By: Hannah Spier, MD

Published: Feb 19, 2026

Imagine an individual whose life is a consistent masterclass in the violation of others. This person demonstrates a profound disregard for right and wrong, operating with a total lack of empathy or remorse for those they hurt. Their primary mode of engagement is manipulation and deceit, using a sharp wit or a performative charm to con others for personal gain. They are a creature of impulsivity and irresponsibility, prone to reckless risk-taking, unable to keep a job long-term, and a chronic failure to plan for the future. When challenged, they pivot to aggression and violence, exhibiting a disregard for safety that borders on the criminal. They lack long-term relationships, as people involved with them expose who they are or tire of abuse.

What you envisioned while reading that paragraph was almost certainly a man. The behaviour maps onto the diagnostic symptom list of the classic antisocial predator. But if we adjust the criteria for the female expression of the same traits: “impulsivity” as high-risk promiscuity, “violence” as the destruction of someone’s reputation, “deceit” to include the performance of the seductive female, and “reckless disregard for safety” as the threat to hurt themselves, then this picture maps onto a borderline woman perfectly.

Agency vs. The Patient Model

We have been conditioned by modern clinical psychology to view the borderline woman as a “victim-patient,” a tragic figure possessed by “third-degree emotional burns” as a result of a broken attachment system. This may be true, but what is equally true is the increasing need for a better understanding of the utility if the wreckage left behind in the wake of these relationships.

Now, we understand borderline as a sort of hyper-neuroticism causing fragility. What if it is also a high-functioning system of interpersonal warfare? In the world of the borderline, “instinctual” might not mean “unintentional,” but a Machiavellian drive to regulate the environment through emotional volatility.

By labeling these individuals as “patients,” we effectively prevent the world from seeing them as predators. We focus so heavily on their “subjective distress” that we have created a linguistic blockade: if she hasn’t sought therapy, the term supposedly doesn’t apply. What’s more, the “Goldwater Rule” (the clinical prohibition against diagnosing someone who isn’t your patient) is often used selectively as a conversational shut-down. However, if this behavior is viewed as a personality style rather than a medical “illness,” it becomes a matter of character assessment. This is something every individual is permitted, and indeed required, to do for their own safety. We have no such qualms when males exhibit antisocial traits.

But the heaviest deterrent remains the way clinicians choose to interpret the borderline mechanism. For instance, the word “manipulative” is often avoided altogether. We have been trained to think of manipulation only as cold, detached calculation—a state we don’t believe an emotionally volatile woman is capable of. We mistake her heat for helplessness, failing to see that fire can be just as instrumental as ice.

But we must remember where the disorder gets its name: “Borderline Psychotic.” This refers to the emotional outbursts, the rages, and the tantrums that so closely resemble a psychotic break that they are frequently mistaken for one. However, if you observe the individual before and after the “break,” a different pattern emerges.

Symptom or Strategy? An Example

In this edited sequence (originally 28min) of a police body cam, we see that the dysregulation clinicians call the borderline outbursts only appear when the previous strategy fails. It manifests the exact second that her physical and social power is neutralized.

0:00 – 0:15 | The Parasitic Entitlement The case worker has called the police and is clearly exhausted. Deja has spent the day using her as a personal chauffeur, has no resources, and refuses to leave the car. This is the parasitic life history strategy. She feels entitled to other people’s care and labor as if it were a natural resource.

0:16 – 0:40 | The Dominance Frame The officer arrives. Deja doesn’t show “fear of abandonment”; she shows Arrogant Dominance. She lies about her age to reset the power dynamic and tells the officer to “get away” from her. She is “testing the fence” of the officer’s authority to see if she can maintain the veto power she has already successfully used on her case worker.

0:41 – 1:05 | Weaponized “Therapy-Speak” Deja says, “Respect my space” and “I don’t feel comfortable.” This is instrumentalized vulnerability. She isn’t actually afraid; she is using modern “safety” language as a tool to paralyze the officer’s ability to do his job. It’s a Machiavellian stall tactic designed to keep her seat in the vehicle.

1:06 – 1:25 | The Shift to Active Antagonism previous strategy having failed, so the mask slips. She puts her hand in the officer’s face, a high-dominance, aggressive gesture, then defies a direct order by getting back into the car. She is escalating the conflict because her “vulnerable” mask failed to move the officer. This is the transition into Overt Secondary Psychopathy.

1:26 – 1:45 | The “Nuclear Veto” (The Tactical Tantrum) The moment the handcuffs click, the “Psychosis” begins. The screaming is not a loss of control or dysregulation; it is a takeover of the environment. By screaming “My head!” and “Emergency!”, she is trying to create a “moral fog” that makes the officer look like the aggressor. Note the next shift, the Strategic Regression: she begins calling for her case worker like a child calling for a mother.

1:46 – 2:00 | The Refusal of Accountability She calls the officer a “monster” and claims she wants to “press charges.” This is the post-tactical reframing. She is already building the narrative where she is the “BPD Victim” and the officer is the “Abuser,” despite her being the one who initiated the battery and the resistance.

