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14/8/2018 2 Comments

Learning to take supervisory authority - Penny Henderson

Whilst training counsellors on a short course about supervision, my colleagues and I became interested in how to teach the trainee supervisors to take appropriate supervisory authority both under normal circumstances, which entails developing some interventionist skills and habits for good practice, and how to manage a relationship under threat because of a major difficulty, which requires a relationship- focused approach. Adlerian ideas about the importance of monitoring whether the superiority and inferiority dynamic is being expressed, and if so, how it is happening in the supervisory relationship have become useful to our teaching. Specifically we used Dreikurs’ (1953) and Sweeney’s (1981) explanations on the inter and intra-personal dynamics that arise from an individual’s feelings of superiority and inferiority. My colleagues, who call the preoccupation with success and failure (superiority and inferiority) “the slippery pole”, introduced me to these ideas and adapted Sweeney’smodel presented in the diagram on page 45.
What do I mean by taking supervisory authority under normal circumstances? It may include many ways to relate that require immediacy, may be uncomfortable, or simply take more initiative than is normal in counselling relationships, currently the major professional role of the trainee supervisors. It relates to the task of the supervisor and the expectations of the role to protect clients and uphold standards.
Examples include:
  1. making contracts for the work;
  2. taking and sharing responsibility for allocating time during the supervision;
  3. coping with ethical dilemmas;
  4. giving feedback about the skills or approach of the supervisee;
  5. writing reports or references;
  6. assessing ‘fitness to practise’ together when the supervisee is facing difficult life
  7. events or health problems;
  8. setting up regular reviews of the supervisory relationship and its efficacy, and​ preparing well for them in advance so each person gives feedback to the other.

Examples of the relationship qualities normally required are subtle to convey, and trainees’ private logic (‘internal working models’, in the language of attachment theory) greatly affects how they hear the teaching. Specifically, and unhelpfully, trainee supervisors may conflate ‘taking authority’ with ‘being authoritarian’, a style they do not wish to implement because it would undermine some core Adlerian values about equality and encouragement, respect and regard. In the inevitably asymmetrical​ relationship that is supervision, the everyday challenge is to sustain these core values about relationship whilst undertaking the necessary tasks of supervision.
As trainers of supervisors, we need to explore the issues and model the skills involved. Especially when supervising trainee counsellors there is a real power differential arising from the tasks the supervisor has to undertake, and this can beneficially be openly acknowledged rather than denied. The Adlerian commitment to supporting clients to fulfil the tasks of their life through encouragement is paralleled in supervision, as assessment and giving feedback are core tasks for the supervisor. Furthermore, these tasks need to be done within honest exchanges and without attacking the self-worth of the supervisee. The concept of Social Interest is uniquely relevant to healthy supervisory relationships and indeed professional relationships ofall sorts, because of the emphasis on people’s “proclivity for being responsible, co- operative yet creative members of humankind” (Sweeney, 1981, p. 23).

Criteria for Best Practice
  1. I have tried to develop criteria for best practice in relation to supervisory authority in both normal and difficult circumstances, and I think these include five distinct elements for trainee supervisors to consider:They need to encourage their supervisees to learn to take responsibility for preparation and for focus, so that they do not abdicate control and initiative totally to the supervisor. Often they become aware during the training of the value of this for themselves as supervisees.
  2. They need to understand about ‘slippery pole’ dynamics, and how to sustain a commitment to equality and mutual respect, especially when difficult things are to be said. Social influence, leadership, mentoring and responsibility, all come within this criterion, and getting the relationship right creates safety and an enabling working alliance.T
  3. They need to develop their views about the purpose of supervision, issues of power and authority, the development of an ethical stance, and an awareness of the importance of ethical principles and frameworks to approach supervisory dilemmas.
  4. They need to become aware of the bases for legitimate authority. These may include expertise, role, and the professional bodies’ expectation that supervisors will keep a watchful eye on practice for the sake of the profession. There is ‘institutional power’ attached to this role even when the relationship is entirely between private practitioners: the supervisor carries responsibility for the promotion of good practice and the protection of clients.
  5. They need to accept that the person undertaking the supervisory role has a right and a duty as part of the role to challenge bad or inadequate practice, and enquire about ‘fitness to practise’. Fitness to practise concerns the practitioner’s resilienceto undertake the role without doing harm to the recipient or becoming more vulnerable to fall into ethical traps because of their own life circumstances or health. With this criterion comes the expectation that the supervisor develop the skills to exercise this right whilst minimising the assault on the sense of worth of the recipient. As trainers, our role is to model and explore the skills involved, and also to engage in equally respectful relationships, even when offering feedback that we could predict would be painful or disappointing to receive. For instance, we aim to model putting the relationship first, not ducking the responsibility to be clear about standards or expectations, and being willing to share our own struggles to practise professionally. Of course as humans, we sometimes get this wrong too.

Contracting: 
Making the contract sets the tone for the relationship. Is it a basis for a working alliance? Is it comprehensive or sloppy? What leeway is there for meeting the unique needs of this supervisee as well as this supervisor? Does the supervisor feel entitled to be clear about her or his own needs, such as adequate payment, or notice for missed sessions? Does the supervisee feel entitled to be clear too, to be able to request help without having to hide their vulnerability or their skill, to be understood at their developmental stage, and so on? Contracts are crucial at the start of the supervisory relationship, and also at the start of each session, especially when the supervisee has a big agenda. The contract conveys that this is a purposeful relationship that can be monitored and reviewed by both parties regularly enough to allow uncomfortable matters to be discussed before they become impossible to speak about. Contracting is useful in counselling, and essential in supervision.

Trainees on the supervision course came with habits and expectations from their experiences as supervisees that implied that contracting is a skill that many supervisors barely deploy. Training can usefully contradict this custom and practice. Trainee supervisors can use contracting to become aware of differing learning styles, and thus of the balance between theoretically-based interventions, intuition, and use of the senses that suits them, and that a different balance may suit each supervisee. The contract can spell these out, together with pragmatics about meetings, payments, cancellations, extra contact between supervisions, and so on.

It is helpful to see managing the time during sessions as a shared responsibility. If the agenda is big, supervisor and supervisee can decide the order of topics and renegotiate if some elements take longer than anticipated. Invitations to use creativity and to focus on a specific question for supervision under each heading can invite the supervisee into
healthy habits of preparation for supervision, and build their “internal supervisor” during the process (Casement, 1985).
Power and the Taking of Authority
Power issues do need to be explored during the training to be a supervisor, add comma in which ways to address supervisee expectations are identified. If the supervisee feels inferior, fears failure, and pervades the dialogue with anxiety and excuses, blaming or complaining, the power dynamic can be discussed, and the supervisee can be invited to express their concerns and to take responsibility for their part in the interaction. This situation and this interchange may thus form a paradigm for other relationships and model direct communication in ways the supervisee may take back to the relationships with their clients. Sensitivity is required, and sometimes it cannot be made all right. Either party needs to be able to say that the relationship is not working and propose an ending, but in particular the supervisor needs to be monitoring the efficacy of the relationship and the work coming out of supervision, and they both need to commit to having regular reviews of the supervision relationship. The Adlerian insight from the slippery pole is to bring encouragement into the situation through attending todescriptions in response to the thought, “What am I doing?” rather than preoccupationwith judgement by self or other.
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14/8/2018 0 Comments

Becoming an Encouraging Supervisor - Anthea Millar, Jim Holloway and Penny Henderson

The encouraging supervisor helps supervisees remove some of their self-imposed attitudinal roadblocks and supports them to aim for their highest possible level of competence.

