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Mentalization-Based Treatments with children, young people and families

Our trainings aim to equip you with the knowledge and skills to implement a mentalizing approach to your current clinical work.

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Mentalization-Based Treatments with Children, Young People and Families

This brief video introduces how mentalizing is relevant to clinical work with children, young people and families and what you can expect when training in a Mentalization-Based Treatment model for children, young people and families at Anna Freud.

Mentalizing is the process of making sense of self and others in terms of underlying mental states. It is what we do when we are imagining what might be going on in the mind of someone, underneath the behaviour that we see on the outside. Mentalizing is a uniquely human process, and it is something that we do automatically, often without conscious thought in our every-day social interactions.

Increasingly mentalizing is thought to be one of the core processes that effective therapies have in common. Effective mentalizing supports wellbeing in several ways; it enables us to predict and make sense of the behaviour of self and others, to understand the social world, to regulate attention and emotion and helps to form a strong sense of self and develop good interpersonal relationships.

Mentalization-based treatments place mentalizing at the centre of the therapeutic process. They aim is to promote mentalizing and resilience in children and young people, along with their families and carers, so they can feel better equipped to tackle the problems that brought them to therapy and to learn how to make better use of supportive relationships.

A core part of all mentalizing approaches is the therapist’s mentalizing stance. The mentalizing stance is both an attitude and a skill. It is a ‘way-of-being-with’ that creates safety, trust and curiosity and facilitates mentalizing in the therapist and those seeking help.

Please watch the video and read the sections below for more information about mentalizing and training in a mentalization-based treatment for children, young people, families, and carers at Anna Freud.