And so if you're ending up with the wrong crowd, if you continually get betrayed and exploited, you need to be more careful about who you choose to spend your time with. And then you ask yourself the various logical question, how do I find the right people? The question is, what are the signals within you that induce you to gravitate?These wrong people 'cause you certainly know who the wrong people are, right? And so then what is it that made you wind up there? What were you chasing? And then try moving in the opposite direction. And it's really about introspection. What is going on within me. This is hard for people who have narcissistic conditioning. A really good treatment for narcissistic personality disorder is something called mentalization based therapy. And what mentalization is. This is something that people with narcissism really struggle with is when they look at other people, they don't understand that someone.Their brain is not able to calculate that someone else's behavior is driven by all kinds of internal things, right? All they see is the injury to them. So if you wear this dress and then I say you're wearing this dress to make me feel bad, this is an action that induces a feeling within me. And what, what narcissists lack, like literally their brain has difficulty making this calculation, is that this action was done because you wanted this result. since this resulted in this. This is the same as the why. This is why you did it. I feel this way, therefore you did it because these reasons, this is all they have awareness of. They don't have awareness that this person has feelings, desires, insecurities that lead to this action. They have no vision of this, right? It's not about you. There are other things involved. That's the difficulty that narcissists have. Explain Also tell me about this mentalization based therapy in this context
The passage makes two connected claims.
On the relationship pattern: if you keep landing with people who betray or exploit you, the more useful diagnostic question isn't "why do I keep meeting bad people" but "what in me keeps choosing them." That means actually naming what you were chasing when you gravitated toward someone — validation, excitement, being needed, rescue, a familiar intensity from an earlier relationship — and then deliberately moving toward the opposite of that pull, rather than just vetting people more carefully on the surface.
On why that's hard for narcissistic patterns specifically: here it gets more clinical. The claim is that narcissistic cognition has a specific deficit in how it processes other people's behavior — it can't easily compute that someone else's action arose from that person's own separate inner life (their own feelings, needs, history) rather than being fundamentally about the narcissist. The dress example is doing real theoretical work: someone wears a dress, the narcissist feels bad, and the conclusion is "you wore it to hurt me" — the felt effect gets treated as proof of the other person's intent, with no gap left for "she wore it for reasons that have nothing to do with me."
That's a mentalizing deficit, which is why mentalization-based therapy (MBT) is the natural pairing here.
What mentalizing is. Peter Fonagy and Anthony Bateman, who developed MBT — originally for borderline personality disorder, later adapted for narcissistic and other personality pathology — use "mentalizing" (also called reflective functioning) to mean the capacity to understand behavior, yours and other people's, as arising from mental states: beliefs, desires, feelings, intentions. It's related to what cognitive science calls theory of mind, but treated as something that fluctuates rather than a fixed trait — everyone's mentalizing degrades under high emotional arousal, especially attachment-related arousal (feeling rejected, criticized, humiliated). Personality disorders involve that collapse happening more easily, more often, and lasting longer.
Their developmental account: mentalizing gets built in infancy through a caregiver's accurate, attuned mirroring of the child's internal states — that's what teaches a child their inner world is real and legible, and distinct from other people's. Inconsistent, intrusive, or absent mirroring leaves that capacity underbuilt, and under stress the person falls back on more primitive modes of relating to minds. Two of those map directly onto what you described:
- Psychic equivalence — what I feel is simply true, with no room for "maybe I'm misreading this." Feeling hurt becomes proof of having been wronged.
- Teleological mode — only concrete, visible actions and their effects count as evidence of intent; internal states that don't cash out as something done to you don't register. This is the dress example exactly: the reasons behind her choice are invisible; only the impact on him is real.
Why MBT specifically, and why it's adapted for narcissism. MBT-N (the narcissism-specific adaptation) exists because narcissistic patients tend to oscillate between grandiose and deflated/shamed self-states, and struggle, quite literally, to hold the idea that other people — including the therapist — have autonomous minds not organized around them. The treatment mechanism isn't insight delivered through explanation; telling a low-mentalizing patient "here's what's really going on for the other person" tends to either go over their head or land as one more failure to be understood. Instead the therapist works moment-to-moment, usually inside the therapy relationship itself — noticing in real time when mentalizing has broken down, slowing the moment down, and asking exploratory questions ("what do you imagine I was feeling when I said that," "what do you think was going on for them") while modeling that more than one reading of someone's inner state can be plausible. Because mentalizing is a relational capacity, it gets rebuilt relationally, not through abstract discussion.
That also loops back to the first half of the passage: someone who struggles to mentalize other people's motives usually struggles to mentalize their own just as much — accurately naming what you're chasing when you gravitate toward someone is the same capacity, turned inward. Which is part of why "just be more introspective" is easier prescribed than done here, and why treatment aims at rebuilding the underlying capacity rather than correcting behavior directly.
A few things actually move the needle, and they map fairly directly onto the mechanics from before.
Slow the gap between feeling and conclusion. This is the direct antidote to psychic equivalence. When something happens and you feel a strong reaction, resist letting "I feel hurt" auto-complete into "they did this to hurt me." Practically: pause, name the feeling to yourself as just a feeling, and treat your read of their intent as a hypothesis rather than a fact. A useful internal question is "what's at least one other explanation for what just happened?" — not because your first read is always wrong, but because generating the alternative is the actual exercise.
Practice curious, tentative language out loud, not just internally. Swap declarative statements about someone's motives ("you're doing this because…") for genuinely open ones — "what was going on for you when…", "help me understand what that was about for you." This isn't a politeness trick; it's the skill itself, externalized: holding your read of someone's inner state as provisional, and leaving room for it to be corrected.
Do the perspective work after conflict, not during it. Mentalizing capacity is lowest exactly when you need it most — in the middle of a disagreement, under attachment-related stress. That's normal, not a personal failing; arousal degrades this in everyone. The more useful moment is afterward: separately narrate what you think was going on inside the other person, then check it against what they actually report. This is close to what happens in MBT sessions — not insight delivered as a lecture, but repeated low-stakes practice, inside a real relationship, with correction.
Get comfortable sitting in "I don't know what's going on for you." A lot of snap interpretations exist to relieve the discomfort of not knowing someone else's mind. The trained capacity is tolerating that gap instead of filling it with a story — especially a story where you're the main character.
Watch for teleological slips specifically. If you catch yourself judging someone's feelings only by what they visibly did for or to you ("if they cared, they'd have called"), that's the tell. Try to generate one account of their behavior that has nothing to do with you at all before deciding what it means.
Use an actual relationship as the practice ground, with feedback. Because mentalizing is relational, it's rebuilt relationally — a partner, close friend, or therapist who's willing to say "that's not actually what I was feeling" gives you the correction loop that solo reflection can't. Journaling or self-review helps you notice your own patterns, but the feedback from someone else is what makes the recalibration stick.
Worth holding loosely: the realistic goal isn't never losing mentalizing capacity under stress — everyone does, to some degree. It's shortening how long you stay in the collapsed state and getting faster at noticing you're in it.
