Mentalization-Based Treatment for Developmental Trauma: A Casebook for Working with Children and Their Families

Mentalization-Based Treatment for Developmental Trauma offers mental health practitioners a transdiagnostic model to support the needs of traumatized children with both internalizing (emotional) and externalizing (behavioural) difficulties, and shows how MBT can be applied to meet the needs of children who have experienced various types of developmental trauma.

This volume includes contributions from global experts in MBT who share their experience of using the method with traumatized children in a range of settings, from individual therapy to group work and work with parents, carers, and the networks around the child. They highlight the benefits of using MBT with different groups, such as children in foster or residential care or those who are refugees. The chapters offer a framework for clinicians to support children to better process and regulate their emotions, highlighting the importance of early intervention as a means of mitigating certain psychopathologies that commonly result from developmental trauma. With clinical vignettes throughout, this book covers different stages of treatment, such as assessment, direct therapy with the child, work with the network and support for carers and parents.

This book is a vital resource for child counsellors, psychologists, psychoanalysts and therapists who work with children who have experienced developmental trauma, as well as junior psychologists and child psychiatrists, mental health nurses, social workers and others working in child mental health services.

Nicole Muller is a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and family therapist at Centrum Hecht Opleidingen in Holland, a specialist centre for training of professionals and treatment centre of children, youth and their families, specialized in attachment and trauma disorders. She is a MBT-CYP practitioner, supervisor and trainer.

Emma Morris is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and MBT-CYP practitioner, supervisor and trainer based in the UK. She is the founder and co-director of the Multi-Family Project and co-director of the Trauma Recovery Space, a specialist trauma clinic. She is co-author of High Conflict Parenting Post Separation: The Making and Breaking of Family Ties (2020) and Systemic Multi-Family Therapy: Concepts and Interventions (2024).

Nick Midgley is a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and Professor of Psychological Therapies with Children and Young People at UCL and Anna Freud, London, UK. His books include Therapeutic Work for Children with Complex Trauma: A Three-Track Psychodynamic Approach (2023), Short-term Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Adolescents with Depression: A Treatment Manual (2016), and Minding the Child: Mentalization-Based Interventions with Children, Young People and their Families (2012).