Mentalization In Plain English

A dog cowers when we approach, even though we mean no harm. That moment forces a human question we ask all the time with kids, partners, and friends: what is happening inside them? We start this series by naming the skill behind that question mentalization, the capacity to understand ourselves and other people in terms of thoughts, feelings, fears, hopes, wishes, and intentions, not just surface behavior.

We share how therapy dogs in clinical work can make mentalization visible and surprisingly accessible, especially for children with autism spectrum disorder or ADHD. By asking simple prompts like “What do you think they need?” we invite a child to practice reading emotional states without the pressure of a right answer. That opens curiosity, strengthens attention to the present moment, and helps build the foundations for emotion regulation and empathy.

We also dig into how mentalization develops in child development and attachment: babies feel emotions before they can think about them, and they learn to understand their inner world through thousands of interactions with caregivers who try to name and hold those feelings in mind. From there we tackle a big relationship problem, the clash between objective truth and felt truth, and why mental health and healthy relationships often depend on holding both at once without rushing into certainty.

If you want a practical parenting and relationship framework that makes behavior make sense, listen, then subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the series.

Transcript

A Dog’s Fear And Meaning

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to this opening episode in the series about mentalization. I'm going to talk about what mentalization is, but before I do, I want you to imagine approaching a dog that cowers as you approach it. You're not threatening, you have no intention to harm the animal, but somehow it still reacts in this way. And we ask ourselves the question, what has happened? We can't ask the dog. But what we do is somehow we access that part of us that is alert to and can read that the behavior is meaningful. It may cause us to back off for fear of being attacked. It may cause us to be gentle and sensitive and reassuring. This is quite common. Dogs don't speak, animals don't speak, but they do communicate. They are highly attuned to the emotional states of others, and they react accordingly.

Therapy Dogs With Children

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Now, in my capacity as a clinician, I see this in my work with children when I introduced two of my therapy dogs, Jess and Oscar. They are highly attuned and have been encouraged to develop their skills of reading and responding, and they are quite remarkable. They are immediately alert to the needs of a child. They will respond according to what they see. And when I work with children who have autistic spectrum disorder or ADHD, sometimes the results are truly miraculous. I have to say that this is something I stumbled on accidentally, but have nurtured for the past four or five years. What I see is that the unspoken language and behavior between the child and the animal is more therapeutically meaning than anything I could do. And so for that reason I will use them, the dogs, as a vehicle for communication. Because what I'm doing, and the child is unaware of this, is I am endeavoring to increase their capacity to mentalize. I will ask them questions like, what do you think he or she is telling us at the moment? What do you think they need? What do you think they're trying to tell us? And these questions are not about right and wrong answers, they are about opening up that part of the child's mind that can anticipate, read, and make some kind of sense of what they're experiencing. This is very important because it serves as an incredibly powerful therapeutic tool. And what it does is to open the child's curiosity, it opens their capacity to see the abstract, to be aware of what they are experiencing in that moment. Because dogs, like all animals, exist in the present. They have no demands, no expectations. They live now. Human beings aren't put together in the same way. Their past collides with their present. And sometimes we are preoccupied with the future, the what ifs. Dogs don't work that way. Unless, of course, their experiences are informed or shaped by things which have caused them distress, things which have caused them to worry. As listeners will be trying to pay attention to what I'm saying. One of my dogs is communicating with me. It's remarkable. Never work with dogs or animals and children. I do both. Never mind. We continue.

Defining Mentalization Clearly

SPEAKER_00 4:05

So this episode is really about the nature of mentalization. What does it mean? There are ten episodes in total, and I want you to just listen to this first one so that we can try and develop a shared understanding of what this concept is really about. One of the most important questions in child development is this. How does a child come to understand that other people have minds, not just brains, not behavior, but minds? How does a child learn that behind every action there is a feeling, a thought, a fear, a hope, a wish, or an intention? This ability is known as mentalization. Peter Fonicky is one of the world's leading researchers in this field and describes mentalization as the capacity to understand ourselves and others in terms of mental states. In simple terms, it means recognizing that behavior is driven by what is happening inside a person. Now most of us do this automatically and we do it every day of our lives. When a friend snaps at us, we might think they seem stressed. When a child refuses school, we might wonder, I wonder if they're anxious. When our partners become distant, we might ask, have I upset them? Or is something else happening? Now we might verbalize these, so we might just think them. But mentalization is the process that allows us to move beyond behavior and to become curious about the mind behind it. Now without it, behavior becomes confusing. With it, behavior might begin to make some sense. I am constantly giving the message that can behavior is a communication. If we can understand or be curious about what that what that communication is, things take on a very different kind of quality.

