This Practice-Based Training demonstrates and provides opportunities to practice the skills and attitudes involved in empowering parents of adolescents to promote mentalizing, epistemic trust and the we mode with their adolescent children and within their families. The objective is to use the Pedagogic Stance, Mentalizing and Epistemic Trust as the keys to the effective parenting that enhances the adolescent’s resilience and capacity to develop a social network outside of the family.
Participants will engage in a structured protocol that utilizes discussions and role playing for parents to practice with other parents how to talk so their adolescents will listen and feel understood and how to listen so their adolescent will talk and trust. How to set limits and provide direction with clarity, empathy, consideration, flexibility, playfulness, validation and respect of the adolescent perspective; model taking responsibility for mistakes and repairing inevitable breakdowns in mentalizing and epistemic trust. Encouraging reciprocity and the we-mode within their families, which in turn provides adolescents with a secure base and a template to generalize the we-mode outside of the family.
This multi-family protocol is proposed as a component of MBT-A or MBT-F or as a stand-alone for mild to moderate mentalizing problems in adolescence. Data from a pilot study will be discussed.
Presenters:
Efrain Bleiberg
Louise Esquenazi
Javiera Duarte
Joanna Zapata
Wednesday 27 May 2026 — Pre‑Conference Workshops / 13:00 – 15:00