The Bunny Boiler
Our topic for February is about Femme Fatale – the all-encompassing bunny boiler woman who will stop at nothing for vengeance bringing the saying “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” to a whole new level.
So, what is a bunny boiler? The previous definition was a woman who acts vengefully after having been spurned by her lover. However, these days bunny boilers don’t have a gender really, men do it too – they’ve always done it just the term has only recently applied to men in this day and age.
Bunny boilers are associated with psychopathy, particularly personality disorders that are characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits. It is sometimes considered synonymous with sociopathy.
There’s an interesting set of words – personality disorder. I’ve dealt with a personality disordered person before. Many years ago and it just about destroyed everything (and me) I had worked so hard to achieve in life. Talking to her other female victims that her past is riddled with including her own female family members. That personality disorder is called Borderline Personality Disorder.
At the time I had found a group of people who had gone through similar online. I literally had just gone through having my very own personal “bunny boiler” Sharon Stone style (kind of). She prompted me to post on a personal blog about it a few months after it had happened.
Here are a few of the behaviors you might see with a bunny boiler, regardless of gender:
Push/Pull – the I hate you but don’t leave me to dance. This is something they do by idolizing you to keep you enmeshed and engaged with their need for attention then pushing you away by demoralizing you. It’s also called seeing you all good or all bad. It’s a projection behavior. They project their self-hate onto another person because they don’t have the emotional maturity to handle how they feel about themselves.
Parentification – this is a behavior that happens when the BPD’er has children. They swap roles with their child. Making them the parent to feed the BPD’ers ego and need for attention.
Chaos Manufacturing – this is when they create drama or dramatic events to create chaos with people. It’s a way of sucking you into their circle and getting their ego fed.
The number one thing you could do for yourself with a BPD’er is not to respond to the behaviors. Ghost them, even if you don’t condone ghosting a person, this is one time you should. Unfortunately, sometimes that’s not an option but at least don’t escalate and always let the appropriate authorities deal with legal (or illegal) behaviors. I have to admit, she did leave me with a few positives – knowing how to recognize a personality disordered person, being able to incorporate my experience into writing (Bone Jar, for example, Troy is a very disordered fellow and write what you know right?).