The word ‘supervision’ has oppressive connotations to some people. So before going any further, we need to emphasise the importance of establishing an equal, collaborative relationship between supervisor and supervisee that also has the potential to be mutually enjoyable. This is an essential value at the heart of our book Practical Supervision: How to Become a Supervisor for the Helping Professions1 and the Cambridge Supervision Training courses. Although we draw on diverse resources, our main approach rests on Adlerian ideas and values, focusing on awareness of interpersonal relating, the importance of empathy, equality, and co-operation, and the central need for, and specific skills of, encouragement.
 
‘En-courage-ment’, with courage at its heart, develops the person’s inner resources and courage and enables the building and maintenance of a constructive working relationship. The encouraging supervisor helps supervisees remove some of their self-imposed attitudinal road blocks and supports them to aim for their highest possible level of professional competence.
 
The theory and practice of encouragement was described by Alfred Adler nearly one hundred years ago, and these ideas are now extensively shared by ‘strengths based’ supervision approaches2 and ‘appreciative enquiry’3 where the supervisor and/or organisation respects, values, and positively acknowledges the ability and potential of their supervisees. As most management texts now agree, people perform best when they feel appreciated, understood, encouraged, and accepted ‘warts and all’. We can all feel shame when we make mistakes. The encouraging supervisory relationship provides a space where learning from mistakes, coping with uncertainty, and processing our emotions, are valued as normal and actually essential elements of  our professional development. An encouraging supervisor does not ignore these mistakes or uncertainties, but provides an appropriate balance between support and challenge, ensuring that the supervisory role also carries authority. This involves knowing how to be authoritative without being authoritarian. 
 
Before exploring some of the encouraging ways to put this support and challenge into practice, here are what we understand to be the three supervision tasks to be met:
 
1. To support and give courage to people engaged in emotionally demanding tasks.
2.         To make sure they know how to do what is expected.
3.         To uphold agreed standards and support the supervisee to work to them.
 
In our experience, the successful achievement of the core tasks requires the supervisor to ground their practice in these definitive essentials of supervision:
 
•           Creating a carefully negotiated working agreement between supervisor and supervisee(s).
•           Developing a supervisory relationship that has mutual trust and safety as its basis.
•           Talking openly about personal and professional values and ethics in relation to the work that is being supervised.
The working agreement
Effective supervision is a collaborative process. The co-creation of a clear contract through exploring both explicit and implicit hopes, fears, and requirements of supervisor and supervisee, lays the foundation for an encouraging, respectful and equal relationship.
The explicit contract includes such issues as organizational arrangements, codes of conduct and ethics, general practicalities such as venue, time, payment, and structures within supervision such as review processes:
The psychological or ‘implicit’ contract in supervision prevents unspoken misunderstandings bubbling away beneath the surface, such as clarifying training level,  expectations, issues of difference, learning style, ensuring boundaries, and maintenance of the supervisory alliance.
Contracting for each session
To reduce a power imbalance, it will also be important for the supervisor and supervisee to work together to clarify the agenda for each new session, so that the needs of supervisees are freshly accommodated. Some possible open questions include:
Ÿ          “What is your key supervisory question?”
Ÿ          “What do you most want to achieve in this session and how can we work together best        to achieve that?”
To maintain the encouraging equality of the relationship, supervisors can actively invite feedback from supervisees at the end of each session with such questions as:
Ÿ          “What are you taking away with you today?”
Ÿ          “What was useful about this session and what was less helpful?”
A supervisory relationship based on mutual trust and safety
Even where there is a difference in experience and expertise it is possible for supervisors to create a climate of equality and collegiality with their supervisees. This provides a potent foundation that helps supervisees have the courage to be imperfect5. Making mistakes and ‘not knowing’ are essential prerequisites for learning. Yet, as was identified in some USA based research6, trainee supervisees often avoided bringing material that could have been central to their learning; this included personal issues raised by clinical work, perceived clinical mistakes, and negative reactions to clients. This non-disclosure, which is particularly relevant with trainees, can be prevented by the supervisor at the outset of the contract saying something like:
“In supervision it is important to bring me things you are worried about, or feel you have not done quite right, or that you need to know more about. This can provide really valuable material that will invariably be useful as a base for further learning. If you avoid bringing any of these worries, I shall be concerned that you are not telling me essentials. I will be clear with you as we go along if I have any concerns about your ability to pass this course, and will discuss this with you long before I write any report.”
 
Part of what is involved in being an encouraging supervisor is to be able to name uncomfortable issues and offer clear feedback about the supervisee’s practice. Effective encouraging feedback is about enabling growth and learning and improved practice. It can be seen as an interaction, or a meeting-point between the supervisor and supervisees, rather than something that the supervisor ‘gives out’ to them. The feedback channel works best when it is two-way. One-sided feedback in supervision invariably increases a power imbalance, even when the supervisor shares positive comments.
 
Encouraging feedback is different from traditional praise or rewards, as it focuses on enabling both supervisor and supervisee to develop an inner sense of satisfaction and motivation. This involves much more than expressing positives7. Different from praise, encouragement focuses on what the person is doing, rather than how the person compares with others. Verbal encouragement can be achieved by avoiding the use of adjectival labels such as ‘good’, ‘unethical’, ‘clever’, ‘non-empathic’, and by keeping in mind the assets and intentions of the supervisee.
 
By using descriptive language and paying particular attention to verbs, the supervisor can offer feedback that is very specific, identifying what the supervisee has actually been doing, without needing to evaluate it. For example, an evaluative label: “You’re hopeless with boundaries and get far too involved with your patients” becomes: “I notice that instead of the allotted half-hour, you regularly stay for one hour with your patient, and that you made an additional home visit out of work hours when it was this patient’s birthday.”
 
From this non-attacking base, the supervisor can invite the supervisee’s own views, and then share any concerns, providing educative information and supportive challenge as appropriate.
Here respectful use of ‘signposting’ is helpful. Just as it is crucial on a motorway to be prepared for a side turning a good mile before, we can signpost our feedback in advance so it is less startling and enables a more collaborative meeting-point.
 
For example: “I’d like to discuss the ethical issue that may be involved in this situation – can we look at this now?” Further space can then be given for two-way discussion with the supervisee.
 
The use of Socratic questions can also help supervisees focus more deeply on their work, thus keeping a two-way flow of communication. This type of questioning invites the supervisee to gain insight into their own perceptions and then, ultimately, their own wisdom. For example:
 “When you say you find this young person difficult, what specifically do you mean?”
“What do you appreciate about the way you handled that?”
“How might you do things differently in future?”
 
Being able to receive feedback in a constructive way is a skill in itself, and is far from a passive process. Whether in the role of supervisor or supervisee, some form of defensiveness is likely when receiving feedback. Maybe because this triggers old feelings of shame, from which we may defend ourselves by shrinking and losing our sense of capability, or perhaps we overcompensate for our feelings of inferiority by becoming aggressive. Either way this inhibits potential learning and growth. The challenge for both supervisee and supervisor is to be able to listen openly to the feedback, and identify how, if at all, this might support future practice.
 
Supervisees will feel more able to share their mistakes and vulnerabilities if supervisors take risks to speak directly and honestly, and not put themselves on a pedestal. In addition, the supervisee must know the steps to take if they wish to make a complaint about the supervisor (this information can be clearly indicated in the initial contract).  Supervisees seldom say what the supervisor has done that was unhelpful, and so it is important that the supervisor routinely asks such questions as: “What were the most and least useful parts of today’s meeting?”
 
Ethics and authority
Part of the supervisor’s role is to act as a gate-keeper for the profession. Trainee practitioners are especially aware of this when coming for supervision, as the report the supervisor writes about their work could directly affect their entry into their chosen professional field. Whether a supervisee is in training or fully qualified, if there are concerns about their competence and resilience, the supervisor has an ethical responsibility to address the concerns, in the interests of protecting clients/patients from possible harm. The ethical position as supervisor is also one of support and care for the supervisee. So is an encouraging attitude compatible with the supervisory authority essential for effective supervisory practice?
 
