Transcription
So welcome. I'm going to talk about mentalizing. Mentalization. This very simple, ordinary, but quite subtle idea.
So, what I'm going to cover is some ideas about what mentalizing actually is. What do we mean when we use that word? If I was going to summarize it in one sentence, it's a brain activity. It's a state of mind, but it's only one out of many possible states of mind that our brains can can operate in.
I'm going to say something about where mentalizing comes from. How it develops. It develops obviously from a brain, but it develops from a brain that has access to very particular relationships. Relationships where there's been trust involved. So I'll be talking about that connection between the brain bits, which we won't say very much about, and the relationships. And we'll say a bit more about that.
And then we need to cover why it matters. If I was going to summarize that in a sentence, from our point of view, mentalizing is absolutely the center. It's the axle, if you like, the part that carries the weight of the whole of ambit. But in a more general terms, mentalizing is what makes humans human. It's the part of our brain that is quite unique in all of the animal species. So, two, two reasons why it matters.
And I'm gonna focus now on on getting started. So, this is the only picture of the brain I'm going to show. Don't, don't, don't run away. What I want to show you is how a child develops into an adult in in just a few minutes, because this is very important as to how mentalizing comes online.
At birth, pretty much, we've got these centers deep inside our brain, particularly a piece of the brain called the amygdala, but this kind of center called the limbic center that deals with threat and danger and emotions more generally. It's, it's, it's, if you like, the sort of engine of the whole of our being.
But in the end of kind of primary school age, 10, 11, maybe, there are other parts of the brain on the side of the brain, the temporal lobes, connected with memories, that start to function as a kind of radar. They're taking in the information that's coming from other people and they're comparing that to a set of like scripts, like kind of stories about how people should behave in this situation. And if the way people are behaving doesn't fit my story, I connect in and I switch on my my my deeper sort of what we call our emotional centers, this amygdala, these red parts. I get alarmed, I get anxious, I get angry, or whatever.
Right here in the frontal part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, if you want the science, there's this extra part of the brain that is really quite unique to humans. And it's here that we do a different kind of thinking. And it's here that mentalizing, if it's located anywhere, is located. And the one of the key things to understand is that that part of the brain was the last for us to evolve as an animal, but it's the last to mature in the individual. It probably doesn't reach adult maturity until about the age of 22, 23, 24. The age seems to get a bit older as the researchers get to look more at it.
Now, that really turns this into a situation where it's as though the child, particularly at the end of primary school, at the beginning of secondary school, in adolescence, is like a car that has this powerful engine, the emotion center. He's got an accelerator pedal, this kind of kind of detector part that can tell when people are kind of going off-script, not going right, not cool, not not okay. But it doesn't yet have the braking system, which is this frontal part of alert of the brain that stops to think.
So where the frontal part of the brain, the prefrontal thing, does all of this wandering, weighing things up, kind of making sense of people's behavior, hesitating, kind of not rushing into things, the emotion center gets straight into being very certain and get it to get into activity. And of course, you can see that the dilemma for the adolescent, particularly, but many of us adults too, is that at times we get quickly into our, if you like, our action center without giving time for that slightly quieter, hesitating, stopping, thinking, kind of weighing things up. And that's the dilemma, if you like, of adolescents, that they've got this powerful engine, this accelerator pedal, but not quite a fully kind of functioning braking system that can help them stop and think.
So making sense of mentalizing, which is what's happening in this part of the brain, the frontal bit. Mentalizing then is the kind of brain activity, and it's an imaginative activity. It's not a knowing. It's a wandering, amusing. Mentalizing takes place when I'm trying to make sense of behaviors, either your behavior or if I'm looking in a mirror, my own behavior. And it's the same piece of brain that I would use to try and figure out why you might be doing something or to look at myself and think, why did I say that? Or what was I thinking? What on earth made me do that?
And I do that by assuming that the person doing that action, the agent, is mental. And by mental, what I mean is having a mind. Because if you're not mental, you're mindless. So in that sense, to mentalize is to assume that there's a mentality, a mind, behind what's happening. The words that coming out of my mouth, the actions of my hands or my legs. And a mind that has hopes, fears, beliefs, that might be correct, they may be incorrect, and intentions. And it's that kind of figuring out part of our mind that helps us slow things down and make, if you like, wiser, more discerning decisions about how to behave in relation to one another.
