ABSTRACT
Personality disorder (PD) patients experience interpersonal exchanges problematically. Driven by schemas they act automatically in a way preventing them from satisfying their wishes. The author first manualised Metacognitive Interpersonal Therapy in Group (MIT-G) and then empirically tested it. MIT-G includes psychoeducational and experiential aspects. The protocol is addressed particularly to PD patients with inhibited-overcontrolled characteristics, poor metacognition and tendencies swing rigidly and repetitively among a very few mental states when living through relational experiences. MIT-G goals are twofold: promoting metacognition and learning more complex interpersonal relationship handling skills to maximise the odds of fulfilling one’s wishes. Therapists can use amusing descriptions for motivations, explaining, for example, social rank with animals challenging each other when courting a partner. The emerging of defensive relational attitudes or distressing emotions, difficult to handle subjectively, can be linked to the activation of interpersonal schemas, to the unexpected resurfacing of memories connected to the scene or to identifying with characters on stage.
