Supervision
Supervision is an essential part of any counselling or psychotherapy practice. To be working constantly and at depth with the distresses and traumas of other people has an impact on practitioners that they need to understand and be able to express to a third party in order to remain healthy and effective. A supervisor will at different times be a mentor, educator, reflective mirror or just listening ear.
I trained as a supervisor at the Centre for Supervision and Team Development (www.cstd.org.uk). Two of the founders of CSTD, Peter Hawkins and Robin Shohet, co-wrote Supervision in the Helping Professions (Open University Press), a key text that lays out the theory and practice of supervision. Much of the research for the book was based on supervising psychotherapists and counsellors, but the supervision model is transferable to working with a wide range of health and social welfare professionals, such as medical staff, social workers, teachers, police and fire officers. For the most part these services don’t have allocated funds to provide their staff with supervision, although current trends towards in-house mentoring and co-coaching are moving more in that direction. I have supervised doctors and teachers who have opted to pay for supervision out of their own pockets, regarding it as a necessary professional expense.
At the start of a supervision contract I would generally suggest fortnightly sessions lasting an hour. Some practitioners prefer weekly meetings, especially if they are at a critical stage of their own training or have particularly demanding caseloads.
Please contact me if you would like to know more about supervision and how it might be helpful to you.