Course overview

Holding Minds in Mind: Attachment and Mentalisation in the Therapy Room explores how clients’ early attachment experiences can shape their capacity to understand their own and others’ minds. The course introduces mentalisation as the ability to stay curious about thoughts, feelings, intentions, and relational dynamics, especially when emotions are high or relationships feel under threat.

Participants are invited to consider how mentalisation can become harder during shame, fear, rupture, or attachment activation, and how this may show up in therapeutic work through withdrawal, certainty, emotional flooding, intellectualisation, or difficulty trusting the therapist’s mind.

The course offers practical ways to support clients by prioritising regulation, pacing reflective work carefully, responding to rupture with curiosity, and using tentative, boundaried interventions that help clients move from certainty to curiosity, reaction to reflection, and threat to connection.