Mentalization-Based Therapy (MBT) in Austin, TX
Evidence-based, psychodynamic therapy for people who keep misreading or feeling misread by those closest to them.
What is Mentalizing?
Mentalizing is the ordinary, remarkable thing you do all day without ever noticing: making sense of behavior—your own and other people’s—in terms of what’s going on underneath it. Thoughts, feelings, intentions, needs.
Mentalizing is what lets you recognize that a colleague's clipped hello in Monday's staff meeting probably has more to do with the coffee they spilled on the drive in than with you. It's also what lets you notice that the curt text you just sent your partner wasn't about anything they did—it's that you're a new mother who is sleep-deprived, touched out, and irritable.
Our hot-off-the-press reactions are often informed by assumptions: “Their bad mood must be about me,” or “They should just meet my needs without me having to explain.” MBT slows this process down. It helps you pause, get curious, and ask: What am I actually feeling right now? What might the other person be thinking or feeling? Could there be another explanation?
The ability to slow down and get curious, or to “mentalize,” can break down under stress, in close relationships, or when old emotional wounds surface in new relationships. When this happens, we tend to misread situations, jump to conclusions, or react in ways that don’t quite fit what’s happening.
Mentalization-Based Therapy in Austin, TX
I use Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT) to work with recurring difficulties in relationships, attachment, and personality. MBT is an evidence-based psychodynamic, interpersonal approach, developed by Drs. Anthony Bateman and Peter Fonagy for people who struggle profoundly with relationships and emotion regulation. Its clinical reach has since turned out to be far wider. Writing with Dr. Jon Allen, they describe MBT as "the least novel therapeutic approach imaginable"—their argument being that mentalizing is the most fundamental common factor in every therapy that works, whatever its name. What MBT does is make it the explicit focus of the work.
The work isn’t primarily about developing insight into your past, though exploration of your family of origin is an important part of the therapy. It’s about strengthening your capacity to mentalize—the ability to pause and hold a more nuanced, flexible, tentative, and values-aligned understanding of your own and others’ thoughts, feelings, and motives.
Allen, Fonagy, & Bateman, Mentalizing in Clinical Practice (2008).
What the MBT process looks like:
We start by getting curious. Early sessions explore your relationship patterns and how you tend to interpret other people’s intentions.
We slow things down. We pause to explore what might actually be happening — for you, and for the other person.
We use real moments as they happen. We attend to what comes up between us in session, and use it to practice mentalizing in real time.
We check assumptions. You’ll learn to ask, “What else could explain this?”
We build uncertainty tolerance. Not knowing what someone else is thinking is uncomfortable. Knowing what someone else is thinking is impossible.
We track patterns over time. We notice patterns and explore the past experiences, thoughts, and feelings that drive them.
We practice new ways of responding. As mentalizing strengthens, you’ll likely notice more pauses, more curiosity, more flexibility—with yourself and with others.
MBT might be a good fit for you if:
You understand your attachment style intellectually, but that understanding hasn't changed the pattern
You keep repeating the same patterns in close relationships, even though you know how you want to show up
Your emotional reactions catch you off guard, or feel bigger than the moment that caused them
You can explain your feelings clearly without quite feeling them
You often feel certain you know what someone else is thinking—and it's usually something unkind about you
Once you've decided what something means, it's hard to hold open the possibility it means something else
You lose hold of yourself in heated moments—a jab you didn't mean, a rush of reassurance-seeking, something impulsive you regret
You can see the whole interaction clearly an hour later, but not while it's happening
Who MBT may not suit:
Like many psychodynamic treatments, MBT is a long-term approach. It builds a capacity—much like strengthening a muscle—rather than aiming for quick symptom relief. If you're looking for brief, solution-focused work, other approaches will serve you better, and I'm happy to point you toward them.
We’ll do it together.
Clients describe me as a good listener, warm, insightful, direct, transparent, thoughtful, and deeply caring. My hope is that you will always feel that I am in it with you. I'll meet you where you are with everything I've got.
