Effective Supervision for the Helping Professions

Michael Carroll

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473906204
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychotherapeutische Beratung

Using features such as case studies, exercises and points for reflection, this is an ideal introduction to managing the supervisory relationship for both trainee and supervisor. This second edition of the book formerly titled Counselling Supervision now covers new and contemporary areas of supervision such as ethical maturity, insights into supervision from neuroscience, the organisational demands from the various contexts in which supervision takes place. It widens the concept of supervision to include professions such as coaching, organisational development consulting, counselling and psychology.

Appendix 1: The Supervisory Journey: A Memoir

I am sure there is a wonderful connection between why individuals become supervisors and their early experiences in life. Joan Wilmot describes this for herself in a chapter entitled ‘Work as Transformation through Supervision’ (2011). She remembers her father dying in a motor bike accident when she was nearly two years old; she recounts her mother's family history including accidental deaths and family break-ups. Her conclusion:

I think as a result of this early trauma I have a part of me that is engaged in healing shock both in myself and in other people. Supervision is the conduit by which I do it and help others to do the same. (2011: 78)

What early influences in my life led me to work in supervision? This question uncovers many otherwise hidden connections, associations, motivations, values, aspirations. It is deeply personal. It remains a mine of personal awareness as life progresses and becomes richer the more we excavate!

Let me start my own story by recounting a Native American legend:

An old Cherokee chief is teaching his grandson about life: ‘A fight is going on inside me,’ he says to the boy. ‘It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.’ One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-doubt and ego. The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith. ‘This same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person too.’ The grandson thinks about it for a minute and then asks his grandfather, ‘Which wolf will win?’ The old Cherokee replies, ‘The one that I feed.’ (Traditional)

In every endeavour involving relationships (being present to, being with) it is always worthwhile locating oneself. Where I am, where I come from and who I bring with me are fundamentals in all relationships, including the supervision relationship. The Native American story above locates me somewhat. Not that the two wolves inside me are the wolves of negativity and positivity, though those are there too. The wolves that locate me in supervision are the wolves of reason and emotion.

The Fight

I was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the mid-1940s. I was the second eldest of a Catholic family of nine children from working-class parents. We lived and grew up in the volatile cauldron of sectarian differences and violence; already these two ‘collective wolves’ had a centuries-old tragic history. Alongside these external wolves, two further wolves also existed in my family. My father was a fairly typical Irish man who was dedicated to his family. He worked all hours possible to put food on the table, and by and large left the dynamics of family life and child-rearing to my mother. He was quite remote emotionally and would have felt awkward with public signs of affection or feeling. In later life he changed quite dramatically and became emotionally present to his children and grandchildren. As the disciplinarian of the family he saw it as his duty to stay somewhat distant and to ‘supervise’ family life from his pedestal. My mother was quite the opposite – warm, available, emotional, involved – and soft when it came to discipline. The warm relational wolf and the remote rational wolf co-existed relatively peacefully together.

I fed the wolf of reason and discipline and at the early age of 12 joined a junior seminary to study for the priesthood. My journey of cultivating reason began. There was little or no recognition of the role of emotion, feeling or of the physical body in my priesthood training and education. The body existed, as someone said, to get your head to meetings. Nothing existed from the neck down. We know now, as the horrendous results of clerical sexual abuse in Ireland come to light, of the dangers of denying our bodies and repressing our feelings. My studies in philosophy and theology were typical of the modern rational approaches to knowledge and learning. Even my relationships with others were reasonable and rational relationships. I couldn't say I was truly ‘in relationship’, since much of the emotional connection in how I lived and worked with people was missing. In this celibate, perhaps even sterile, world of discipline and collegial relationships the wolf of reason thrived while the wolf of emotion starved. The resilient emotional wolf would not, however, stay silent, and his persistent cries began to be heard as the life of the rational wolf became more and more unsatisfying. Eventually the emotional wolf demanded recognition and acceptance. As my studies in counselling and psychology evolved (including group work, individual counselling, supervision etc.), I became more and more aware of the one-sidedness of my life. I began the interior journey of feeding, befriending and loving the emotional wolf. It was a journey that led me to leave the priesthood, get married and start a new life of emotional awareness. I learned to critique some of the assumptions of reason, think for myself and allow myself to feel and express my emotions. So, belatedly, I started to see the value of, and immerse myself in, individual reflective practice.

I left my former life, however, with an inheritance. I was still very much influenced by what has been called ‘technical rationality’ (Schon, 1883: 31). (Technical rationality is an approach that logically finds right answers or methods of applying professional knowledge to practice in a technical or robotic manner.) My religious training had been based on the assumptions of natural law whereby everything, human beings included, can be understood as following definite and fixed laws of cause and effect. This paradigm ‘reduces practitioners to the level of technicians whose only role is to implement the research findings and theoretical models’ (Rofte et al., 2001: 7). Technical rationality works on the principle that once the theory has been grasped, the practice will follow automatically.

I was learning fast, however, that between the theory and the application is a vast chasm that the practitioner has to bridge. From the lofty heights of what should work according to professional knowledge, to the down-to-earth practice of what did work, there was a whole territory of adjustment, adaptation, interpretation, readjustment and moment-to-moment decision making. Practitioners are not like carpenters with a hammer and chisel; they are more like tailors with their cloth. The answers are not given. They are certainly not as applicable as a sticking-plaster is to a wound.