At the start of this article we defined the encouraging supervisor as someone who helps supervisees remove some of their self-imposed attitudinal road blocks and supports them to aim for their highest possible level of professional competence – so yes, authority and encouragement go hand in hand. Authoritative interventions include advice-giving, providing information, and confronting. Feedback can be particularly useful when the other person has a ‘blind spot’, and is totally unaware of their motivation for what they have done or the impact of it. Often trainees fail to recognise minor ethical difficulties. When supervision can offer an encouraging and authoritative space for the supervisee to explore, ‘not know’, and ‘feel stuck’, there can be rich learning from mistakes.
 
 
It is important to distinguish between mistakes, malpractice, and poor practice. Minor mistakes are normal unintended slips in normally good practice. Malpractice arises when the practitioner meets their own needs at the expense of the workplace or people in it, and if it continues, this must be addressed as part of the ‘giving of courage’ or encouragement. Whether mistake or malpractice, the supervisor needs to address the issues with encouraging authority, and in turn, the supervisee will be more open to the feedback and guidance. 
 
The supervisor also needs to be open to stuckness, not knowing and learning from mistakes. Saying ‘I don’t know’ can be hard as a supervisor, if you feel you ought to know. It is beneficial to tolerate the discomforts of not knowing while still thinking together about an issue: this models the reflective process and demonstrates the value of reflection to the supervisee in an encouraging way.
 
Encouragement is a many-faceted process, and we see it as a vital ingredient for effective supervision. However, this fine balance between support and challenge, empathy and authority is by no means easy. We all have tendencies to move into judging and defensive positions at times, and we all make mistakes. When we can embrace these moments with compassion, it is gratifying to realize that they offer great opportunities for professional growth.
 
1. Henderson, P., Holloway, J. and Millar, A. (2014) Practical Supervision: How to Become a Supervisor for the Helping Professions. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
2. Edwards, J.K. (2012) Strengths-based Supervision in Clinical Practice. London: Sage.
3. Cooperrider, D. et al (2000) Appreciative Enquiry: Rethinking Human Organization Towards a Positive View of Change. Champaign, IL: Stripes Publishing.
4. Burnham, J. (2012) ‘Developments in social GRAAACCEEESS: Visible and invisible, voiced and unvoiced.’ In Krause, B. (ed.) Mutual Perspectives: Culture & Reflexivity in Systemic Psychotherapy (pp 139-162). London: Karnac Books.
5. Dreikurs, R. (1970) ‘The Courage to be Imperfect’. In Articles of Supplementary Readings. Chicago: Alfred Adler Institute.
6. Ladany, N., Hill, C.E., Corbett, M.M., and Nutt, E.A. (1996) ‘Nature, extent and importance of what psychotherapy trainees do not disclose to their supervisors’. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 43, 10-24.
7. Millar, A. (2007) ‘Encouragement and Other Es’. Therapy Today (18)2, 40-42.
 
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14/8/2018 2 Comments

Who's in and Who's out? - Jim Holloway

Why is it that some clients find their way into supervision from the beginning, while others barely get a look in? 

How do you decide which clients to take to supervision? That sounds like a straightforward question for any of us to ask, as part of good reflective practice. However, scrutinising a question can often be more productive than replying to it – so, instead of giving an answer, let’s look at some of the basic premises underlying this one. I reckon four key assumptions are made.
The first assumption is that deciding which clients to take to supervision must be a conscious, deliberative process. Really? If you say you consciously decide, does this mean they are never unconsciously selected as well? We could get clever (or pretentious) on this point by engaging with neuroscientific findings about the reality of ‘free will’ and so on – but let’s work instead with an ordinary notion we’re all familiar with: the hunch.
They say a hunch is stronger than a guess but not as strong as an intuition. Although we employ ‘the professional hunch’ a lot of the time, we tend to underestimate its true value. Of course, we make carefully considered decisions too, but let’s not overlook the sudden wisdom of our hunches. For example, when it ‘comes to mind’ that I need to take a particular client to supervision, even if I then wonder about what’s going on with me and that person, I’m still not ‘choosing’ to take them for any obvious reason – but this does become clear later in supervision. When a piece of client work is seriously baffling or disturbing, I am very likely to take it, but other clients arrive in the supervisory space without any conscious intention on my part.

The second assumption is that choosing is necessary and unavoidable because it would be practically unworkable to take all your clients. This depends on what kind of supervisory arrangements you’ve devised for yourself. I know someone who runs six to eight therapy sessions a week. She has one-hour fortnightly supervision with me and two-hour monthly co-supervision with a colleague. This set-up means she can fulfil her self-imposed requirement to ensure all her client work is supervised. I admire her commitment, but some therapists might feel over-supervised in that situation.
One of my past supervisees had 15 appointments per week and saw me for one-and- a-half hours every month – ie the recommended absolute minimum* – so several of her clients were never mentioned, let alone discussed. I asked her to write a caseload summary every other month, with a thumbnail description of the work with each client, plus brief queries. With this ongoing information about all her clients, I could request we give some time to certain cases that caught my eye, but which she did not choose or intend to bring. Preparing in advance for clinical presentations of clients is often essential, but I believe it’s just as productive sometimes to bring them ‘unrehearsed’ and ‘unrefined’ – not so time efficient, perhaps, but still valuable for therapeutic insight and learning.

The third assumption is that supervision is always for the benefit of clients, therefore as many clients as possible should be taken to supervision. We assume supervision can benefit clients, and very often we feel it to be the case. In fact, we’re in the peculiar position of believing it’s beneficial, while knowing there is hardly any research evidence to support our belief. It would be more accurate to state that supervision is primarily for the benefit of supervisees. To put it in plain terms: we trust that whatever good stuff a supervisee derives from their supervision sessions, one way or another, it really does get passed on to their clients.

I hope that what you get mostly from supervision is support, understanding, challenge, development and encouragement for yourself, so that you are then well resourced, refreshed and ready to maintain the same or similar beneficence for your clients. If clients do benefit from supervision, it is mostly through a subtle, indirect transmission. The point is this: in order to gain the benefit of the supervisory space for yourself, it’s not a good idea to squeeze as many clients as you can into the room.

The fourth assumption is that clients themselves have no say in the matter. In principle, if they’ve read in your contract that you consult confidentially with a supervisor, any client could ask if you talk about them in supervision. A few practitioners tell some of their clients about their supervisory discussions anyway, and the remote supervisor can become a useful transferential figure. So, in some cases, the client’s own intentional input into the supervision process is central to the work.
What intrigues me is how certain clients leap straight into supervision from their first encounter and settle themselves there for a long time. They may be welcome, but who actually invited them? And then there are clients who suddenly ‘pop in’ while you’re presenting another case. I’m sure some clients unconsciously let the counsellor know they need to be supervised. In this sense, clients ‘bring themselves’ to supervision.

In contrast, people you conscientiously put on your ‘take to supervision’ list may never show up. They ‘get lost in transit’, or you always run out of time. Or, if you do introduce them, you soon find yourself trailing off. In this instance, it’s important to ‘hear’ what that individual’s psyche could be telling you about their absence from supervision. Perhaps some clients unconsciously instruct us not to share anything of their story with anyone. With this in mind, we can invigorate our sense of choosing who we take to supervision – reluctantly or otherwise.

In BACP documents, the figure of one-and-a-half hours per month is always stated as the minimum for accreditation purposes. I’ve met many practitioners who wrongly take this to mean a ‘sufficient’ or ‘correct’ amount.
​

Reference
1. Wheeler S, Richards K. The impact of clinical supervision on counsellors and therapists, their practice and their clients: a systematic review of the literature. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research 2011; 7(1): 54–65.
2. Davies N. Research and literature overview of supervision within the counselling professions. Good Practice in Action 043. BACP 2016.
​

Jim Holloway is a senior accredited counsellor and supervisor, a partner in Cambridge Supervision Training, and a co-author of Practical supervision: how to become a supervisor for the helping professions (JKP 2014).

