Transcription
If I can take a stab back about mentalization, it's very often misunderstood. Uh, it's something very ordinary. The tragedy of individuals with borderline personality disorder is that they are not able reliably do something that's so ordinary that everyone takes it for granted and nobody gives them credit for the difficulty that they have when that quality disappears from their life.
So when we judge a a person's actions, we assume that behind that action there must be a subjectivity, there must be a set of thoughts and feelings that actually motivate that action. But when a person acts in ways that lacks that driver, that lacks mentalizing, that lacks awareness of the language of thoughts and feelings, of wishes, of beliefs, desires, then these individuals feel isolated, feel misunderstood because everybody assumes that it's there and they look at them and they say, they say to them, look, you're human. You must have it there somewhere. Why aren't you ordinary? Why aren't you like me?
At the same time, particularly in the context of intense attachment relationships, the mind of an individual with borderline personality disorder cannot work exactly that way. They are not able to be aware of their own feelings. And at the same time, as soon as they lose proper awareness of their own feelings, they also lose awareness of the capacity to judge how other people might feel. They lose awareness of how their mind is working, what it is that they are thinking. A thought comes to their mind and they can't put that in the context of doubt. It becomes a sense of absolute certainty. I am thinking this and therefore it is so. I know that you don't like me. The person might have moved an eyebrow but triggered a thought that most of us would not even notice would just set aside. But if you're not clued in to wanting to figure out what somebody else might be thinking or feeling, then these little signals mean an enormous amount can feel absolutely devastating. And people around them don't understand how devastating it does feel and how convinced they are of feeling unwanted or feeling unloved or having been rejected.