Introduction

This is a phrase that has been used to talk about two areas of experience in this work:

• the young person's focus
• the team focus.

There is a deliberate echo in "Team around the Worker" of the phrase more conventionally used in this field, the "Team around the Child". It is very important to understand how the Team around the Worker concept is not an alternative to, or a contradiction of this, but is instead a complementary "position" that helps address some of the potential unintended problems that the Team around the Child can bring - especially in working with socially excluded, unconventionally (or non-) help-seeking youth.

Team around the worker is one of the ways that we use Mentalization in Working with your TEAM to help the worker hold their balance in the ever-present tension between the principles of forming strong individual KeyWorker relationships, but ensuring that to counter the unbalancing forces at play in such relationships, there is also a Keyworker well-connected to wider team.

1. Young person's focus: privileging existing helping relationships

This refers to the privileging of a specific relationship (of Epistemic Trust) between a KeyWorker and a young person.
Here, the point is not to define an organisational ROLE ("Who is the keyworker in this case?"), but instead to define the worker who, in the mind of the young person, is KEY, right now - who does this young person have a relationship with that is characterised by anything approaching Epistemic Trust? Powerful individual relationships that have this "KeyWorker" characteristics are not easy to sustain, and this is why AMBIT advocates a team-based approach, and is never "just" an individual therapy. The person (or there may be more than one) in the role of KeyWorker may change over time,

Particularly for young people who - for reasons of past disappointments, trauma, neglect, genetic disposition etc - have very low levels of this specific kind of trust ("Epistemic Hypervigilance"), it does not make sense to ask them to share this out between multiple new workers. This can more often or not be overwhelming to a young person in crisis, who may experience multiple different workers with different specialist interests and trainings as a latter day version of the Tower of Babel experience - too many different voices and "languages", all speaking at once, and often apparently disagreeing with each other. Unlike the conventional notion of the "Team around the Child" - which has its place, but can also (out of the best of intentions) deliver an experience of care that is aversive (see Dis-integratedInterventions), in AMBIT the primary setting for therapeutic change at any moment in the "treatment journey" is the relationship between a young person (and/or family) with a single practitioner. That individual practitioner may be replaced by others across time, and the young person or family may develop more relationships alongside this KeyWorker as time passes (and the capacity for Epistemic Trust grows), but attention to WHO is significant and helpful in a young person's mind, and building on that relationship, is at the heart of the Team around the Worker approach.
Thus we advocate deploying early efforts towards one of the Core Features of AMBIT which is Scaffolding existing relationships. At least to start with the existing relationship to focus on is the best helping relationship that the young person already has. Supporting this person (who may be another member of the team, or from another team, or an informal contact such as a family member, but who - at the time in question is seen as "key") may well be the prelude to developing a direct 1:1 relationship with me as a new worker (especially if my team is delivering a particularly specialist intervention that other workers would not feel skilled, authorised or motivated to do themselves even with my active support.) On the other hand it is worth

2. Team focus: taking responsibility for the mentalizing of colleagues in these key relationships

This links to another of the Core Features of AMBIT, which is the principle of the Keyworker well-connected to wider team: placing as much emphasis on mentalizing one's colleague (insisting on and supporting them to sustain a mentalizing stance) as one does on encouraging the same in our clients.

In order to privilege such a powerful individual KeyWorker relationship, we must acknowledge the risks that this can lead a worker into. Intense, intimate relationships with young people whose backgrounds and difficulties are of the kind that AMBIT is designed to help, may be fun and rewarding but they can also be unsettling. We are invited to collude with risky or antisocial behaviours, we are shocked or worried by threats or authentic concern. We may "up-regulate" our "ordinary" antennae for risk and become rather macho, denying or downgrading risks, we may burn out, or be drawn into overintrusive actions more to settle our own anxiety than to help the young person. Sometimes young people, particularly those whose early experience has been blighted by sexual abuse or exploitation, may act in ways that are frankly seductive. The active Team around the Worker is there to help the worker hold her balance.

This is why AMBIT is a team activity, in which team members are expected as a matter of course actively to support, and take some responsibility for, the mentalizing of their colleagues. We emphasise that this is a CORE task for all workers.

In order to sustain a position as a worker who is a predictable, attuned, helpful presence, the KeyWorker must be recognise the universal frailty of Mentalization - particularly at times of high anxiety, or confusion, and be prepared to use his or her colleagues to support his or her mentalizing, as well as taking responsibility for protecting and strengthening the mentalizing of his or her colleagues. Under Working with your TEAM we document a range of Mentalization-based approaches that support this effort - the principle one being Thinking Together.

Effort is always directed at making the KeyWorker relationship safe, predictable, aiming to activate a secure Internal Working Model of relating to help, thus stimulating or allowing exploration into new and transformative understandings on the part of the young person and family.