Therapeutic Work with Parents’ Childhood Experiences in the Context of Intensive Home-Based Treatment for High-Risk Youth: Practical Mentalization-Based and Trauma-Informed Interventions

Although childhood experiences are widely recognized for their potential impact on adult health and happiness, clinical practices apt to solicit and process such experiences with adult clients are often not described in sufficient detail to offer meaningful guidance. The present paper describes how to use the Important Childhood Events (ICE) scale to anchor psychotherapeutic work with parents of extremely high-risk youth in intensive home-based treatment, where childhood experiences may ultimately provide a salient port of entry into identifying and addressing parents’ perceptions of their own children’s difficulties. We aim to contribute to trauma-informed and mentalization-based clinical practices, particularly for clinicians who are working with families affected by complex, intergenerational trauma in the context of social marginalization. We do this by operationalizing steps in the therapeutic process to prepare both parent and clinician for such difficult conversations, and by describing clinical vignettes which illustrate interventions to foster mentalizing and repair in response to avoidance or dysregulation.