Supervision in the Helping Professions

Peter Hawkins & Robin Shohet


The supervisor has to integrate the developmental role of educator with that of provider of support to the worker and, in most cases, quality oversight of the supervisee's clients. p4


Developmental function: developing the skills, understanding and capacities of the supervisees... through the reflection on, and exploration of, the supervisees' work with their clients.


Resourcing function is a way of responding to how any workers engaged in personal work with clients are necessarily allowing themselves to be affected by the distress, pain and fragmentation of the client, and how they need time to become award of how that has affected them and to deal with any emotions. 


Qualitative aspect provides the quality control function in work with people. It is not only the lack of training or experience that necessitates the need in us as workers, to have someone look with us at our work, but our inevitable human failings, blind spots, areas of vulnerability from our own wounds and prejudices. pp 57-58


Why be a helper?
Aware of what Jungians call our 'shadow side', we will have less need to make others into the parts of ourselves that we cannot accept. .. focusing on our shadow, we will be less prone to omnipotent fantasies of changing others or the world, when we cannot change ourselves.
'You are not here to treat the residents, nor are you here to heal them or make them better. The job of the staff is to maintain the structure and keep open the space in which the residents can learn and grow. You are merely the servants of the process'. p10


Meeting our own needs 
As part of our training we are taught to pay attention to client needs, and it is often difficult to focus on our own needs. 
'In fact countertransference is there from the beginning, since some unconscious call in me impels me to do this work. I may bring to my work a need to redeem the wounded child, so that every person who comes to me for help is my own hurt wounded childhood needing its wounds bound up by good parental care. Or the reverse. I may still be the wonderful son who would lead his father or mother out of their mistaken ways. This same parent-child archetype may also affect us, for instance, in the need to correct and punish an entire generation, its ideals and values'. ....................
Needs in themselves are not harmful, but when they are denied they join the shadows of counselling and work from behind as demands. .... Demands ask for fulfillment, needs require only expression'.  Hillman 1979   p13


Stress management
How heavy is this glass of water?....... The absolute weight doesn't matter. It depends upon how long you try to hold it. If I hold it for a minute, that's not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I'll have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, you'll have to call an ambulance. In each case it's the same weight, but the longer I hold it the heavier it becomes.  And that's the way it is with stress management. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later the burden becomes increasingly heavy, we won't be able to carry on. As with the glass of water, you have to put it down for a while and rest  before holding it again. When we're refreshed, we can carry on with the burden. 
So, before you return home tonight, put the burden of work down. Don't carry it home. You can pick it up tomorrow. Whatever burdens you are carrying now, let them down for a moment if you can. Relay, pick them up later after you've rested. Life is short. Enjoy it. (Chesterman, Personal communication, 2006). p30


Self-supervision
Questions useful in monitoring our own responses to clients are:

• What would I least like my supervisor to know about my work with this client?
• How do I want to change this client (to access my implicit or my explicit agenda)?
• Why did I make this intervention?
• What might I have held back in any way during the session?
• On a scale of 0 to 10 how well did the session go?
• What might have made it a higher score?
• What score might the client give?
• What residues from the session do I experience in my body / my thoughts?
• What is an image for the session? 

p42