Mentalisation Based Therapy

Mentalisation Based Therapy (MBT) was originally developed for patients with borderline personality disorder (BPT), who can find it difficult at times to distinguish between their own thoughts and feelings and those of others. This can make it hard for them to experience and express empathy, or to imagine what a particular situation feels like for another person. Clearly, these problems can have a significant impact on their ability to negotiate the complex world of friendships and relationships at work.

When we cannot reliably understand how other people are feeling, or why they are behaving in a certain way, it is much more difficult to know how we should adapt our own behaviour in response. The good news is that the skills to deal with our complex world can be learned, and one of the most effective methods for acquiring them is found in MBT, which is one of the therapeutic techniques our experts offer at the Private Therapy Clinic.

A clinically-proven technique, MBT combines different approaches to psychotherapy, including cognitive-behavioural therapy, for people with personality disorder, anxiety disorder, impulse control, and other problems. The aim of the therapy is for you to become enabled to interpret your own and others’ actions accurately, with an understanding of the underlying mental processes – the relationship between what a person feels, and how they act in response. This starts a journey towards a more comprehensive understanding of yourself and others, making it easier for you to develop and foster healthy relationships, while also becoming better at managing negative thoughts and feelings. Over time, you will become enabled to work towards the life that you have always wanted, as it will become incrementally easier to sustain friendships and close family relationships, and to get along with people in a professional context. In other words, it becomes easier to develop healthy attachments to the people in your life, and the feelings of stress and anxiety that you might be experiencing will get better, because social interactions have become easier, with more positive outcomes in your private life and at work.

MBT calls for developing a particular type of relationship with your therapist, characterised by a sense of partnership – working together towards the common goal of a more fulfilled future – and an attitude of gentle curiosity, or wanting to find out about the thoughts and processes that underlie feelings and actions. Unlike some forms of psychotherapy, MBT’s focus is rooted primarily in understanding the present – what is going on right now – rather than digging deep into the past. In this respect, it resembles Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which shares its pragmatic focus on how to make things better, starting from now.