On 14 October 2026, ACAMH will host Mentalising with complex clinical presentations in children and families: a systemic and trauma-informed approach. We caught up with the presenter – Emma Morris, a consultant clinical psychologist and co-director of The Trauma Recovery Space – about the topic itself, her career, and her hopes for the event.
How did you come to specialise in this area?
I’m a clinical psychologist, and started working in CAMHS, alongside work for the family courts on child protection cases, parenting assessments, and children on the edge of care. I then moved to the Anna Freud Centre. More recently, I’ve set up my own specialist trauma clinic, the Trauma Recovery Space.
The mentalising thread has run alongside all of that. When I was in CAMHS, Mentalization Based Therapy (MBT) was just beginning to gain traction. In the past 10 to 15 years, I’ve been part of a group developing MBT for children and families, including building the evidence base.
Everyone mentalises to some degree – so what makes it a therapeutic tool?
Mentalising is our capacity to understand the feelings, intentions, desires and beliefs behind our behaviour, and the behaviour of others. It links closely to epistemic trust, which is our openness to receiving and learning from social communication. Trauma can damage both these things, meaning a child finds it harder to benefit from the learning that happens in relationships – not just family and friends, but also with a therapist, carer or practitioner.
MBT supports improved epistemic trust by building an understanding of a child’s capacity to mentalise, and how to strengthen it. Importantly, MBT is about developing someone’s strengths, rather than pathologising.
One common misconception is worth addressing here. People sometimes come to MBT thinking that mentalising is the destination, and that the goal is to arrive at a correct understanding of someone. It isn’t. Mentalising is the process and having the curiosity and willingness to wonder about what’s going on for someone else.
With that in mind, is MBT designed to be part of broader therapeutic practice, or is it, in itself, enough?
It can be either – one of the things I find most useful about MBT is that you can either practise it as a pure model, so to speak, or use it as a way of positioning yourself as a therapist, while also using another specific model.
It is complementary rather than in competition with other practices – I’m currently working on a trial with frontline practitioners in schools and early intervention settings who are already trained in CBT and other models. Part of what we’re exploring is how they can hold onto the skills they already have, but enrich those by deploying them from a mentalising stance.
This flexibility means MBT can support children and young people in a wide range of situations, including at the very severe end of the spectrum.
Can you bring that to life with an example from your practice?
I worked with a nine-year-old boy who had witnessed serious domestic violence at home, and his mother. He had a diagnosis of ADHD and was on the brink of permanent exclusion from school, and his mum had her own trauma and physical and mental health difficulties as a result of the abuse from the dad, who was no longer on the scene.
The system around him – mum, teachers, everyone – understood that he’d experienced trauma, but ADHD remained the primary explanation for his behaviour, and there wasn’t really much thought about what was going on in his mind. With an MBT approach, we brought in ideas about mentalising. His behaviour started to make sense as something that had happened to him, not just something wrong with him.
We had one-on-one sessions with him to understand his own triggers, and worked with his mum to strengthen her own mentalising, and did some dyadic work with them together. He has stayed in school, avoided exclusion, made friends and he and his mum became more of a team – he felt she was on his side, and she felt she had some agency.
What does the future of MBT in this area look like – and what part are you playing?
The randomised controlled trial I mentioned earlier is looking at how MBT principles can be embedded in frontline, early intervention settings, and how practitioners already trained in other models can use a mentalising stance to extend that work. It’s an exciting development in terms of reach.
One important thing that needs to happen is greater integration between the adult MBT world and the child MBT world. The adult field has moved further in some respects, in particular trauma-specific MBT. Trauma has lifelong rippling effects so the ambition, ultimately, is to treat it as early as possible. I sometimes say – only half-jokingly – that we want to put adult services out of a job.
Who do you hope will attend, and what will they take away?
The session is aimed at practitioners working with children, young people, and families where there’s been developmental or relational trauma – family therapists, psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, social workers, community mental health practitioners, supervisors.
There’s a pre-recorded introduction to core MBT concepts that attendees can watch in advance, so if you’re new to the model, you’ll have the grounding you need before the live session.
If you already have some MBT training but haven’t applied it in a trauma context, I hope it will open up new thinking. And if you’re already using some of these ideas, hopefully it will help consolidate and extend what you’re doing.
Where next?
Join our webinar Mentalising with complex clinical presentations in children and families: a systemic and trauma-informed approach.
