This is associated with the four aspects of The Therapist's Mentalizing Stance, and really expands on the first aspect of the Mentalizing stance - known as the "Inquisitive stance"

Maintaining a focus on mental states

In sessions practitioners will maintain a focus on trying to understand mental states in the here-and-now, a capacity known as Mentalization, also referred to as "Mind-mindedness", and will use their interactions with the young person and family to try to increase mentalizing: see Mentalizing manoeuvres.

In particular, the KeyWorker is attentive to the here-and-now - sensitive to the coming and going of mentalizing, and (in keeping with another of the principles of the substance use treatment) prepared to Adapt your Discourse, by addressing Pre-mentalistic stances such as Pretend mode thinking.

Holding a Not-Knowing and Curious stance:

Avoiding any assumption that I have knowledge of the contents of state of my client's mental state, and modelling constant curiosity about this. "I find I'm really curious about what happens when you are telling me about your mother's reaction to you smoking weed. I wonder what you think I might think about it; I wonder whether you worry I'll react like her, or very differently..."

Implicit in this assumption is that we learn by making well-meaning mistakes ("an expert is someone who has made all the avialable mistakes in an area") and then learning from these.

Suggestions and questions are presented tentatively:

In keeping with the not-knowing stance, the practitioner avoids presenting suggestions or questions as though the answer is already known: "This may not make any sense, but I have this idea that perhaps the weed is very useful as a way of not-thinking too much about some of these painful things you have been telling me about. does that make any sense at all to you?"

Taking responsibility for one's own mentalizing

In working with young people and families who are in crisis of one sort or another, the mentalizing capacity of the practitioner is regularly threatened. Practitioners in the team have as a core task the use of their team's SupervisoryStructures to foster and sustain Mentalizing in each other's functioning.

In the therapeutic relationship, when things go wrong (the client withdraws, becomes irritable, etc) the practitioner will always tend to take personal responsibility for this, rather than allowing blaming to creep in to the discourse:

"Something has happened just now, and I think I must have got something wrong here - I must have misread things in some way. Can you help me figure out what I did that has upset you like this, because that is no help to you at all..."