Mentalization-based psychotherapy practices in patients with borderline personality disorder

Abstract

Introduction: Mentalization-based psychotherapy (MBT) develops with the importance of establishing attachment relations with patients. MBT focuses on internal mental processes that occur in the therapeutic process that actively improve patient-therapist relationships.Methods: A woman with preoccupied/anxious attachment is given mentalization-based psychotherapy. The goal of psychotherapy based on mentalization is to develop secure attachment relationships in therapy, use empathy and validation in reciprocal relationships, strengthen the patient's capacity to reduce emotional dysregulation and impulsive behavior, increase self-awareness, control of attention and flexible thinking in the context of emotions and relationships.Results: The patient has begun to form a secure base attachment. Patients' mentalization has improved along with the formation of secure base attachments, patients are better able to do self-soothing and regulate emotions properly.Conclusion: In the early years of life, patients have a pattern of interaction with caregivers who lack the need for mirroring. Furthermore, the patient develops into an insecure self and has an inherent preoccupied/anxious attachment. It has an effective representation and attention regulation system that is not functioning so that patients use existing stimuli as the basis of an insecure sense of self. Fonagy termed this condition with incoherent, disruptive "alien self" through controlling and manipulative behavior. The patient externalizes the alien self against the attachment figure. This externalization appears as a countertransference experience in a therapy session, if it can be appropriately managed it will emerge a feeling of coherence in the patient's internal world.