Is Supervision Therapy?

There is a fine line between supervision and therapy , but….is supervision therapy? The answer is no, and a little bit “yes”.I’d like to share a bit more about the array of benefits that supervision can bring.

I won’t go into the benefits of supervision in the professional sense – that’s a topic for another blog post! I’ll just say that some of the main points are: setting boundaries, learning how to contract, being challenged in your practice so you can improve and add interventions to the way you work, increase your theoretical grounding for your work, reflective practice, and more.

Regarding supervision as a therapeutic space – not as therapy as such, but as a therapeutic space, as there’s a key difference in what we do in our therapy and what we do in our supervision -, there are a few things that we can get that will help us on our personal development journey, which will in turn impact on the work we do and in our relationships in general.

Self-Awareness

Developing your self-awareness is something that will impact your work with clients, as you will be able to separate what’s yours and what’s theirs, and therefore help the clients more effectively. This learning can also transfer over to your other relationships, for example, you can learn how to separate your emotions from your friend’s emotions. You can still be there to support them of course, but with the knowledge that their stuff is their responsibility, you can only do so much!

Self-Care

Adding to the previous point, supervision might help us realise that we’re trying to look after everyone else and leave ourselves on the side. Setting boundaries and meeting your own needs first is a topic dear to my heart, and something that I believe everyone needs to learn, for the sake of their own happiness and for the sake of improving their relationships.

Containment and holding

Learning how to allow our supervisor to contain and hold us when we feel like we’re unravelling after a client session or due to a personal situation will also transfer over to our personal lives, just like things worked through in therapy will transfer over to our lives outside of the therapy room.

Support to get back into the swing of things

Being held by our supervisor will help us get the support we need from them and from others around us, which will, in turn, help us get back on track. It can be very therapeutic to know that we are being listened to by our supervisor.

Focusing on yourself is OK

Ok this is a biggie for practitioners. We are so used to being there for our clients, and probably we do the same outside of the therapy room! The focus of supervision is on us and our work. This can be very therapeutic for some of us that find it difficult to be in the spotlight. It can be very therapeutic to know that we can be in the spotlight and it doesn’t mean it’s taken from anybody else. It also doesn’t mean that we are being selfish. It is what we need. There are many reasons why supervision is a requirement for practitioners, and it’s not only about the ethics of our practice (although this is also very important!).

Venting space

Therapists are bound by confidentiality, meaning that we can’t discuss our work with our friends, or with anyone except our supervisor (unless there are safeguarding or other issues that need disclosing!). Supervision is a great place to vent about anything in our work that’s upsetting us or that we need to work through in order to regain control and be able to help all our clients to a good standard. There might be issues in the current climate in our profession that need to be discussed, and this might be the best and safest place to do so.

Processing space

I will write about this one, starting with a question: have you had a session where you feel heavy for a day or week after? Sometimes projective identification and strong counter-transference can invade our personal lives and spaces. Identifying this and working through it – or processing – in supervision will help us share the load and figure out again what’s ours and what’s our clients’. There are other ways to use the processing aspect of supervision, which might be about more personal stuff or about ethical or practical or theoretical issues that arise in your practice.

As I pointed out earlier, supervision can be therapeutic, but it is not a replacement of therapy, as the focus is on the work with the clients rather than on the supervisee’s personal life. These do cross-over at points, especially when the supervisee is struggling with their personal life and this might impact in client work, or there is something imminent to talk about and the supervision space happens to be there at the right time. Supervision is about being flexible but boundaried. The flexibility allows for the variety of interactions I’ve described above, some of which can impact on the work, others can impact on the supervisee themselves on a more therapeutic level.

It’s all about balance and knowing how to maximise the use of the supervision space.

In a nutshell, …supervision can be therapeutic, but it doesn’t replace personal therapy.