Summer 2017 Private Practice 25
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14/8/2018 0 Comments

The Case of the Sleeping Supervisor

Jim Holloway considers what we might learn from the apocryphal tale of the colleague who dozes off when in the supervisor’s chair

Over the years I’ve been in practice I’ve heard several therapists say they once had a supervisor who fell asleep in a session. You might have heard this a few times yourself and perhaps wonder, like me, if it’s really true. I’ve never experienced it myself, in almost 25 years as a supervisee with many different supervisors, but I suppose it might yet happen. (From the other side, in the supervisor’s chair, I would like to point out that I’ve never nodded off when supervising – as far as I know. Seriously, I’m pretty sure I would remember if one of my supervisees ever had to wake me up in the course of a session.)

One of the best measures to take against compassion fatigue is to get right away from the world of work fairly regularly
Whether told with gentle good humour, fierce indignation or a combination of both, the story of the sleeping supervisor is worth probing. It’s a subtly potent little tale that seems to have a life of its own in our professional circles, rather like a piece of folklore. This sort of micro-myth must exist for a purpose, surely, so it could be useful to take a closer look at it and explore what kinds of meaning it might carry. One very direct approach, as a purely personal experiment, is to take a few minutes to imagine seeing your current supervisor fall asleep during one of your sessions, and then observe as vividly as you can what you think and feel as the scene unfolds in your imagination. This exercise might seem a bit weird, but I did it myself and found the effect surprisingly moving and productive. If you try it for yourself, I think you’ll find the thoughts and feelings that arise may yield some unexpected information about the current state of your relationship with your supervisor.

As you create the scene in your mind, you might be aware of tender and concerned feelings towards him or her. Is she unwell, or distressed, or just extremely tired for some reason? If you feel the urge to help, what can you say or do? Alternatively, you might get primitive sensations of being lost and abandoned, and start to feel anxious, scared or angry. Notice where your thoughts take you. Maybe you begin to wonder about what kind of parallel process might be taking place. Most of us are familiar with the phenomenally sleepy way in which we sometimes react to clients, and we know this embodied effect can be unconsciously transferred into the supervisory relationship. Might that help to explain why the supervisor has apparently drifted off? Sitting silently for a minute or two while she dozes is not what you expected from the session, no doubt, but something constructive could emerge from the strangeness of the experience, if you let it develop with full awareness in your imagination.

You might take the view that almost everything that occurs in supervision is potentially relevant data to be used in the service of the client, in which case you can probably find it quite easy to stay curious and reflective. But perhaps you’re simply not in the mood for a sensitive reverie and instead you get busy exercising your sharply critical mind with immediate contractual concerns about professional ethics and fitness to practise: your supervisor is seriously letting you down and is probably over-working or suffering from an undisclosed illness. That may or may not be the case, but either way it could still miss the point, which is the plain fact that you’re totally pissed off with your supervisor for falling asleep in front of you. How dare she? You tell yourself this situation is absolutely not your responsibility and you’re not going to rescue her or somehow make excuses for her. The session feels like a waste of valuable time and is definitely not what you’re paying for.

​ Now, there are many angles we could take here, but let’s talk about money. What difference does the fee make? If you imagine a colleague dropping off drowsily in a peer group or co-supervision session, I guess your response would be strongly affected by the greater equality in the collegial relationship because no money changes hands. The true significance of your ethical commitment to care for colleagues is heightened in this sense, because no one is in charge and no one is paid to take control. When you pay your supervisor for their professional service (whether one to one or in a group) the equation is different. The way I see it, a proportion of the fee I’m paying my supervisor is for their self-care. At a basic level, the supervisor needs to charge enough for each session so they can make a good living without having to run so many weekly sessions that they become over-stretched and exhausted, and also so they can afford planned time off from working, whether just an occasional half-day or a whole week or two.
​

This is about organised resilience. One of the best measures to take against compassion fatigue as a therapist or supervisor is to get right away from the world of work fairly regularly. For me, a daily break is essential too. I’m a firm believer in the benefit of taking an afternoon nap for half an hour – a wonderfully simple luxury for which I feel grateful every day – but of course I must make sure it’s affordable. It may sound odd to state that my supervisees (and therapy clients) are paying me to switch off in my own time, not theirs. But in relation to the mysterious tale of the sleeping supervisor, this reality is exactly what the supervisor must wake up to.
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14/8/2018 0 Comments

Saying the Real thing - Jim Holloway

Bullshit in supervision shows up when we say the ‘right thing’ instead of the real thing,

I first came across the idea of a bullshit detector in a rather unexpected context, namely Michael Carroll’s scintillating chapter on spirituality in Integrative Approaches to Supervision, where he says he got the idea from the American philosopher Sam Keen. Adapting Keen’s concept of a spiritual bullshit detector for use in the field of professional supervision, Carroll identifies five things to beware of:

    1. Highly charismatic supervisors who are seen as unquestioned authorities.
    2. 
Supervisors with double standards: they ask from you what they do not do themselves.
    3. 
Superior supervisors who set themselves apart and avoid collaborative peer relationships.
    4. 
Supervisors who neither encourage difference of opinion nor invite challenge and criticism.
    5.
Deadly serious supervisors who have no sense of humour and are never playful.

So, here’s an immediate health warning: if you recognise your supervisor in this list, you could be exposing yourself to harmful levels of bullshit. Obviously, I want to believe nobody reading this column currently has a supervisor who is anything like that. In private practice, we usually select our supervisor using our own initiative, according to our particular requirements, but many practitioners in other work settings are allocated a supervisor, and do not have a choice. However, even if you seek out your own supervisor independently, you might still encounter a significant amount of bullshit. Our detectors, I would argue, need to be well tuned at all times, in all professional circumstances.

In a world full of bullshit, each of us can do 
our profession a favour by minimising our own production of it. Reflecting on its occurrence within the supervisory frame, what comes to mind? For me, it describes the quality of what is spoken when the speaker doesn’t really know what they’re talking about but believes they mustor should know. What’s behind this might be a fear of seeming stupid or incompetent – the dark edges of shame, perhaps. If I bullshit regularly in order to hide my secret feelings of inadequacy, I might never find out whether those feelings are justified in the first place, and so I learn nothing new. When, for some reason, I pretend to be something I’m not, bullshit seems to provide an effective disguise.
​

Bullshit in supervision can be a type of dissimulation (making one thing appear to be another), which sounds more polite but is just as obstructive to genuine dialogue. It also shows up subtly when a supervisee or supervisor says theright thing instead of the real thing. That kind of convenient bullshit is probably something we all come up with occasionally in the ordinary flow of interpersonal relating, but keeping it out of the professional supervisory space as much as possible strikes me as a practical and ethical necessity.

The trouble is this: in highly verbal and inventive individuals, as many therapists evidently tend to be, bullshit (whether spoken or written) can be marvellously distracting, often seductive, sometimes almost hypnotic. I know this partly because I’ve been on the receiving end of it (I guess we all have, in one kind of relationship or another) and also because I’m perfectly capable of delivering it. Let’s not overlook our own little bits of bullshit. If you’ve constructed a bullshit detector and decided on the calibration markers (like the handful in the list above) that make sense for you personally, then be prepared to apply the detector not only to others but also to yourself.

As a practical anti-bullshit device in supervision, I like the simplicity of a brief personal story told ‘against myself’. Like a teaching tale, it paints a picture and attaches some real emotion to the learning point. Take the following example of me being a bullshitter while supervising – or ‘poopervising’, if you like. This happened several years ago when I was a novice in the role, a fact that offers a partial explanation, perhaps, if not
a full excuse.


