So what is the role that mentalizing plays in borderline personality disorder, and why is it so important that there is a whole treatment built around it?

It turns out that people with personality disorder, and that is across the board, all personality disorder, and in fact, all people with psychopathology have difficulties in mentalizing.

So let's zoom in on personality disorder more broadly and BPD in particular, and there I'll quickly just talk about how mentalizing develops because then it'll make sense why people with BPD have the particular kind of mentalizing problems that they do.

Mentalizing develops in the serve and return with your caregivers in the first instance.

And with caregivers, I mean your mom and your dad, perhaps an older sibling, perhaps the nanny, perhaps the daycare staff, and even perhaps society at large.

In the serve and return...

And what do I mean with serve and return? I mean when we're in an interaction with someone, there's a ping-pong game happening.

How do you do that in practice?

And today, we really just want to focus on giving people the information of what is this diagnosis, but in a non-stigmatizing way, which I think your developmental lens will probably be so helpful with.

I think it does help.

And I've got another way of talking about it that I think is non-stigmatizing.

And I'll just put it out there and then we can sort of unpack it as we go along.

But the way I would describe it is a non-trait-based way.

So I really hope that your audience can come away today after this talk discussion, not being stuck anymore in a trait-based way of thinking about BPD.

So let me start with the traits though, because that's where we all have a sort of common understanding of what BPD is.

And two, BPD is untreatable, right? Both not true the way you've highlighted.