From Reaction to Reflection: Mentalisation, Mind-Mindedness & Affect Regulation in Therapy
Presented by Jo Bealey
A practical exploration of how we understand minds, regulate emotion and stay curious when attachment is activated.
From Reaction to Reflection: Mentalisation, Mind-Mindedness & Affect Regulation in Therapy
Live online | 4 hours | 5 ACA OPD points
From Reaction to Reflection is a four-hour professional development workshop for counsellors, psychologists, psychotherapists and mental health professionals exploring mentalisation, mind-mindedness and affect regulation in therapy. The workshop examines how attachment and emotional arousal influence our capacity to understand our own and other people’s minds, and introduces practical ways therapists can support regulation, curiosity and reflective capacity in clinical practice.
Drawing on the work of Peter Fonagy and Anthony Bateman, we’ll explore mentalisation as our capacity to understand our own and other people’s behaviour in terms of thoughts, feelings, needs, beliefs, intentions and motivations.
But this isn’t simply about understanding the theory. The focus is on what happens in the therapy room.
When strong feelings make it difficult to think
A central theme of the workshop is the relationship between affect regulation and mentalisation. When feelings remain within manageable limits, we have more capacity to think about them. When somebody becomes overwhelmed by fear, shame, anger, anxiety or distress, that reflective capacity can become much harder to access.
Mentalising ourselves and other people
We’ll explore how the capacity to understand minds develops within early attachment relationships and how those experiences can influence the ways we make sense of ourselves and other people.
Attachment strategies and mentalisation
The workshop considers mentalisation across different attachment strategies and what this might look like in therapeutic work.
Bringing mentalisation into the therapy room
Most importantly, we’ll explore what therapists can actually do with this understanding. The workshop introduces practical ways of helping clients slow down and become curious about their internal experience. We’ll also consider events happening between therapist and client. The workshop therefore explores practical attachment-based interventions
Moving from reaction towards reflection.
What participants will explore
- Mentalisation and mind-mindedness through an attachment lens
- The relationship between mentalisation and affect regulation
- What happens to reflective capacity when attachment is activated
- How overwhelming emotion can lead to reaction rather than reflection
- Mentalising across different attachment strategies
- Recognising distorted or restricted mentalising
- Impulsivity, projection and misreading the intentions of others
- Marked mirroring and sharing minds
- The window of tolerance and creating space to think
- Practical ways of engaging a client’s reflective capacity
- Using what happens within the therapeutic relationship
- Developing curiosity about our own and other people’s minds