I enjoy working with supervisees of all levels and a variety of modalities. I hold a level 7 certificate in supervision, and am qualified to work with supervisees from UKCP and BACP. I was trained in an integrative school, so I use different techniques such as hypnotherapy, CBT, humanistic or psychodynamic therapy as appropriate to a client’s personality and situation.

I am also trained in and use trauma-informed techniques such as IFS or EMDR with clients but I’m not specifically qualified to be a formal supervisor of trauma techniques (by bodies such as EMDRIA for example).

What is good therapy supervision?

Good supervision should balance three functions: 

1) Supporting therapists emotionally in the role of being a therapist (with a distinct hand-off point where it becomes more appropriate to talk to your own therapist) 

2) Developing therapists’ skills 

3) Protecting clients’ wellbeing by ensuring therapists act ethically and professionally. 

What can I talk about in therapy supervision?

It is common to have human emotions around clients, such as attraction, irritation, dislike, or kinship. Supervision is a safe place to reveal, explore and reflect on these feelings to ensure that they do not prevent good and safe therapy for your client, and so that your behaviour does not become inappropriate or harmful. 

I will offer challenge to your perspectives and help you explore different angles or things that may have been in your blindspot, with the goal of ever-expanding awareness for personal and professional growth for you, and ethical safety for your clients. 

The widely established “seven-eyes” theory of supervision (by Robin Shohet) outlines all of the following possible perspectives to keep in mind during supervision

• Focus on the Client: What the client presents, including their physical appearance, non-verbal cues, language, and the story of their life as they tell it. This aims to bring the client vividly into the supervision room.
• Focus on the Supervisee’s Interventions: An exploration and analysis of the specific strategies, techniques, and approaches the supervisee used with the client, and considering other possible interventions.
• Focus on the Client-Supervisee Relationship: Examining the conscious and unconscious dynamics, transference, and countertransference playing out between the client and the supervisee.
• Focus on the Supervisee’s Internal Process: The supervisee’s own feelings, thoughts, bodily sensations, and personal reactions to the client and the work. This helps develop self-awareness and identify potential triggers.
• Focus on the Supervisory Relationship: The dynamic between the supervisor and the supervisee, and how it might be unconsciously paralleling or mirroring the client-supervisee relationship (parallel process).
• Focus on the Supervisor’s Own Process: The supervisor’s own internal reactions, insights, and feelings while listening to the supervisee, which can provide valuable information about the client and the overall dynamic.
• Focus on the Wider Context: The systemic and external factors influencing the work, such as the client’s family, the organizations involved, professional ethics and codes of conduct and broader social or cultural issues. 

This model helps to ensure a holistic and ethical approach to practice by providing a map to navigate the many dimensions of supervision, ensuring no single viewpoint dominates the reflective process. 

Obviously this is an awful lot to attempt to consider at once but below are agenda points that we can adapt to suit our sessions:

• Safeguarding and harm reduction: Bring emergency cases where there is a risk of suicide, self-harm or harm to someone else
• Client work: Discussion of case conceptualisations. Bring cases for reflection that make you feel anxious, avoidant or unsettled. Confessions about client work that gives you strong feelings (eg attraction or dislike, hopelessness or anything else.) Requests for ideas of approach or further reading. If any client were to make a complaint about you, who would it be and why?
• Blind spots Bring work that you feel very confident about. Is this complacency?
• Success stories or profound moments
• Ethical dilemmas
• Anti-oppression considerations
• Training plan: Sufficient CPD Hours logged. Sufficient skills in the approaches you are advertising for
• Data protection: Are your GDPR, ICO and clinical will up to date?
• Supervision ratio: Sufficient supervision hours logged?
• Insurance: Is it up to date?

Fees

My rates are £80 for 60 minutes. For BACP registrants who need to log 1.5 hours per month, we can do £120 for 90 minutes or 2x fortnightly sessions of 45 minutes at £60 each. I am not currently running supervision groups. 

If you are a trainee, we can discuss how you need to log your supervision hours, and, unless there are any issues which we’ll discuss as we go along, I can provide a psychological maturity report for your qualification. Normally the fee for the report is an additional £40.

How to get in touch?

Please fill out the contact form below and we can have a short chat for free to discuss further.