This is where reflection enters the helping equation. It becomes the bridge that adapts professional knowledge to real-life and real-time situations: ‘The reflective practitioner acts as a skilled tailor, using the knowledge base of his or her profession as the cloth from which to cut appropriate solutions to fit the requirements of the specific practice situation’ (Thompson and Thompson, 2008: 15).

Supervision became a central and symbolic component in my new life and stands as an archetypal bridge between my past and present. It provides a path for both myself and others to span the distances between past and present and between the emotional and the rational. It is of course a fragile, rickety bridge rather than a solid structure. It represents the abilities to both go with the flow and stand against the current.

My journey in supervision has enabled the wolves of reason (theory, skills, models, frameworks and research) and emotion (relationships, engagement, trust, critical moments and ethical decisions) to find ways of living together and coexisting in harmony. The reasoning wolf is well fed in my avid reading and interest in the supervision literature. The rational supervision wolf is plump and sleek. But I have also been practising supervision attentively – involved, engaged, relating, emotional and connected. The emotional wolf is equally well-fed and sleek. My legacies from my mother and father have combined productively in my supervision. I know I need to feed both wolves. My hope is that this book will show how reason and emotion combine to make supervision one of the most creative learning environments available to us.

Learning and Supervision

At the heart of my interest and passion for supervision is my fascination with learning. It has been an abiding theme of my life and all my jobs have revolved around setting up learning relationships, creating learning environments and facilitating learning in one-to-one, group, team and organisational settings. Learning for me means increased knowledge, new or more finely-tuned skills, capability, competency and change of behaviours, values, mind-sets and mental maps. Simply put: learning = growth = development = change. Being part of the journey of learning is one of the most satisfying and fulfilling aspects of my life. What thrills me most is when I meet someone who was on a programme I directed and they say how that programme affected their learning and their lives. Those transformational moments are what make my work worthwhile. I look back and become ‘retrospectively introspective’ (Ray and Myers, 1986). Kierkegaard is reputed to have said, ‘You live life forwards, you understand it backwards.’ He could, of course, have been talking about supervision, which is concerned with making sense of past experiences and past practice. He could have been talking about my making sense of my own learning. I want to gather or glean my learning from experience and see if it resonates with your supervisory learning and experience.

From the past to the Future

I wish I could ‘live the mantra’ outlined by Shaw and make it a way of life rather than simply a set of skills:

I have a keen sense of the move towards and away from agreement, of shifts in power difference, the development and collapse of tensions, the variations in engagement, the different qualities of silence, the rhetorical ploys, the repetition of familiar turns of phrase or images, the glimpsing and losing of possibility, the ebb and flow of feeling tone, the dance of mutual constraint. (2002: 33)

My own mantra would include:

I want to formulate desires and aspirations for myself as both supervisor and supervisee.

I want to be less knowing.

I want to stay more with unknowing and uncertainty.

I want to cherish silence.

I want to disagree more agreeably.

I want to listen, notice and articulate the assumptions I make.

I want to accept the discrepancies in my practice.

I want to build authentic bridges between theory and work.

I want to remember that most bridges are rickety.

I want to notice the textures of feeling.

I want to see and hear what I so often overlook.

I want to see my blind spots, speak my dumb spots, hear my deaf spots.

I want to be patient and wait until the insight is ready.

I want the enthusiasm of the beginner and the wisdom of the experienced.

I want to see my supervisors, my supervisees and all our clients as bearing gifts.

I want to be able to distinguish the gifts from their wrappings.

I want to see with the heart as well as with the head.

I want to become real to myself and to others.

I want to be a critical reflector leading to transformational learning.

I want to glimpse the future in the present.

I want to reflect deeply and critically on all of my life.

I want to be supervision-in-motion.

An Exercise

When training supervisors, I often ask them to write their ‘Philosophy of supervision’ for me and for others. What letter would you like to give potential supervisees that captures for them what supervision means to you? Take lots of time on this and when you have a first draft ready seek feedback from trusted colleagues and friends. I suggest you repeat this exercise every few years as your philosophy of supervision evolves in the light of practical experience.

Here is one that you might use as a starting point:

I want to offer you a space where vulnerability is accepted, where there is respite from perfectionism, achievements and the demand for results, where there is rest, time and space for reflection. A place to stop, to get off the treadmill, be heard and nourished and challenged to be who you truly are, to develop potential. I want you to be safe to push the barriers of your comfort zone, so there can be growth. I want you to have the freedom and spontaneity to shout with excitement and enthusiasm at your success and to acknowledge without shame your worst scenarios. Supervision is an encounter where spirit meets spirit.

When this meeting happens there will be trust, humility, modelling and shared learning; there will be the ancient art of play, guides come to education, challenges present themselves, there is honest and loving feedback. The senses of taste, smell, touch sight and sound, knowing and wonder become sharper and are appropriate channels. There is a real sense of connection, a reservoir of deepening levels of awareness and personal responsibly, a mystery waiting to be explored. An eagerness to meet, a quickening of life forces, magnets which draw teacher to teacher. I want there to be innocence and purity, surprises and creativity. I want to take the risk of being wounded, scared into reality so that you can be healed. You need to feel protected from ridicule, shame and abuse. Bubbles of energy seep to ...