The vital elements in a nurse-patient relationship are the ways in which this encounter takes place, and the methods that enable patient’s participatory action and help the patient find to his/her own ways to solve problems and gain strength in the healing process. The professional development of a psychiatric nursing is a continual process composed of self-knowledge, determination and ability to reflect. The purpose of our research is to elaborate how psychiatric nurses make use of their working experience in nurse-patient relationships and how they share their experience with novices in the field. Our research questions are as follows: What aspects do the psychiatric nurses with long working experience see important in nurse-patient relationships? What kind of knowledge psychiatric nurses see important to mediate with novices in the field relating to nurse-patient relationship? How the work of psychiatric nursing, with respects to nurse-patient relationship, has changed during the respondents’ careers? This is a qualitative study, in which we used open individual interviews with four respondents, who have all acquired fairly long working histories in the field of psychiatric nursing in Oulu university hospital. All the interviews were recorded and examined using inductive content analysis. The experience of psychiatric nurses was conveyed as a conscious readiness to reflect one’s own professional attitudes in the course of a nurse-patient relationship. The professional and mental readiness of psychiatric nurses enable a grounding condition for a nurse-patient relationship that builds on a trust. The primary message for novices was the importance of self-reflection, which permits the continual professional development and the becoming of a psychiatric nurse. The concluding argument of our study is that personal readiness, that is, an ability to understand and encounter the experience of the other as real for him/her, is a necessary condition for constructing mutual trust in a nurse-patient relationship. The findings on the significance of reflective attitude and its maintenance can provide some insights for students studying in social and health sector, and also for novices in working life as a part of mentoring process.