Introduction

Supervision provides time and space for psychotherapists and counseling therapists to receive support, guidance for client work, and oversight following the ethical standards of the profession, with the backing of a more experienced supervisor. More specifically, through supervision, a supervisee may receive support and affect regulation triggered by client work; educational guidance, skill-building, and introduction to new techniques for use in client sessions; and guidance and oversight of work aligned with ethical principles. Consequently, the topics or questions that a supervisee brings to supervision can be diverse.

Supervision topics

At the beginning of their psychotherapeutic practice, supervisees often need an additional understanding of the client and the process and answers to questions like “What next.” In such cases, along with emotional support and often a normalization of fear and overwhelm, the supervisor can offer their perspective of the process using a theoretical foundation, aiding the supervisee in integrating theory with practice.

As the supervisee grows as a professional and the supervisory relationship develops—similar to the psychotherapist-client relationship, requiring time to create a sense of safety and trust—the supervisor may encourage the supervisee to pay attention to the transference reactions occurring in the psychotherapeutic process.

Additional supervision topics that may arise based on the themes brought by the supervisee or questions posed can relate to the therapist’s countertransference reactions parallel processes in the supervisor-supervisee relationship, and the supervisor may utilize their own process and countertransference reactions to explore the supervisee’s question/theme.

A seventh theme is the impact of context on supervision and the supervisory process. The context may reflect current or past influences, such as the impact of a business organization or regulatory body or life circumstances that affect the supervisee/supervisor and their work.

The areas of potential themes for exploration in supervision are consistent with the 7-eyed supervision model described by Hawkins & Shohet (2012). The 7-eyed supervision is a process-oriented, relational, and systemic model of supervision that focuses on the relationships between client, therapist, and supervisor, as well as the context in which they work and live. It also considers how these relationships influence each other and how the elements behave concerning one another while considering the context that affects all those relationships. It is termed “seven-eyed” because it concentrates on seven distinct aspects of the therapeutic process.

Working with clients activates numerous vulnerable points and blind spots in the supervisee, which, with the supervisor’s support, can be identified and learned from to benefit the psychotherapeutic process. The supervisor can support the supervisees in better understanding themselves, which enables them to better understand the people they work with.

For supervision inquiries, please use the contact form without providing information about duration and other details.