So what does it look like when this part of the brain is in action? Well, I can't look at your brain. I can't see when this part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, gets busy and you start to do this particular kind of thinking. But I can have some clues as to what somebody looks like when they're mentalizing. Dogs are not great mentalizers, but they're probably one of the best mentalizers after the humans, partly because they've evolved with us for many, many centuries.
So a person who's mentalizing shows that head on one side, that curiosity, that kind of inquisitiveness to try to find out, to try to understand. A person who's mentalizing is not somebody who knows what's going on in my mind, but who's wondering. They treat my mind as if, if you like, it's an opaque light bulb, one that has frosted glass rather than a clear one that I can see right into.
A person whose mentalizing may be curious about the other person, me, wondering what you're thinking watching this film. Or they may be curious about themselves. How am I doing? Why am I saying it this way and not another way? A person who's mentalizing is aware that emotion here and now will have an effect on my ability to be thoughtful and on yours. If you're getting bored or angry watching this, you're going to be much less likely to wonder why I'm making such a big thing of this, why it might be important.
A person whose mentalizing demonstrates an ability to tell stories about how somebody or something came to happen that makes some sense. Why I kicked the dog at the end of the day might be because I'd been late leaving work, I had a parking ticket, then I was caught in a jam, then I got home and other family members yelled at me, and then I tripped over the dog. And that would make more sense as to why the poor dog got it than me just kicking it.
And above all, the person who's mentalizing demonstrates humor, particularly a kind of self-deprecating humor, making fun of my own failures, my own mistakes. Shakespeare wrote a play called The Comedy of Errors, and that's what it is to be human, because we make mistakes about making sense of each other. Most humor is about me understanding something that the butt of the joke clearly hasn't understood yet. It's about mentalizing. So mentalizing allows for comedy, for humor.
So assuming you've got a brain, is that all it is? You grow this frontal lobe, you learn to mentalize? No. As I said at the beginning, mentalizing develops in a relationship. It develops particularly in a relationship of trust. And if you like, one way of putting that is babies learn to mentalize by having an experience of somebody mentalizing them. Another way of putting it is that the mind of the mother or the father or the carer is the incubator of the baby's mind. It grows the mind by holding a picture, an imagined idea about that baby's mind, so that the baby can start to see it.
This is rather a long piece, but I'll just read it out. "I treat you as if you have a mind. I make sense of your behaviors on that basis. I share with you the sense that I'm making of you, and you see yourself as my mind portrays you. And now, as you recognize yourself in my portrayals, you build your sense of self, of your own mind. Now happy, now sad, now afraid, now excited. And now you become curious about my mind too. How did I get that right? Why did I get that wrong?"
So we could say it's not "I think, therefore I am." I just think myself into existence. It's "my mother thinks I think, therefore I am." And how this happens is the mother here has a picture of her baby's mind in her own mind. And where the baby is looking excitedly and interestedly and curiously at the photographer, the mother is kind of imitating it. We call that mirroring.
When the baby's howling, the mother doesn't just howl back. She does something much, much more subtle. She does what we call marked mirroring. She talks in a singsong voice, "Oh, gee, oh, you look unhappy, baby, yeah?" And she's frowning. So she's showing the baby a caricature of what she thinks might be in the baby's mind. "You seem like a cross baby at the moment. Now, what could that be?" Um, what she might offer as a whole series of things that might fix it. Maybe the baby needs a nappy changing, maybe the baby needs feeding, maybe the baby needs winding, or just is bored. And the mum can run through those ideas, those imaginings about why the baby might be cross.
So that as long as a mother gets this right about one-third of the time, two-thirds of the time she's going to get it slightly wrong. She's looking the wrong way, she's thinking it was something and it was something else. But as long as she gets it right about a third of the time, that's enough. And when she gets it wrong, that's what stimulates the baby to go, "Hey, you missed that crack I called out. Oh, you're looking the other way." So the baby begins to mentalize the man. And the baby slowly sees these pictures of him or herself in the mother's mind. And bit by bit, he sees himself as a happy baby, a sad baby, a frightened baby. And that's how we build our sense of who we are, our sense of self.
