Reimagining (parental) embodied mentalisation
About
A creative arts workshop facilitated by Dr Emma van Daal (Centre for Infant Wellbeing, Melbourne, Australia) and supported by Dr Amanda E Woodford (Holding Space Therapeutic Arts Studio, Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand) for professional practitioners.OVERVIEW
This workshop for professional practitioners will draw from parental embodied mentalisation theory (Shai & Belsky, 2011, 2016) using creative arts approaches to bring focus to the affective and sensorial parental and infant patterned ways of being together (van Daal, 2023). Intentionally introduced as a non-verbal activity, practitioners learn to attune to and ‘stay with’ the felt-sense of the parent-infant relationship and interactions as key aspect of building embodied mentalisation capacities. This approach, presented by Dr Emma van Daal, supports the practice-based concept that by meeting infants where they are at developmentally and embracing their forms of communication, their voices and agency are elevated. In addition, rather than teaching mentalisation, a creative approach to 'parental embodied mentalisation' offers a tangible way for the parent/s to feel into, imagine, and understand their own as well as their infant’s feelings, thoughts and desires, vital to parent/infant wellbeing.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
The intention of the approach shared is to support a parent’s embodied mentalisation capacities by using a creative approach to be able to identify both high (congruent, reciprocal) and low (mismatched, preoccupied) mentalising in service of the infant and the dyad. The workshop aims to provide practitioners who work with (or hope to one day work with) parents of infants, an experience of embodied mentalisation using creative arts processes in a scaffolded arts-based way:
• Introducing and applying the key principles of embodied mentalisation using creative arts processes.
• Providing a first-hand experience of “doing” embodied mentalisation using three different creative arts practices that can be applied in the context or both individual (parent only) or dyadic therapy.
• Generation of a deeper understanding of our own embodied schemas of “being with” through an arts-based inquiry that will inform our own ways of being with the parents and infants we companion/work with.
• Learning about the potential applications to perinatal and dyadic work (taking what I have come to know into my work).
COST:
$126.50 inc gst
ABOUT THE FACILITATORS
Dr Emma van Daal is an infant mental health consultant and researcher, child psychotherapist, and arts therapist working in private practice and community organisations for the past 15 years. Her passion is early intervention of early life trauma incorporating the arts to nurture attachment and promote healing, having presented internationally on this work. She recently established the Centre for Infant Wellbeing as Australia’s first organisation dedicated to promoting arts, play, and relational approaches as vital in therapeutic and research practices that support infant wellbeing. Dr Emma is the co-founder of the not-for-profit, IPEACH (Infant and Perinatal Engagement in Arts and Creative Health) focused on advocating for creative arts and music therapies to be part of usual care in PIMH. Her practice, writing, and research is strongly influenced by New Materialism and post qualitative inquiry, having published on mapping the materiality of lived experiencing arguing to (re)conceptualise well-being, trauma, and mental health within a relational ontology. Emma enjoys/seeks interdisciplinary collaborations that innovate new ways of doing intervention that are meaningful and amplify the voices of babies. https://infantwellbeingcentre.com.au/about/
Amanda practices part-time as a registered Creative Arts Therapist (ANZACATA) and approved supervisor from her therapeutic arts studio–Holding Space (Mornington, Dunedin). The remainder of her time is spent as an Academic, coordinating the MIECAT Institute’s Professional Doctorate course. As an arts-based researcher, she shares Emma’s interest in New Materialism and post qualitative inquiry, and in research and practice, finding ways to amplify voices that are quiet or less heard in traditional ways. For this workshop, Amanda will support Emma in the event facilitation and local organisation. She is thrilled to be a part of bringing the Centre for Infant Wellbeing’s work to Dunedin.
References
Shai, D., & Belsky, J. (2011). Parental Embodied Mentalizing: Let’s Be Explicit About What We Mean by Implicit. Child Development Perspectives, 5(3), 187–188. DOI: 10.1111/j.1750-8606.2011.00195.x
Shai, D., & Belsky, J. (2016). Parental embodied mentalizing: how the nonverbal dance between parents and infants predicts children’s socio-emotional functioning. Attachment & Human Development. DOI: 10.1080/14616734.2016.1255653
van Daal, E. (2023). Multimodal cartographies of mental health lived experiencing. Multimodal showings. JoCAT, 18(2). https://www.jocat-online.org/c-23-multimodal-vandaal
Date
Wednesday 5 August 2026 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM (UTC+12)Location
Dunedin City Library, Dunningham Suite
230 Moray Place, Dunedin, Dunedin 9054
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Reimagining (parental) embodied mentalisation
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