A new supervisee, an integrative therapist who had recently qualified, talked about The Therapeutic Relationship by Petrūska Clarkson.
I owned this important book without having done 
more than skim it but – bullshit alert! – I immediately reacted as if I knew the text, since I was at least aware it contained Clarkson’s seminal and much-quoted stuff about the five relationship modalities, and a close colleague had only recently told me he couldn’t imagine working effectively in therapy without fully appreciating her five-level model. All this added up to a major bullshit-manufacturing opportunity in my head, and it extended for several long minutes as the supervisee, apparently encouraged by my sage-like nods as she spoke candidly about her struggle with the book, suddenly asked a really well-formed and very pertinent question about it. I wince to recall the crap I offered in response. Regrettably, my reply could only be expressed in the false language of bullshit due to my having already taken a phoney position.
​

Thanks to that experience, one small but vital calibration point on my internal supervisor bullshit detector became firmly set: never give the impression of being familiar with something (a text, theory, author, research study, even just an acronym) that you’re really not. It’s disrespectful to myself and others not to simply state my lack of knowledge at any given point. As it happens, there is a bit of a twist in the tale too: I still haven’t read the whole book.
References
1. Carroll M, Tholstrup M (eds). Integrative approaches to supervision. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers; 2001.
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14/8/2018 1 Comment

Resistance and Resilience - Jim Holloway

If we never embark on edgy or experimental strategies, we risk becoming stuck in the work and limit what we can offer our clients

If your supervisor asked, ‘How are you resiling right now?’ it would sound like an odd question, but in the context of supervision it’s actually a regular and familiar enquiry – we just put it in different language. What might we be doing when we resile?

When we resist 
things, we can usually figure out what’s being resisted and why – on reflection, if not immediately – and we can become more conscious of how the resisting is done and what, if anything, can be changed for the better. To describe, understand and appreciate your action of ‘resistance’ involves using active verbs: you block, defy, turn against, push away, and so on. The fact that as a profession we haven’t taken the verb ‘to resile’ into our customary lexicon could be significant in this respect. When you think of yourself resiling, what actions come to mind?
I will resist a tasty etymological digression at this point, except to note that ‘resilience’ comes from the Latin resilire, meaning ‘leap back’ or ‘rebound’. I like that – a definite sense of movement there – and it also connects the action of being resilient to the vital concept of boundary.

In supervision, we tend to bang on about the importance of maintaining clear boundaries of all kinds, and properly so. But consider this: in actual practice, a great deal of effective work is done right at the very edge of, or just beyond, a boundary of some sort, despite – or perhaps due to – the counsellor feeling pulled out of shape by the process. Tight boundaries are good, and slack ones are bad. All the same, I can imagine an inflexible, rigidly boundaried practitioner missing out developmentally and therapeutically by never embarking on ‘edgy’ or experimental strategies, avoiding all leaps in the dark, not risking any creatively spontaneous interventions, and thereby often becoming ‘stuck’ in the work with clients.

I know that endurance of being-in-stuckness is sometimes necessary in longer-term therapy and can often be the start of a truly liberating movement in the client. But, if a therapist or supervisor or any practitioner becomes an expert ‘stuckist’ – too set in their ways, impervious to innovation and dismissive of novelty – then I would say they are almost certainly limiting or diminishing what they can offer to their clients and colleagues. Moreover, they increase their susceptibility to boredom.
One of my supervisees (who isn’t at all boring and has let me use, anonymously, what follows here) told me about a long-term client he called ‘a permanently stressed-out workaholic’. For session after session this client seemed to rebuff all possibility for change in his life. There were no apparent shifts in perspective, no new behaviours, no fresh insights, no reframing of anything at all. Now you might be thinking ‘resistant client’ and/or ‘bored counsellor’. And both of them, you could say, were showing true resilience: the client kept rebounding by coming to every session in exactly the same shape each week; and the counsellor was always dutifully prepared and held the space for him reliably and regularly every time.
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In supervision, the counsellor talked about sitting back with the client (often but not always a sensible position when things feel immoveable) and claimed not to be bored or frustrated – but I certainly was, and after a while did not resist saying so. My willingness toresile, to continue to return again and again to all this unchanging sameness, was rapidly fading. How come? With my supervisee’s agreement, I sat in a different chair and voiced my feelings about the situation as if I were the client. By opening up the parallel process in this way, we realised it was more a case of ‘bored client’ and ‘resistant counsellor’. That’s over-simplifying the dynamic, but essentially my supervisee discovered that, distracted by the permanent array of presenting problems, he had been unconsciously resisting a deeper relational connection to the client, who we guessed (correctly as it turned out) was really desperate for closeness. The client had assumed he couldn’t get that quality of relationship without keeping a tight grip on all his many issues; although he was totally fed up with suffering them, he believed they made him worthy of being bothered with, as if he was nothing without them. So, a paradox became clear: due to his phenomenal resilience, he wasn’t getting what he needed from therapy. The notion that resistance and resilience are concurrent or convergent actions, which I think this brief story illustrates, does not mean they are identical or never separate. For example, resistance can often be absolutely non-negotiable. Some things in your professional life must be resisted in order to maintain safe boundaries – no ifs and buts, no excuses. When in doubt, your safety as a private practitioner is enhanced if you take to supervision what it is you feel you’re resisting and what you wonder if you might be resisting, so you can then discern whether your resistance is in the service of your clients or detrimental to them. This ethical enquiry has a clear effect on the nature of your subsequent resiling: do you return to the client exactly as before or do you rebound in a different way with either a boldly revised or a subtly altered view of the client? I think that is essentially what it means to resile
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14/8/2018 0 Comments

Professing and Confessing - Jim Holloway

What do we mean when we describe ouselves as "Professional"? 

A therapist who wanted help with his application for BACP accreditation recently contacted me. He was young and keen, with a lot to say about his professional attitude, rigour and integrity. He used the word ‘professional’ so frequently I began to feel it was losing any real meaning. After acknowledging his commitment to a thoroughly professionalised approach to psychotherapy, I asked – more out of curiosity than exasperation – what the term actually meant to him personally.
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I’ve asked myself before what it really means to me too. This self-enquiry can go deep, if you let it. First of all, I think it’s simply about the good feeling of doing something well. At another level, it’s to do with my self-respect and earning the respect of my peers. The mutuality of this esteem among my co-professionals relates to a deeper need to feel genuinely recognised and appreciated by others.

In that respect, gaining BACP’s public ‘seal of approval’ can have profound private significance. Others I know find the formalised and institutional aspects of professional practice Less significant than their personally felt sense of vocation as a helper or healer. One counsellor took the view that if bodies like BACP didn’t exist, she would be working with her clients in the same way she is now. She believed that the strength of her convictions about the meaning and purpose of her therapeutic work would not be diminished in a ‘de-professionalised universe’, as she put it. That’s quite a statement. What difference do you imagine it would make to you to be practising in such a world?

Useful provocations often arise in these reflective dialogues. For example: am I truly professional in my role or is it more truthful to say I behave in such a way that I appear to be professional? If that is indeed sometimes the
and courage. It’s a key professional task to find the time, make the effort and call up the courage.

You might agree that a sense of professionalism builds quite slowly at the start of a career – and ideally continues to grow for as long as the career lasts. I doubt if any of us ever achieve a complete understanding of our professional persona, which is then done and dusted. That sounds like a barrier to lifelong learning. We might even say that a steady commitment to continual learning is a defining trait of true professionalism.

Is CPD the only thing you need to sustain your professional identity and prevent it from becoming jaded? Reflecting in supervision on the current state of your working life, with all its ups and downs, is in itself a resource for the nurture of this identity. Maintaining a sound professional practice is not merely a bureaucratic, timeserving achievement. Any concept of professionalism is pointless unless it’s animated and energised by what we actually do in our relationships with clients, and how we conduct ourselves around the work. In this sense, the certificates on your wall – while hard won and proudly displayed – are only details.

