Skip to content

Mentalization-Based Treatments - 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.

View our upcoming MBT-CYP training

What are Mentalization-Based Treatments?

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 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.

MBT Programmes

Listed below are Mentalization-focused and MBT training programmes offered by Anna Freud for professionals working with children, young people and families.

International MBT-CYP Training and Conferences

International Congress on Mentalization-Based Treatment for Children, Adolescents and Families

We will be supporting the second International Congress on Mentalization-Based Treatment for Children, Adolescents and Families, which will be taking place in Santiago, Chile, on the 6th, 7th, and 8th of November 2025.

The Congress is being organised through a collaboration between Diego Portales University, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, University of Valparaíso, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, the NGO Paicabi Corporation for the Promotion and Support of Childhood, and MIDAP (Millennium Institute for Research on Depression and Personality). It is also being supported by IMAGINA, the Mentalization Applications Centre, and Anna Freud.

Find out more

OSZAR »