Supervisors carry a particular kind of risk. You are responsible for work you never see.
You work from an account, given by somebody doing their best, who does not always know what they have left out. Sometimes what they left out is the thing that mattered.
You are not working blind
This is the part that rarely gets named. You often know something before you can say it. A quiet sense that something is not quite right, assembled out of tone, hesitation, what gets mentioned twice and what never gets mentioned at all. Sometimes you even sense what it might be.
The literature calls this implicit relational knowing. I think of it as over the horizon empathy. You are picking up something that has not yet come into view.
It is worth being clear about how this differs from what happens in the consulting room. A therapist’s countertransference is a response to somebody sitting in front of them. A supervisor’s is a response to somebody who is not in the room at all, assembled second hand, and often from pieces separated by months.
Say a supervisee mentioned, months ago and in passing, some difficulty in their own relationship. They are now talking warmly about a new client, and that client happens to be the same gender as their partner.
Nothing in that is evidence of anything. People have difficulties. Practitioners like their clients.
And yet.
A perception you cannot use
You cannot put it to them as a conclusion, because you might be wrong, and being wrong in that particular way would damage the relationship you need in order to be any use.
You also cannot ignore it, because the times it turns out to be right are the times it mattered most.
So it has to go somewhere before it goes to them. Somewhere to ask whether this is about your supervisee or about you, and to find what a sayable version would sound like.
That is an argument for supervision of supervision that has nothing to do with seniority, hours or governance. It is structural. You are holding a perception you cannot act on, and you need a third position in order to make it usable.
The rest of what supervisors bring
- A supervisee whose competence you have started to doubt, while you are the one carrying the risk.
- A supervisee you can feel is not telling you something, and you cannot yet say what.
- Parallel process. You and your supervisee stuck in the same shape as their client work, and neither of you able to see it from inside it.
- A fitness to practise judgement that has to be made about somebody you like.
- A supervisee whose client is at risk, where the supervisee is minimising and you are not.
- Being supervisor and line manager at once, and holding both without one corrupting the other.
- A supervisory relationship that has quietly become comfortable after several years.
- Supervising somebody more experienced than you, or working in a modality you do not practise.
- A supervisee under investigation by their professional body.
- A supervisee who has to attend a coroner’s court following a client’s death by suicide.
Almost none of those is a clinical question. They are questions about judgement, about risk, and about what you carry on somebody else’s behalf.
Where these conversations currently go
Mostly nowhere. Supervisors have colleagues, and they have their own supervision, but that supervision was often set up for the client work rather than the supervisory work. So the hardest part of the role gets discussed in the gaps, or not at all.
That is what supervision of supervision is for. Not more oversight. A place for the part of the job nobody else is holding with you.
I supervise supervisors, people training to be supervisors, people who train supervisors, and people delivering therapy training courses. How I work, 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.