To return to the therapist I mentioned at the start, his response was, in short, a hesitant yet brave declaration of his relentless perfectionism. He ‘confessed’ – his word – that he set such high standards for himself, he could hardly bear to discuss his difficult cases (which he called ‘failures’) in supervision. Another ‘confession’
was about his strong need to impress me. Here was an ambitious practitioner (and I have his permission to say this, slightly disguised) whose highly professionalist approach looked and felt to me like an elaborate performance. Naturally, he wasn’t exactly delighted to hear this when I gently let him know. What he had not yet realised, we might say, is that it is perfectly professional to confess to not being a perfect professional.
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14/8/2018 1 Comment

Pressure of Time - Jim Holloway

Instead of covering a lot of ground in supervision, choosing to explore fewer issues can bring greater depth and clarity.g to explore fewer issues can bring greater depth and clarity

We’re in the business of talking, primarily, and we know that a natural part of speech is silence. When sitting and talking with clients in therapy, letting silences happen is vital because the quietest parts of dialogue often move us in the most useful directions. I experience this as a therapist and as a client. But in the different role of supervisor, I notice how I’m more likely to end pauses and fill spaces before they have much chance to deepen or ripen. By verbalising too soon – however inspired or confident I might feel in the moment – an opportunity for creative drifting or extended thinking might be getting squashed.

Discussing this with a colleague who said she tended to do a similar kind of ‘over talking’ when supervising, we both recognised the impulse to be brisk in supervision sessions in order to be truly effective supporters of our supervisees – who are themselves very often busy, pressured, fast- moving people. It’s worth noting here that my colleague and I don’t see ourselves as highly driven individuals. In fact, we are generally ‘rush averse’. But we’re also well aware of the need to hasten when time is tight.

For many supervisees, time spent in supervision feels like a luxury. Of course, every practitioner wants their supervisor to listen closely at length but also to talk about a range of practice issues, to ask questions, make observations, offer ideas, give opinions and so on. Every precious minute counts when supervisors have so much knowledge and wisdom to impart. My colleague and I joked about that touch of grandiosity, but we also recognised a serious point: in response to the diversity of needs, problems, doubts, demands, and challenges our supervisees bring, and in seeking to ensure they get the most from all their sessions with us, we find ourselves increasingly in ‘full on’ mode. This doesn’t mean we don’t manage to do any well-paced reflective work but it does increase the risk of missing important details, jumping to conclusions or making misjudgments.  

The wider world outside the supervisory space often feels absurdly hectic. When the daily news frequently shocks and appals us too, it becomes even more sensible to step aside from the fray for a while, to pause and sigh and re-ground ourselves. Let’s not underestimate the simple benefit of a little respite from attending to the perennial problems of living. For any practitioner who is also directly involved in political activism or social justice campaigns, the need to rest and relax, to take a break from fighting the good fight, is doubly important. In this respect, I’ve often heard people talk about therapists and supervisors creating mini-sanctuaries of sorts – calm, benign spaces experienced as somehow separate from the seemingly perpetual onrush of daily life.

So, we want to be reliable, steady, grounded, unperturbed, and yet we find ourselves grinding through the gears and hitting top speed in sessions. Not always flat out, but often. What might be driving this? What ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ could be influencing us here? Perhaps some unrealistic personal and professional self- expectations are at fault. Distinguishing unhelpful personal imperatives (eg ‘I must always work as hard as I can or I’m no good at all’) from questionable professional assumptions (eg ‘I should be constantly up-to-date with supervision research’) helped my colleague and I to clarify the issue for ourselves. One key thing we acknowledged was how the ‘quality control’ aspect of supervising our peers – significantly at a time when we both had an unusually large number of trainees coming to us for supervision – had probably led us to set our own standards so high that we ‘overshot the mark’ from time to time. The mark we aim for is where we deliver the most helpful level of supervisory intervention. This moveable point, largely influenced by the nature of the client material brought to supervision, hovers somewhere between the supervisee’s and the supervisor’s responsibilities.

There’s a difficulty in finding the right balance. As appointed gatekeepers and entrusted guardians of the counselling professions, supervisors are inevitably obliged to keep a load of ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ in mind. This applies when working with long-established practitioners just as much as it does with trainees and novices. Good ethical practice is not defined by a rigid set of regulations but, at the same time, it’s not rule-free either. In supervision we experience the tensions between what we can do and what wemust do. The rules (more aptly known in the current Ethical Framework as ‘commitments’) are there to be considered, discussed, exercised, applied, and tested – and to carry this out conscientiously in supervision can obviously take a lot of time.

If attempting to do too much within the time constraint is a problem, it has a straightforward solution: supervisor and supervisee(s) agree to experiment with doing less. This requires brief preparation and micro-contracting for the session. Don’t try to cover a lot of ground – you might end up touching on several topics or multiple aspects of client stories but only superficially or clumsily. Instead, decide deliberately to explore fewer issues (ideally with a focused supervisory question attached to them) and enjoy the benefit of greater depth and clarity. It’s a simple matter to divide the session time into no more than three or four segments, making sure the first (which may be the most urgent) really does focus on the presenting issue. If it needs more immediate attention, then supervisor and supervisee can explicitly acknowledge this and perhaps agree to reset the schedule. This mutually decided time management works with time-scarcity rather than against it. In practice, I’ve found it enables small but valuable periods of stillness and silence.
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14/8/2018 1 Comment

Figuring out the Framework - Jim Holloway

Jim Holloway believes the revised Ethical Framework gives us an accessible set of refined terms to help guide our work
I got an odd look the other day when I suggested to a wonderfully conscientious supervisee that the new Ethical Framework for the Counselling Professions1 is a supreme work of fiction. I admit that was very pointedly postmodernistic of me – not my preferred mode as it happens, but it can sometimes stimulate useful new thinking.

In this case, after a slightly tense discussion, my supervisee sat back and realised the essentially paradoxical nature of the Framework. In the plainest terms, the paradox is this: we say all these fine things in it about how superbly we conduct ourselves, and it’s obvious we don’t behave like that, because if we did it wouldn’t be necessary to write it all down. A good way to develop this idea is to ask yourself how you would be practising differently if the Framework didn’t exist. 

We might say the Ethical Framework 
is fictional only in the sense that it’s aspirational – it points you to the best version of yourself, which, unless you’re a living saint, isn’t going to appear.

We sit in the frame to talk and then something happens. We are the work that animates the frame. all day every day. And this hints at another basic but more personal paradox: the very best version of me is one in which I accept my imperfections.
Another supervisee told me she had no trouble at all accepting the new Framework as both excellent and flawed. She said she feels similarly about her religion: for her, it is at once emancipatory and restrictive. This led us to talk about how counselling as a vocation might have a sort of religious aspect for some counsellors, with BACP as a type of church. Could the Ethical Framework be mistaken for scriptural dogma? I really hope not. Although it could be aptly be  described as our trade association’s ‘Articles of Faith’, it has not been delivered to us as a divine revelation, and its chief scribe, Tim Bond, is not a holy prophet (as far as we know!). However, it does tell us there’s a strong moral code to be followed and we’re committed to following it.

While not primarily proclaimed as such, isn’t supervision itself a morally based activity? Our professional lexicon seems to favour the word ‘ethics’ over the more pious-sounding ‘morality’ – though of course the Ethical Framework does lay out a list of desired moral qualities for us to nurture in ourselves. (By the way, have you noticed that ‘fairness’ has been dropped from the list, and ‘competence’ has been renamed ‘diligence’? Something to ponder, briefly. I think the two new additions, ‘care’ and ‘identity’, complement the others well but need a bit of discussion to make good sense of them as active personal virtues.)

