It is not uncommon for people doing the AMBIT training to comment that they do 'mentalizing' already. Our experience of this is that this is often both true and not true.
It is true in the sense that 'Mentalization' is not something that we have invented and is a fundamental aspect of human interaction. So we are sure that people do this already. In that sense we are training fraudsters, training people in what they do already! We plead guilty to this charge.
However, sometimes, people indicate that they consider mentalizing to be the same as 'being supportive' or 'being interested' in someone. Although we believe that mentalizing may be experienced as supportive it is quite easy to be supportive withoutExplicit mentalization. Rather than go into a lot of theory as to the difference between the two, here are some examples of being supportive without much mentalizing.
Offering to make a cup of tea. - perhaps the most common act of kindness in English culture! The offer to make a cup of tea conveys concern about the position of another person but may or may not lead to an invitation to explicitly mentalize how the other person is feeling. Of course there is a degree of implicit mentalizing of the other person but there may be a delicate interactive dance around whether the person would welcome the opportunity to explicitly mentalise how they are feeling etc. Acting in a supportive way may be all that is required at that moment.
The problem is other people. Ordinary interactions between people may result in feelings of frustration, anger, annoyance, resentment etc about the behaviour of others. These may be just the usual 'ups and downs' of human interaction that will take place in any team or family. However, these interactions may indicate patterns linked to states of mind. For example, whenever there is a conflict in a team, John always tries to patch up the conflict by some action. Afterwards he feels resentful about always having to be the one who sorts things out. He complains to Sally who is sympathetic to him and listens to him and is 'supportive'. Sally wonders why John always acts the peacemaker but does not invite John to explore this with her. In this interaction, Sally has been supportive, has implicitly mentalized John's state of mind but has not engaged in explicitly mentalizing with John about it. This may be due to a highly tuned sensitivity that this would not be welcome by John (because John believes the problem is other people's behaviour) or because of other constraints (sense of intrusion, time, lack of privacy etc). From this example, we do not wish to convey that explicit mentalizing is preferable or desirable in all contexts (for a family or a team this would be a route to madness!!!) but only that being supportive and explicit mentalizing are different and all teams and families function with both.