Minding the Minds That Mind You: A Half-Day Symposium on Mentalization Based Therapy for Borderline Processes

How can I understand what’s happening for you in regard to me, and how can I understand what’s happening within me in regard to you? That’s a perennial question for all of us, our interpersonal suffering often tied to the pain of feeling poorly held in the minds of others, and to the conflicts that emerge when we are unable to hold their minds in our own. The problem is that none of us ever gets it perfect – the ability to imagine another’s intentions, feelings and experiences in our own minds, and to perform the even more complex task of imagining how we are experienced by them, never fully achievable. The challenge persists despite the fact that a giant part of our brains – the part that is most human, distinguishing us in its size from all other creatures – is assigned the job of achieving this mutual imagining, giving us a remarkable faculty called mentalization.

The failure at mentalizing, while occurring every day of our lives, takes on serious implications when it becomes a kind of pervasive blindness -- the struggles over misjudging the minds of others, and feeling misjudged in one’s self, or, often worse, the blindness to one’s very existence in other minds. Here enters one way of understanding borderline processes, or, if you choose to use such words, what it means to have a borderline personality disorder. 

We invite you to a half-day conference at which we introduce the concept of mentalization and the treatment called Mentalization-Based Therapy. We promise to keep it human and playful, and to invite all of us to think about our own inevitable struggle to mentalize. For psychotherapists, mentalization can be a kind of adjunct to your work, helping you tune your attunement. For behaviorists, learning about mentalizing can open doors to an understanding of borderline processes as more than de-skilled behaviors, giving you access to one of many avenues into the inner world of a particular kind of suffering. 

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