This is what an observer can see - things that are done, rather than the thoughts, intentions, wishes, or feelings that we might use to explain why these particular behaviours have taken place (working out this "why" question is at the heart of Mentalization.) For many clinicians, behavioural therapy is unattractive because it can appear to remove personal agency from the description of a person's behaviour. AMBIT prefers to describe behaviour more in terms of actions than behaviours. Action is really behaviour with the assumption of intentionality, and the assumption of intentionality is the basis of mentalisation. The trick is to maintain the discipline of functional analysis while including aspects of intentionality to develop understanding.

In this way, one of the basic behavioural techniques is doing ABC Diary-keeping. This simply takes a specific situation and examines the antecedents, behaviours and consequences of a particular interaction. The value of this method is that it invites clients to go beyond general, global attributions of others ("You are always like this...") to describe what they actually did, when. It fits extremely easily to add descriptions of internal mental states either experienced in oneself or imagined in others.

The behavioural approach has developed methods of getting accurate descriptions of what actions have taken place in specific circumstances. The effort to get accurate and specific descriptions of who did what, who said what to whom and then what happened are paradoxically capable of being very stimulating of processes of mentalisation. What might appear to come from a very different theoretical model can be integrated into this model of practice without abandoning the useful methods which behavioural work has developed over many years.