If Ridge Forrester’s recent behavior on The Bold and the Beautiful feels alarming, it is because the storyline is no longer about momentary instability or emotional missteps.

What is unfolding is a slow, devastating collapse of a man whose entire identity has been welded to power, legacy, and control. Ridge is not simply acting out;

he is unraveling under the weight of a truth he has spent a lifetime avoiding—that leadership cannot be sustained through domination, and legacy cannot survive fear.

At first glance, Ridge’s erratic decisions appear reckless and contradictory. Boardroom judgments swing wildly. Longstanding alliances fracture overnight. Strategic plans are abandoned in favor of impulsive power plays that seem designed less to secure the future than to reassert authority in the present. But the tragedy here is not confusion—it is panic. Ridge senses, perhaps subconsciously, that time is no longer on his side. His relevance is being questioned, his authority quietly challenged, and his throne no longer feels unshakeable.

For Ridge, control has always equaled love. Authority has always equaled stability. As long as the Forrester name remained untouchable at the center of the empire, he believed everything else would endure. Now, as cracks begin to form in that belief, his response is not reflection but aggression—decisions that cut, isolate, and quietly destroy from within.

The most chilling turn in this arc is not Ridge’s self-destruction, but the enemy he chooses to blame for it: his own daughter, Steffy Forrester.

Steffy does not react as a daughter watching her father falter. Her response is colder, sharper, and infinitely more threatening to Ridge’s pride. She reacts as an heir who recognizes the signs of collapse long before the walls visibly crack. Where Ridge sees disloyalty, Steffy sees inevitability. Years inside the machinery of power have taught her to distinguish emotion from strategy, and that restraint becomes precisely what Ridge fears most.

She does not stage a rebellion. She does not challenge him publicly. Instead, she questions processes, demands transparency, and quietly stabilizes the systems Ridge is destabilizing. In Ridge’s distorted perception, this composure becomes proof of betrayal. He rewrites her concern as ambition, her competence as conspiracy. The more Steffy holds the empire together, the more intolerable her presence becomes to a man who sees his own decline reflected in her capability.

Meetings devolve into exercises in dominance rather than collaboration. Advisors are overridden. Data is dismissed. Dissent is framed as sabotage. Ridge is no longer making decisions for long-term vision but to prove, moment by moment, that he is still in control. And because he cannot accept that the threat is internal—his fear of aging, irrelevance, and succession—he desperately constructs an external enemy.

That enemy is Steffy.

What makes this storyline so unsettling is its intimacy. Ridge knows Steffy’s strengths because he shaped them. He taught her to lead without apology, to see power as responsibility rather than privilege. Now, those very lessons are weaponized against her. He sidelines her influence subtly at first, rerouting approvals, excluding her from key discussions, and diluting her authority through “structural adjustments” that are, in truth, acts of psychological erosion.

Steffy senses the shift long before it becomes explicit. She understands this is not a temporary conflict but a fundamental rupture. What devastates her most is not the threat to her position, but the realization that Ridge would rather dismantle the empire than share it. His obsession reaches its darkest phase when he decides that Steffy must be removed—not through a dramatic firing that would expose his instability, but through a calculated campaign designed to force her resignation.

Impossible conditions are created. Contradictory expectations are enforced. Public humiliations are disguised as accountability. Every success she achieves is reframed as overreach. Every misstep is magnified into proof of incompetence. The goal is not to defeat her, but to exhaust her—to make her leave carrying the blame.

In doing so, Ridge crosses a line he cannot uncross. He turns the language of family into a weapon. He invokes loyalty while practicing cruelty. He accuses Steffy of betrayal while betraying every principle he once claimed to uphold.

The fallout is not immediate. Empires do not collapse with explosions—they suffocate. Trust erodes quietly. Confidence falters. Employees stop engaging not out of loyalty, but resignation. The board notices. So do investors. And yet Ridge mistakes the silence for obedience, unaware that fear has replaced belief.

The question inevitably arises: is Ridge mentally ill? The answer, disturbingly, is not a convenient one. He is not delusional. He does not hallucinate. He understands consequences in theory. What he has lost is emotional proportionality—the ability to distinguish transition from threat, disagreement from betrayal, succession from erasure. This is not a diagnosis that absolves him. It is a psychological implosion rooted in identity loss.

Leadership was never just a role to Ridge. It was proof of worth. As that proof erodes, he does not adapt—he attacks.

Steffy’s eventual exile, whether through resignation, forced leave, or public restructuring, does not read as defeat. It reads as tragedy. She leaves not because she lacks strength, but because strength has been redefined as threat. Her absence does not restore Ridge’s clarity. It removes the last mirror reflecting his deterioration back to him.

In the quiet that follows, Ridge feels vindicated. Meetings are calmer. No one challenges him. But the calm is hollow. Deals stall. Designers leave. Investors ask sharper questions. Ridge responds by tightening control even further, convinced decentralization was the original betrayal. The feedback loop becomes lethal.

The darkest truth of all is this: Ridge does not need a tumor, a diagnosis, or an external villain to explain his downfall. His greatest enemy is the version of himself that could not imagine legacy without domination or love without control. In forcing Steffy out, he does not secure his empire—he fractures it.

And as the silence grows louder, Ridge is left alone at the center of a kingdom he hollowed out himself, haunted by a truth he can no longer escape: the most devastating betrayal was never his daughter’s. It was his own refusal to let go.