Notice, how a maneuver to elicit a desired response—whether through instrumentalized victimhood, feigned incompetence, or seduction—fails to move the target, the volume predictably goes up. If the volume fails, the “system” crashes into a “psychotic-like” break to force the environment to stabilize her. This rage, usually understood as a cry for help; could also be viewed as a “mugging” of the counterpart’s autonomy.

The Weaponization of the Heart

In traditional clinical settings, neuroticism is seen as a vulnerability, as an excess of it usually leads to mood disorders. But if we look closer, hyper-neuroticism (the hallmark of the borderline personality) can be used as a weapon system. By being the most volatile person in any given interaction, the borderline individual establishes “affective dominance.” They effectively set the “emotional temperature” of the room by signalling the willingness to break social norms other’s still care about. Society currently rewards this excess neuroticism. By valuing “lived experience” and “trauma-informed care” over objective character assessment, we have created an environment where the most “broken” person holds the most social power. This forces people to self-censor and “walk on eggshells,” which is the only remaining form of environmental control.

This is the female mirror to male aggression. Where the antisocial male uses a fist to ensure compliance, the borderline woman uses emotional outbursts (rage) to achieve the same end: the elimination of your agency. In an evolutionary sense, this is parasitic success. They extract the maximum amount of labour, attention, and loyalty from a host with the minimum amount of prosocial output.

The Visible Scar as a Tactical Deterrent

This parasitic behavior and its accompanying manipulation successfully hide by eliciting our innate, biological response to female fragility. We are hard-wired to protect the vulnerable, and the borderline presentation exploits this evolutionary “code” to bypass our rational defenses. But if we look past our own compassion, we can identify the specific antisocial mechanisms at work.

Consider the “scars on the arm” not merely as signs of internal pain, but as social signage—a permanent warning system. Through the lens of Costly Signaling Theory, these marks function as a tactical deterrent. They communicate: “If you do not comply with my emotional needs, I am capable of extreme violence—starting with myself.” The female equivalent of the buff, bald biker in the bar with hate tattooed on his knuckles.

This shifts the moral weight of the woman’s safety onto the observer. The scars become armor, signaling to the world that this person is a “victim,” which makes any attempt to hold them accountable look like “bullying a traumatized person.” The partner is no longer an equal in a relationship; they are a crisis manager under duress. It is a form of hostage-taking where the individual uses her own body as the hostage to mandate compliance.

Identity as a Fog of War

Similarly, the “identity disturbance” central to the borderline diagnosis could also be viewed as a strategic lack of identity. A tool for deceit. By having no fixed “self,” the individual can become whoever the target needs them to be during the “Acquisition Phase.” This is the “ideal woman,” the seductive archetype who uses promiscuity and charm to secure a caretaker. A tool for resource acquisition and mate poaching. Men’s protective instinct is often triggered in this phase, with stories of abusive ex-boyfriends, fathers or neglectful mothers.

Once the target is secured, the mask slips because the cost of maintaining the charm is too high. The “Attractive Phase” pivots into the “Psychotic” stranger the moment she is challenged. This creates a “Fog of War” where the partner can never truly pin down the antagonist’s character. The resulting state of intermittent reinforcement keeps the partner addicted to the “good” version and terrified of the “bad” one.

To make matters worse for a male partner, a woman’s inherent higher social ability is weaponized during this acquisition. The male partner often has no baseline for discerning if her emotional response is appropriate to the situation or a calculated escalation. He is blinded by his own biology. This is precisely why your sister and your mother are your most effective screening tools for the borderline woman. Because they possess the same “social hardware,” they are far less susceptible to the performance. They have a much harder time being fooled by the “Attractive Facade” because they recognize the tactical nature of the “vulnerability” being displayed.

This is why it’s so disappointing when clinicians, who should be above such naivete, empathetically dismiss this kind of promiscuity as the mere impulsivity described in the diagnostic criteria of borderline. Instead of seeing the manipulative forces behind, they characterize them as immature ways to seek validation. That they are soothing the broken attachment system responsible for the chronic emptiness also held as a central tenant of the borderline diagnosis.

Restoring the Dignity of Agency

In an evolutionary sense, this is parasitic success. While we readily identify the antisocial male predator as a parasite, we medicalize the female equivalent. The clinical distinction between “Borderline” and “Antisocial” is often a distinction without a difference. Both involve the instrumental use of others for personal regulation. The borderline woman simply uses the “Language of the Heart” to commit the same interpersonal thefts that the antisocial man commits with the “Language of Force.”

When she uses the vocabulary of therapy—“I’m triggered,” “I’m splitting”—it is often a Machiavellian maneuver to maintain compliance. By adopting the language of a broken attachment system, she hides the fact that she may not care about the bond at all, but only the obedience. By labeling these individuals as “patients,” we prevent the world from seeing them as predators.

If Borderline Personality Disorder is understood as the female analogue of antisociality, then the same logic we apply to men must apply here. When a man is labeled antisocial, the diagnosis does not invite compassion; it functions as a warning. It tells the world that he shows a stable pattern of violating others’ rights, and that the appropriate response is caution first, and empathy second.

me: but all the humans I want to meet are on the internet too, or famous or fictional and unattainable...so.

them: well then go to a party and find someone with common interests.