These are just one category of the Features of UNsuccessful Mentalizing

These can manifest themselves in a general lack of attention to the thoughts, feelings and wishes others, or interpreting one’s own behaviour in terms of the influence of situational or physical constraints rather than feelings and thoughts in oneself or in others around one. This often happens when family conversations invariably focus on concrete concerns, such as who did what and explanations of behaviour in terms of physical circumstances and influences (e.g. we always argue when we travel long distances in the car).
The typical features of concrete understanding or simplistic mentalization are:

Difficulty in emotion recognition

Not understanding positive or negative emotions

Confusing a feeling with a thought

E.g. because I feel sad, the world is a miserable place (aim to be able to see that you can feel sad without drawing conclusions from it). This confusion may be because feelings are leading to automatic thoughts outside awareness, or because the child notices how he feels and decides that this is what it must mean

Understanding behaviour in ‘concrete’ terms

E.g. in terms of external circumstances or other behaviours rather than in terms of internal states; e had a fight because it was hot rather than being able to recognize that one was irritable and had difficulty in hearing the other person.

Difficulty in observing one’s own thoughts and feelings

...and in identifying changes in them

Not recognizing the impact of one’s thoughts, feelings and actions on others

Manifested as insensitivityy to each other's emotional needs.

Not being able to see how one thing has led to another

E.g. a thought led to a feeling which led to an action, and a reaction from someone else

Over-generalizing from mental states

E.g. feeling that because one upsetting thing happened, everything has gone wrong

Not being able to be flexible

E.g. difficulty in playing with different ways of thinking about situations

Feeling that somebody else’s thoughts are dangerous

E.g. that if someone disagrees that means that your own point of view is obliterated or that they hate you etc

Struggling to relate thoughts to reality

E.g. The individual in this condition tends to end up going round in unproductive circles and only becomes more anxious

Acting without thinking, or avoidance of thinking.

In this category a parent-child relationship may be described as simplistic or concrete if the parent reacts to behaviour without being aware of the child’s feelings or wishes, which are motivating the behaviour. There is an absence of mentalizing of the child. The parent may thus be angry, over-reactive, blaming, and prescriptive. The child’s mental states are obscured and treated as unimportant. This may also happen when there is an identified problem, e.g. ADHD or a physical condition, and either the condition is ignored or every behaviour is explained on the bases of it. The child may be treated as an object, a machine, an extension of the parent’s identity, without curiosity about or recognition of him/her as an individual. Another way this kind of situation can arise is when there is a passive resignation or withdrawal of awareness from the child and non-thinking over a period of time on the part of the parent. Thus as in the previous case, his/her approach has become unthinking, concrete and behavioural. The parent may be depressed or overwhelmed and too tired to focus on the child unless situations have escalated when the parent falls back on a stock response, without trying to understand the specifics. The child recognises that only amplified behaviour will get through the parent’s preoccupation or distraction, so that the situation begins already in an exaggerated and distorted way.