The next and most important thing about mentalizing, this part of the brain that we keep going on about, is that it's a fragile thing. It's only just evolved. We're not very good at doing this. And we can do mentalizing as long as our stress levels alone, that's fine. But if something comes along that's a threat, we stop mentalizing. Those those emotion centers deep in the brain, the amygdala is one part, fire up and start wanting us, make us very certain about things, get it, run away. And of course, that's useful. And I want to mentalize a tiger. It's not helpful to me to sit there wondering about the tiger. I want to run away. I want to be very certain, very quickly, that this is a dangerous thing that probably doesn't mean me any any good and to do something. So the system is designed for mentalizing to get switched off.
But of course, for many of the clients that we work with, it's not tigers they face. It's an argument with their teacher or their boss or their mom. And they, their brains react in very similar ways, and they switch off this function, which is exactly what might be what could help them. So we know that mentalizing is mentalizing is fragile in our clients. But we also need to recognize that mentalizing is fragile in us as workers. It's actually a human given that we can do a bit of this mentalizing. But when the tension and the stress rises, we get less good at doing it. And we're designed to be that way.
So some of you watching this might remember toys that were incredibly exciting to me in my youth called Weebles. And the strap line was that "Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down." And mentalizing is, if you like, the self-righting thing that pulls these wobbly toys back into balance. But we're always falling off balance. We're always losing up mentalizing minute by minute. It comes, it goes, it comes, it goes. And when it goes, it goes in one of three ways normally.
It's fragile, and we can collapse out of a mentalizing kind of wandering trying to find out into certainty. Which might be useful, but often it's very unhelpful certainty that the thoughts in my mind about what's in your mind are exactly how it is in your mind, rather than just thoughts about your mind. People who were in this certainty, or they call it psychic equivalence, but it's certainty, could look a bit like this chap, very, very clear and jabbing finger. He knows what's in my mind and what kind of person I am, even though of course he doesn't really.
If I don't fall into certainty, I can definitely fall into quick fix. There's a posh word for that, we call it teleological thinking. But it's a quick fix thinking. It's the solution to my sense of war. I feel awkward. Is an action? Something that will come up with something that I can see and feel and touch or hear. And for the clients that we work with, that might be, "It'll feel better when I cut." "It'll feel better when I drink a bottle of vodka or smoke a spliff." "It'll feel better when I hit that person and there's blood coming out of their nose." Violence, substance use, self-injury, all forms of this quick fix thinking.
But actually, you know, as workers, we can fall into it too. The solution is to remove this child from the family. The solution is to remove them from school. The solution is whatever it is might be the right solution. But it might we might have arrived at it in this rather blunt, concrete way, rather than really thinking through what's going on in the minds of the people involved here.
And the other way that we can fall off mentalizing is the one which I like to leave at the end of this talk. Because at this point, you may start to be thinking, "This is going on a bit. This is too much. These are too many words." And that's another way we fall out of mentalizing. We call it the pretend mode. It's like a kind of make-believe. It's like me falling in love with my words and my clever explanations. They may be true, or they may not be true. But the words of my explanations are more important than what it actually is going on between you and me here now. The emotions. I get lost in waffle. "Keep calm, stop waffling" might be a way of trying to prevent that.
What we're going to go on to in later films is to talk about how ambit really tries to think about how not just we work with a young person or a client with their mentalizing, but how teams can be kept in balance from falling out of this thoughtful way of working, when actually a bit more thought would be helpful, and falling into either too much certainty, too quick action, or actually getting into very woefully states. At which point, it's important for me to summarize and and leave you from at the end.
So mentalizing is a state of mind. It's not a lump in the brain. Of course, it requires a brain, but it actually is more than that. And it comes out of relationships. It's about making sense of our behaviors. And it includes sensitivity, empathy, compassion, because that's it's a good thing to feel somebody mentalizing me. But it also has a kind of crueler, more logical, rational thoughtfulness about it that's in balance with this feeling states.
Mentalizing is not about knowing uncertainty. Mentalizing is the opposite of mind-reading. It's about trying to figure it out. Mentalizing is something you can recognize. You know what it looks like when somebody's doing it. And you can actually try to practice yourself. And it's fragile. And it falls apart into certainty, or action, or waffle, really, with quite small increases in anxiety.
So in later videos, we'll go on and talk about how ambit uses these ideas not just to help the work with our clients, but teams, and how teams relate to networks, and how teams learn about their own practice and and and and improve. And add out. Thank you very much for listening.