AMBIT is not an individual therapy but is designed to be delivered by teams who develop a shared approach to their work. Taking part in a team approach may evoke different reactions for individual workers. From our training work we have come to characterise some of the different positions that people may adopt in response to the training. Some of these are listed below.
- The enthusiasts -those that like mentalization as a theory and an approach
- The non-conformists -'I hate people telling me what to do' (we include ourselves in this group!)
- The pragmatists -'I do this already, why do they have to have so much theory!'
- The simplifiers - 'I cant understand all this complicated language - I cant use this with young people'
- The experimenters -makes sense and might be useful - might be helpful but we will only find out in practice
These examples of
Individual Differences and Disagreements are obviously a simplification, and there are obviously lots of other thoughts and reactions to AMBIT training. A genuinely mentalizing approach must be inclusive of all these different reactions to the AMBIT model.
One of the key challenges for a team using an AMBIT approach is to ensure that all these different states of mind are enabled to have a voice while simultaneously recognising that one of the
Post-training outcome goals must be to ensure that appropriate
Governance structures are in place for
Managing Risk, and that the team is "on task" in respect of its
primary Outcomes measures - those of the young people and families it is working with.
An important idea from training is to try to ensure that there is an inclusiveness insofar as all types of positions are recognised as
real to those who are occupying them, and to avoid one position becoming dominant in ways that could be seen as
Psychic equivalence (
"I know that you are in the wrong, and you are damaging this team's work!") or examples of
Teleological thinking (
"You MUST think like me!") .
In this way, a
Mentalization-based approach is explicitly non-conformist, without descending into "formless relativism"!
Exercises