How Kids Learn Minds

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Now the fascinating thing is that children aren't born with this capacity. Babies experience feelings, but they cannot think about them. So a newborn doesn't know I'm frightened, they simply experience fear. A hungry baby doesn't think I need feeding. They simply experience the distress. At the beginning of life, emotions cannot be understood. This understanding develops gradually through relationships. The child learns about their own mind because somebody else has become interested in it. When a baby cries and a parent responds by saying, Oh, sweetie, are you hungry? Something extraordinary happens. The parent isn't just simply meeting a physical need. They are beginning to give meaning to an emotional experience. And over thousands of interactions, the child slowly learns that feelings can be recognized, understood, and eventually managed. And this is where mentalization begins. It begins not inside the child, but between the child and another person. This is why relationships matter so profoundly. Children don't learn emotional understanding from textbooks. They don't learn it from remote rewards and consequences. They learn it from being thought about, being understood, and being held in somebody else's mind. And here's a caveat. Sometimes we don't understand, but the fact that we're trying to is what the child experiences. But over time the capacity becomes one of the foundations of psychological health because mentalization helps us regulate emotions, form healthy relationships, develop empathy, manage and develop or manage conflict, but understanding ourselves and understanding other people. And it also allows us to tolerate uncertainty, to recognize that we may not know exactly what somebody else is thinking.

Staying Curious Not Certain

SPEAKER_00 8:25

So to remain curious rather than becoming certain is the task. And this matters because certainty is often the enemy of understanding. The parent says they're doing this deliberately. Well, that stops them being curious. The parent who says, I wonder what's going on for the child right now, keeps mentalization alive. And that small shift changes everything. So I think that perhaps one of the most important things that parents can understand is this. Children don't need parents who are perfect. They really don't. They need parents who remain curious, who wonder, who think, who try to understand the mind behind the behavior. Every time we ask ourselves what might the child be experiencing, we're engaging in one of the most important developmental processes that human beings possess. We are mentalizing, and in doing so, we help our children learn how to mentalize too. Why is this important? Well, let's think about how it translates into later life. If we are people who struggle to make sense of the motives, intentions, and emotional states of others, we're likely to find that our relationships and our interactions become restricted. This isn't a fault, it's a consequence. And I want to be very clear about that because this is not about judging people in terms of do they or don't they have good mentalizing skills. It could be that they don't for a whole variety of reasons, which we will cover in this series. But let's go back to the beginning. We are in a profoundly influential position when we help our children to mentalize, when we help them develop minds that are curious, open, receptive, and aware. Awareness informs our actions. As children develop the capacity to conceptualize, the capacity to make some kind of sense and meaning of what is happening is really important.

Objective Truth Versus Felt Truth

SPEAKER_00 10:46

In something I posted earlier, I referred to truth. Now this is important because when people think about truth, they think about truth in in a in in a way which is often black and white. It is the truth. That's it, we're done. But actually, I believe that there are two kinds of truth. There is objective truth, which is based upon understanding events, being able to recall events and recount them as the truth, almost as if you're giving evidence in court. These are the events, these are the facts, and they are inarguable. Now, sometimes that thought sense has to sit alongside something else called the felt sense. And the felt sense is the truth that we tell our tell tell ourselves according to our reactions to something. Something which has happened and has happened inside us bypasses the capacity to be objective and instead is replaced by a kind of truth that fits the internal framework. Now, this isn't wrong, but I think what is important is to learn that the two things can coexist. The factual truth is a real truth and it's an objective truth, whereas a felt truth, a felt reality, will feel incredibly real to the individual. However, it is a truth that's being made as a consequence of how we're put together. Now, mentalizing means the capacity to hold two truths at the same time. The felt truth, which is objective, sorry, the thought sense, thought truth, which is objective, and the felt truth, which is subjective. Again, it's not about right or wrong, it's about the capacity for both. So for example, a person might say, objectively, you said the following, so therefore that means this. However, if it if it doesn't include the awareness of the other's self-truth and their felt truth, it means that we miss the other person's reality. And that means that we're not able then to join the dots to make the connections. This person responded or reacted in this way. Therefore, that is that is the truth. Well, yes, those things did happen. However, if you're not able to see what their experience was, you're missing something. Now, one doesn't cancel out the other, it's the capacity to be able to hold both. Children often tell me a version of the truth which is deeply felt, but it might not accurately reflect the objective truth. You know, my parents did this to me, the teachers did that to me, they said this, they said that. Okay, yes. But in fact, what you'll find is that the child is focusing on those parts of the felt truth which they're holding on to. And that misses the bigger picture. Now, I'm not going to tell children they're wrong, I'm going to say, I understand. And then what I'm going to try and do is widen the picture. I'm going to try and help the child to step to one side and take a look from a different perspective. I'm going to be talking about this a lot.

Key Takeaways And Closing

SPEAKER_00 14:39

We have ten episodes to get through, and this is just the beginning. So I hope that this introductory episode gives us some sense of what mentalizing is about. More will be said as we progress, but essentially we call it reading our own mind and mental states and the mind and mental states of others as best we can and seeing the connections between the two, because that then informs our actions. It doesn't mean that just because somebody else holds a different version of the truth, that we have to then adapt and say, oh, well, that is the truth. That's their truth. That's fine. That doesn't cancel out the objective truth. But, you know, I'm beginning to sound a little bit like a philosopher, and that's not the intention. So thank you for listening, and I'll be back.