The power of supervision

Increasingly I am having social workers and counsellors reaching out to get supervision support. What I am hearing as well, is that more clients are presenting with multiple complexities that can make the therapeutic work hard or even halt it entirely! This often means conventional approaches can hit a wall, such as reality testing when a client is in a heightened state.

This is where I feel supervision can take client work from being a bit stuck, to getting some movement in the therapy space. Supervision allows a lot more than training (usually). I often take considerable time with a supervisee to understand a client presentation, as well as looking at the intricacies of the material that arises in the therapy space.

Bringing in a relational therapy to this work is often crucial, as clients can come with story fatigue, systems trauma and even negative experiences with other services we need to overcome. Forging and working on the relationship, as well as learning to do relational work interventions, often builds a deeper sense of safety and rapport. Epistemic hypervigilance (the wariness of others based on past experiences of trust being broken, over and through time) takes time to overcome and can be a barrier for services that generally provide more brief interventions.

Building epistemic trust, as well as learning to do other relational interventions, such as rupture and repair, become a massive part of both the therapy and keeping the client engaged. These are generally not interventions I am finding that are taught in university, and they can be difficult to do during live trainings, due to needing to be Individual for each client context, as well as working out how to respond in the moment.

In supervision, I often slow down the client and therapy process and look at what the clinician and client are doing, and how to bring more relational work into this to hopefully deepen the therapy and gain better epistemic trust. As well as this, it allows a more detailed look as to what is occurring in therapy, and ways to address barriers that might be coming up as common themes, which can be frustrating to the client and therapist!

In turn, I also find over time, this develops the clinicians’ skills to better do this on the fly, independently with clients as they practice these skills and hone them. I work with supervisee’s all over Australia and regional Australia, such as the Central West as well as internationally. These are skills that can be accessed and taught from anywhere in the world but can make such a difference in our clinical practice.