I recently invented a family game, intended to foster connection, communication, and self reflection. The game is called, “Mentalizing Marbles”. In order to understand the game, you need to first understand the concept of mentalizing. 

Mentalization is a cognitive process in which a person can recognize and decipher the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and actions of oneself and others. Engaging in mentalization helps people to better understand themselves and their experiences, taking into account their mental state, desires, values, and any other factors that contribute to how they feel and behave. Similarly, mentalization supports social relationships by helping people to make sense of other people’s actions and it enhances their insight of what might be occurring in someone else’s mind, without an assumption of knowing. Unlike empathy, which involves an ability to share in only someone else’s emotional experience, mentalization is a cognitive process of understanding one’s own and others’ mental states. 

As a quick and easy example of how you can practice mentalizing yourself and another person, let’s say you reach out to a dear friend and they do not text you back as expected. This can potentially lead to feelings of hurt, anger, and confusion, and may even generate internal stories and beliefs about why the other person is not responding. If you begin to mentalize yourself in this situation you may reflect upon how hard it is when you feel abandoned or ignored as a way of beginning to make sense of and contextualize your own internal distress over not getting a reply. Furthermore, if you start to mentalize the other person, you will likely begin to consider what might be happening for them. You may remember how overwhelmed they have been lately with personal struggles and you can reflect upon how they have not given you a reason to believe they would be intentionally withholding based on what you know about them and your connection. Whether or not your theories are accurate, mentalizing another person helps you, because it softens the experience, grounds you in the possibility of multiple realities, and makes it less likely for you to be reactive in a way that creates tension and conflict in your relationships. It’s a win-win all around. 

What’s great about mentalization is even if it sounds like a foreign concept, it’s actually quite easy and practical to begin implementing for yourself, and if you have kids, I can say firsthand how beneficial it is to introduce to them, too! And so, here is the game I recently created:

Supplies needed:

• Small jars, one for each member of your family + one extra to hold the marbles
• A pack of marbles (I suppose you can use any small item but “mentalizing rocks” doesn’t sound as smooth of a title!)
• Paint or maker to label the jars with each family members name

Instructions:

1. Label each of your jars. You can do this with paint, markers, tape, or whatever creative way you want to put your family member’s names on jars.
2. Put all of the marbles in the one unlabeled jar 
3. Every evening, perhaps at bedtime, meet as a family to do mentalizing marbles. 
4. Each family member takes a turn saying who gets their mentalizing marble for the day. Each person can give one marble out each night to anyone in the family except themselves. 
5. When someone gives out their marble, they have to share why they are making that choice/how they feel their marble recipient earned it for the day.
6. Repeat this every night. 
7. At the end of the month, whoever has the most marbles, that person gets to pick a special family activity – what movie to watch, a place to go out for ice cream, a game to play, etc. Your family determines what the possible options are. 
8. Everyone is celebrated verbally, there are no consequences or losing, but just a focus on who really excelled at mentalization in this particular month
9. At the end of the month, empty everyone’s individual jars and reset the marbles back into the unlabeled jar.

A few extra points to note – It’s ok if a person earns multiple people’s marbles in a day, or none. We talk about in our family how sometimes everyone has a robust mentalization day, but on any given day, you are picking one person in the family who you feel deserves your marble most. Since competition can become an issue between siblings, really stress that by recognizing one another, it helps build their connection and how important it is to recognize when someone else leaves us feeling considered. Our kids somehow seem to be motivated not as much by winning, but by how good it feels when they have really mentalized their sibling on a particular day and then their sibling acknowledging them in words and with their marble that evening. 

This is my first publication of my game, so please let me know if anything is unclear or you have any questions, thoughts, etc!