Although it’s packed with enormous nominalisations (‘justice’, ‘wellbeing’, ‘integrity’, and so on), the Ethical Framework does give us an intelligible and manageable structure for remembering first principles, realigning values, giving shape and finding direction. In supervision sessions, ethical principles are often named but I’ve noticed how rarely supervisees refer to or include the Framework as a whole. I wonder about that. Perhaps there’s a clue in the title: it’s a framework, not the work itself. We sit in the frame to talk and then something happens. We are the work that animates the frame. And, in fact, we’re still building the frame. I remind supervisees that the evolved document we have now is the result of painstaking collaboration between hundreds of peopleoveraverylongperiod–morethanthree decades in fact, if we take the new Framework as having begun its life as the first BAC Code of Ethics and Practice in 1984. That code must have had its critics back then, just as the current Framework does now. Not all my supervisees seem aware of the major concerns some BACP members have raised about the new Framework; or, if they are aware, they don’t hold particularly strong views about them. The debate is important and I feel we owe it to our fellow professionals to keep up with the arguments, even if we don’t always know where we stand. For a clear summary of the ideological, statutory and legal issues, I recommend Peter Jenkins’ helpful article and the eloquent correspondence in Therapy Today between Arthur Musgrave, Els van Ooijen and Tim Bond.
Despite perhaps being read by some practitioners as a worthy collection of numbered rules, the Ethical Framework clearly expects us to think for ourselves – and we expect this of ourselves, surely. See the very last sentence (item 78): ‘We will take responsibility for considering how best to act... and will be ready to explain why we decided to respond in the way we did.’ We know from experience that describing our work in regular supervision is the best method to practise being ‘ready to explain’. The way I see it, because the Framework has wrestled for years with some vague, unwieldy or obtuse terminology to do with values, qualities and principles, we now have an accessible set of refined terms to help us shape our explanations. By using this shared language in actual practice, we contribute to its further refinement. And the whole point of learning this language is to comprehend and contain the moral and ethical uncertainties brought into the supervisory space through our clients’ stories. The ethical world we seek to construct may be a fiction, but it’s always real people who live in it.
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References
1. BACP. Ethical Framework for the counselling professions. Lutterworth: BACP; 2015. [Online.] http://www.bacp.co.uk/ admin/structure/files/pdf/14237_ethical-framework- jun15-final.pdf (accessed 18 April 2016).
2.JenkinsP.WhatiswrongwiththeEthicalFramework? Contemporary Psychotherapy. [Online.] http://www. contemporarypsychotherapy.org/volume-7-no-2- winter-2015/what-is-wrong-with-the-ethical-framework/ (accessed 18 April 2016).
3. Letters.Theunethicalframework?TherapyToday2016;27(1). [Online.] http://www.therapytoday.net/article/show/46
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14/8/2018 0 Comments

The BACP in my Head :   Jim Holloway

Jim Holloway is a BACP senior accredited counsellor and supervisor, a partner in Cambridge Supervision Training, and co-author of Practical Supervision: How to become a supervisor for the helping professions (JKP 2014).

What BACP means to you:
I recently read a surprisingly persuasive account of how organisations don’t really exist.  No matter what their purpose, size or structure, they are ‘legal fictions’. A limited liability company, for example, can be accurately described as a figment of our collective imagination: it can’t be pointed at or touched, it’s not embodied by any person or group of people, and often not even located in one particular place. It’s only an ‘entity’ in law. That could explain why many organisations of various kinds try to represent themselves to the general public through an individual figurehead or ‘personality’.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. It’s something I invite new supervisees to play with, if they are BACP members. Say you had to choose someone to be the face of our professional body, as you perceive it, who would you select? I don’t mean a highly personable and articulate PR person, however valuable she or he would be in reality. The fun is in making up at least one idiosyncratic character who captures the subjective essence of what BACP actually means to you. Notice and include any seemingly random associations, however stereotypical, fantastic or daft, that come to mind. This is not a subtle branding exercise: it’s about your unique, genuine, uncensored version of ‘BACP’, in your very own head. For myself, right now, I conjure up Harpo Marx in drag – all turquoise and lavender, as it happens – intently making stacks of sandwiches out of policy documents, membership forms, committee reports, research papers... and occasionally honking his/her horn to get my attention. (What can I say? It works for me.)

Many trainees or novice practitioners seem concerned not to say 'the wrong thing'. Well, let's be clear: very often those are precisely the things that need to be said!   In my experience, most supervisees enjoy having a chance to be free and frank when envisaging BACP in this way. The playfulness of the exercise helps to bring ‘unallowed’ feelings or ‘professionally incorrect’ attitudes – and even perhaps an indication of some important shadowy stuff – out in the open, with good humour and without shame. I believe this is vitally helpful in supervision, for two main reasons. Firstly, I want my supervisees to be true to themselves and not constrained by taking up a deferential or ingratiating stance in relation to the profession or me. While being ethically minded is an essential requirement of the job, this doesn’t oblige us to be nice and polite and proper all the time. Many trainees or novice practitioners seem concerned not to say ‘the wrong thing’. Well, let’s be clear: very often those are precisely the things that need to be said! The supervisory space is nothing much if it isn’t full of candour. Secondly, issues around power and authority need to be addressed openly in supervision and not dodged or dismissed. In private practice we act mostly on our own authority, but there is a higher authority to which we’re answerable, and it has the power to impose sanctions and withdraw our individual membership. That’s what thousands of us have signed up to, and it’s a big deal, both intellectually and emotionally, to be part of such a prodigious and powerful association.

Remembering the argument that they don’t really exist, institutions seem especially likely to attract our best and worst projections and fantasies: we fill them in or flesh them out, as it were, through the power of our subliminal imaginings. To help make these transferences more conscious, I invite supervisees to say what they know about their typical pattern of relationship to authority. The story they tell about their personal power and what they do with it is always relevant. Some perceive BACP as a potent enabling force, like a nurturing family, so they feel empowered; others experience it as officious and demanding, so they feel oppressed. What follows from that? I want the supervisee to be aware of the next movement they make in response, and they usually find it useful to reflect on this in terms of parent/adult/child dynamics.

This process is reliably helpful when a supervisee is very anxious about applying for accreditation; even more so after they have made an unsuccessful first application. When a supervisee is despondent or frustrated, feeling let down or unjustly treated, then the restorative function of supervision is obviously invaluable. I believe there’s added value to be gained by recognising that the intellectual and emotional struggle to become accredited is necessarily difficult and painful. Not everyone finds it excruciating, but I believe going through the process is very much like an initiation. In other words, it’s about growing up.
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I don’t want to oversimplify this, but if ‘BACP’, in your head, is: (a) too much like a mother or father you must please and have approval from, or (b) too much like a parental authority you must criticise and do battle with, then you are probably not in a truly grown-up relationship with BACP. Many supervisees in private practice adopt a kind of reluctant pragmatism (‘There must be a less bureaucratic way, but I will do my best to jump through all the hoops because I need to become accredited’), and to be fair I think that is how a lot of us actually move closer to mature autonomy. The experienced practitioners I supervise have matured enough to know the childlike positions they can get themselves into, and how to make the necessary adjustments. Some less experienced supervisees wince, and some laugh, but most do both, when I point out that the letters BACP really do not stand for Big Anonymous Critical Parent.
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    Encouragement: An Essential ingredient of Supervision - Anthea Millar

    Supervision comes in many shapes and sizes, inspired by numerous models and theoretical orientations. Yet when ‘unpeeled’, it seems there is a common ingredient at the heart of all effective supervision practice: encouragement. This is also an essential value at the heart of our Cambridge Supervision Training courses and the book Practical Supervision: How to Become a Supervisor for the Helping Professions co-authored with my colleagues Penny Henderson and Jim Holloway.
     
