call them curable.

This is a practical look at what could make a difference, first at the individual-level, and then at a societal level.

Join me this Sunday at 2 pm Eastern for a live stream on Substack in conversation with Edward Dutton: https://hannahspier.substack.com/

00:00 The Missing Piece: Prevention 00:28 The Temperament Foundation 02:10 How it Develops 05:35 Where Parents Lose Ground 06:53 Containing Neuroticism 11:30 Training Agreeableness 13:14 Culture vs Parenting 16:06 The Danger Effects of Peer Saturation 17:19 The Role of Social Norms and External Constraints 18:11 Cultural Shift: From Restraint to Expression 21:13 Feminism’s Role in Shaping Behavior Norms 23:14 A Practical Example 26:06 Preserving Innocence and Delaying Instrumentalization 27:29 What Needs to Change (Family, Culture, Mental Health Framing) 30:25 Indulgence vs Adversity (Why Traits Are Increasing Today) 31:37 Final Framework: Containment vs Expression

Tags

feminism borderline parenting

Transcript — YouTube panel (English (auto-generated)

) (human-authored)

0:00 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.

1:25 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.

2:19 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

3:28 attention from everyone around and uh 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, “The is not you. Um I know when you’re scared. This is not you being

4:32 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’s a lot of respect for authority. So I I don’t

5:29 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 very 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’re 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

6:31 the boundary I put too harsh? Is 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 instable 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

7:33 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 clusterb/orderline. 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 stabilized me instead. And that’s exactly what our daughter tried to do. She tried to have us, she tried to move her environment to

8:36 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.

9:24 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.

9:55 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

11:02 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 soo you. And if you are able to 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 neurot 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 fightor-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.

12:12 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

13:21 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

14:33 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.

15:36 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 temperament 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

16:48 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

18:06 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 hot head.” 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.

18:58 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 a 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 Linen uh said causes borderline pathology invalidation. And my point is that these temperaments will interpret almost everything as

20:21 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 a shy and and polite girl. She 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

21:33 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 uh 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.

22:20 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 guard rails 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 a there’s an analogy there. We know that fatherlessness and and uh 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.

23:27 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 dressed 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.

24:35 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 show a united front and hold the boundary together for the long-term good and then they would be supported by the broader norm. They would be backing the parents up and and now because culture isn’t doing this the environment around aren’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

25:42 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 reals that she’s watching. You’re shaming me. It’s my body. You don’t understand how things are now.

26:24 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 the longer that doesn’t happen, the better because once she’s learned those things, it is almost impossible to be undone.

27:16 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 if their 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.

28:26 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 re reward structures they matter enormous enormously and I think you know well social media is always always gets to 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 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 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

29:35 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 all if we’re 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 culprit in this. We have created uh shields where pathological personalities can hide behind like autism, like bipolarity, like trauma.

30:20 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 uh 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 has 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

31:42 indulgence. It’s it’s it’s permissiveness. It’s uh parental inconsistency. Um peer satur 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 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

32:58 streams twice a month.