Practitioners rarely come to supervision with a technical question.
When somebody contacts me, it almost always sounds like one of these three.
I have no idea what is going on with this client, and I am doubting my own competence.
I am struggling personally and I need help now, because I have to keep working.
This client’s material is touching my own. I need help quickly so I can stay in the room with them, because they are in no position for me to withdraw.
What those three have in common
Not one of them is about a technique. All three are about the practitioner.
All three are urgent. Two of them say, in as many words, right now.
And underneath all three sits the same fear, which is almost never said out loud.
I might have to stop working.
That is not a small fear. For most of us this work is not only income. It is the thing we organised a life around, and often the place where we are most ourselves. The prospect of having to step back from it, even briefly, reaches a long way into everything else.
The kind of supervision that gets somebody through the door
There is a version of supervision built for the planned conversation. The developmental one, where you look at the next level of your practice, the patterns you keep meeting, the direction you want to set. I do a great deal of that, and it is where people actually grow.
But it is not what gets somebody through the door.
People arrive because something has landed on them that they cannot take anywhere else and cannot put down. They stay, sometimes for years, for the other thing.
I have two supervisees I began working with in March 2012. Neither arrived with a development plan. Both arrived with a version of one of those three sentences.
If you are carrying one of them today
It is not a sign that something has gone wrong with you. It is what this work does to people who take it seriously.
Nothing is too difficult or embarrassing to bring to supervision, and that includes your own personal failings. If anything, those are the ones worth bringing first.
How I work with supervisors, senior practitioners and coaches, including a single urgent consultation when something will not wait, is set out on the supervision page. There are free worksheets for practitioners, including one on countertransference, on the worksheets page.