    Adler, over 80 years ago, took an optimistic view of human nature, believing that a need to belong and contribute to the group is inborn in each individual. However, humiliation and shame, disconnection and disgrace, inferiority and deficiency are deeply threatening dangers to us all, and prompt us to lose courage (feel discouraged) in making positive connections and contributions. So we may resort to patterns of self-destructive behaviours if, in our family of origin, we experienced these forms of discouragement. Adler also suggested that neither heredity nor environment is the ultimate determiner of personality. Instead he believed that this desire for pro-social behaviour is embedded in us, and we all have the capacity for constructive change (Ansbacher and Ansbacher 1956). And crucially, this change is most likely to occur in a relationship with a person who is encouraging.
     
    Encouragement has been described as: ‘…the process of facilitating the development of the person’s inner resources and courage towards positive movement. The encouraging person helps the discouraged person remove some of the self-imposed attitudinal road blocks.’ (Dinkmeyer and Losoncy 1980 p 16).  Looking more specifically at supervision, Lemberger and Dollarhide (2006) state that the process of encouragement can ‘..assist the supervisee to aspire to the highest possible level of professional competence. Encouragement is literally “entering the courage” and assets possessed by the supervisee….(it) can further buttress the working relationship between the supervisor and supervisee and open up new meaning-making opportunities for both…’ (p119).
     
    In a bid to identify the many forms that encouragement can take, and having a bit of fun with alliteration, I have created a diagram that aims to illustrate my thoughts about the main Elements (or ‘E’s) of supervision. These elements are ordered to echo key phases in the supervision process, and are framed by encouragement.
     
    Ethics
    Where there is a clearly contracted working alliance that is underpinned by a strong ethical framework, such as that provided by the BACP, both supervisor and counsellor can work more courageously.  The increased courage comes from being supported by a set of principles that are not there to ‘police’ but to encourage mature reflection. Without the encouragement of an ethical frame, dilemmas can seem insurmountable; or of much greater concern, we may miss the dilemma altogether, and unwittingly enter into unethical practice, becoming both discourager and discouraged.
     
     
    The Essential ‘E’s
    of Supervision
     
     
     
     

    Ethics 
    Equality   Empathy 
    Exploration
    Enabling Insight
     
    Education   Extension
    Effectiveness

     

     
     
     
     
     
     
     

     

    Equality and Empathy‘To be human means to have inferiority feelings’(Adler 1964 p54). Adler suggested that the development of inferiority feelings result in large part from subjective childhood comparisons with other family members. As these feelings are so uncomfortable, we compensate by striving to overcome them through such patterns as superiority and perfectionism. Here’s where problems can arise in the supervisory relationship. This ‘slippery pole’ dynamic of inferiority and superiority will show itself as a discouraging power imbalance, that destroys a sense of equality.
     
    Equality does not mean that the supervisor and supervisee need to have the same level of experience, values or theoretical orientation – what it does mean is that there is a cooperative partnership that acknowledges and honours difference. By not getting caught into ‘How am I doing in comparison to others’, and reflecting instead on: ‘What am I doing?’, we then offer a supervision space based on equality that encourages supervisees to risk disclosure of problematic issues much more readily.
     
    Most counselling and supervision approaches have empathy as a fundamental basis to the relationship and I certainly see this as essential to offering an encouraging frame for the supervision work. However encouragement is always about authenticity, where a willingness to be honest (congruent) with a supervisee is as important as offering of empathic understanding.
     
    Exploration and Enabling InsightEnabling the supervisee to present and explore what is going on, whilst keeping a careful eye on the client’s well being, is a complex task. As supervisors, we may be tempted to come in too early with our theories, interpretations and answers. Equally, with the aim of being empathic, we may delay intervention, listen attentively, but offer no focused input to the supervisee. One example of very many interventions that can encourage supervisees to explore and gain insight is the process of Socratic questioning (Millar 1999).
     
    Using Socratic questions, the supervisor does not play the role of expert or authority. The skill of the supervisor is in having an idea of what direction would elicit the most useful information, clarification, or insight. Each new question is based on the supervisee’s previous answer or statement. Gradually, the supervisees are led to their own insight, and make their own conclusions as to what they are doing, and what they could be doing more effectively.
     
    Education and ExtensionWhether in the role of supervisor or supervisee, taking risks and extending our skills is often deeply encouraging. Our learning can be particularly rapid after making mistakes or discovering gaps in our knowledge. However it is at exactly these moments that we can feel most vulnerable to inferiority feelings. By protecting ourselves from this discomfort, we are not protecting the client, and poor practice may be perpetuated. Supporting the supervisee to have ‘the courage to be imperfect’ (Dreikurs 1970) through feedback that will educate and extend, is an essential aspect of taking supervisory authority (Henderson 2006). So how can this verbal feedback be offered encouragingly so that it is neither punitive nor unhelpfully praising? (Dreikurs 1958, Dweck 1999, Kohn 1993).
     
    Adlerian practice puts the emphasis on first identifying a person’s strengths, before presenting areas for development and change. This provides a firm base from which we can be more receptive to other forms of feedback. A similar process can be used both for identifying strengths and challenging areas for growth, as verbal encouragement, differentiated from praise, focuses on what the person is doing, rather than how the person compares with others. This is achieved by avoiding the use of single adjectival labels such as ‘good’ ‘unethical’, ‘clever’, ‘non empathic’, and also by keeping in mind the assets and positive intentions of the supervisee. By using descriptive language, paying particular attention to verbs, feedback offered is very specific, identifying what the supervisee has actually been doing. From this base, the supervisor may add their view, or provide educative information as appropriate.  
     
    EffectivenessLast, but not least, is the need to assess not only the supervisee’s competence, but our own effectiveness as a supervisor. Some crucial ways for the supervisor to ensure this include regular opportunities for mutual feedback between supervisor and supervisee, supervision for the supervision work, ongoing professional development and further supervision training.
     
    Encouragement is a many faceted process that is the essential ingredient for supervision. But it is not easy. I have continually to deal with my own tendency to move into a superior and judgmental mode, but have discovered, gratifyingly, that when I am more encouraging, I actually feel more encouraged. So I would invite all supervisors to reflect on what they might develop further to ensure encouragement is at the heart of their supervisory practice. This practice will in turn encourage and enable the most important person of all: the client.
     
    ReferencesAdler, A. (1964) Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind. New York: Capricorn. (Original work published 1933)
    Ansbacher, H.L. & Ansbacher, R.R. (Eds). (1956) The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. New York: Harper & Row
    Dweck, C (2000) Self Theories: Their role in Motivation, Personality, and Development.  Philadephia: Psychology Press.
    Dinkmeyer, D. & Losoncy, L.E. (1980) The Encouragement Book. New Jersey: Prentice Hall
    Dreikurs, R. (1958) The Cultural Implications of Rewards and Punishment. The International Journal of Social Psychiatry. Vol IV, No 3, Winter 1958
    Dreikurs, R. (1970) The Courage to be Imperfect. In Articles of Supplementary Readings (Chicago: Alfred Adler Institute 1970)
    Henderson, P. (2006) Learning to take Supervisory Authority. In P.Prina, K.John, C.Shelley, A.Millar (Eds). UK Adlerian Year Book 2006. London:ASIIP pp 40-49
    Henderson, P., Holloway, J. and Millar, A. (2014) Practical Supervision: How to Become a Supervisor for the Helping Professions. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
    Kohn, A. (1993) Punished by Rewards New York: Houghton Mifflin.
    Lemberger, M.E. & Dollarhide, C.T. (2006) Encouraging the Supervisee’s Style of Counseling: An Adlerian model for Counseling Supervision. The Journal of Individual Psychology. Vol. 62:2, pp106-125
    Millar, A. (1999) The Use of Socratic Questioning in Classical Adlerian Therapy. In P.Prina, C.Shelley, C.Thompson (Eds). UK Adlerian Year Book1999. London:ASIIP