Passionate Supervision

Robin Shohet

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781843105565
• eBook ISBN: 9781846427497
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Social Sciences

This is a book that unashamedly brings love, spirit and soul into the heart of the supervision process but does so without becoming sanctimonious or precious. We see this through the various heart-felt experiences and stories of the different helping professionals that Robin Shohet has brought together'

- from the Foreword by Peter Hawkins, author of Supervision in the Helping Professions

Practitioners working in the helping professions realise the importance of supervision as a space for: reflection; compassionate inquiry; and continuing professional development. This book presents examples of good practice which will help readers to enhance their own supervisory relationships.

Robin Shohet brings together supervisors from the fields of consultancy, education, coaching, psychotherapy, youth work and homeopathy, many of whom have been supervising for over 20 years. The contributors explain why supervision continues to be just as important as when they first started, and describe how and why they have managed to stay passionate about their chosen career. The book features numerous case examples to illustrate the different perspectives, demonstrating that supervision is essential and rewarding in a variety of professions.

Passionate Supervision is a valuable resource for anyone working in the helping professions, for whom supervision is an integral part of their work.

Introduction to Chapter 1

I knew of Jochen’s work with refugees and asylum seekers in the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and saw how it had transformed his practice as a therapist and supervisor. In this chapter we are asked to re-examine many of our beliefs and concepts, our stories of who we think we are. In urging us to think outside our boxes, he is offering a way of listening to ourselves, our supervisees and our clients that is potentially both challenging and liberating.

I asked Jochen what he most wanted the reader to take away from his writing and he replied:

Writing this chapter has been a challenging, exciting and rather unpredictable journey. It rattled me more than I had expected, pushed me over more edges than I had anticipated and led to insights deeper and more reassuring than I could have ever wished for.

I hope this chapter does for the reader what it has done for me.

Chapter 1

Breaking the Box: Supervision – A Challenge to Free Ourselves

Jochen Encke

A child is having a terrible nightmare.

Isn’t our instinct to take it gently in our arms, hold it tenderly and by lovingly talking to it encourage it to wake up?

In this chapter I show how I invite my supervisees to do exactly the same with their clients: rather than to examine their clients’ stories and to explore their feelings, I encourage my supervisees to wake up to a bigger reality and, by doing so, help their clients go beyond their own stories. We do not suffer because life is so painful. We suffer because the box we have built around ourselves has become too small. What is needed is not the healing of wounds, but our willingness to break out of our boxes. Passionate supervision offers a way to do this.

I remember my first psychotherapy session many years ago. I was deeply distressed, and I felt pretty hopeless; nothing seemed to work out in my life. For about half an hour I poured out my pain and confusion. I plunged it all in front of my therapist hoping for an analysis and a suggestion how to go about solving these numerous problems.

However, what I received was one sentence delivered in a warm and understanding manner:

My God, Jochen, you are in a pickle!

This sentence threw me. It did not throw me because it would so powerfully help to understand my problems and solve them (because it did not). It was not my mind that got affected. At that time I could not really put words to what had touched me so much. I only could feel a physical response: I observed my stomach muscles relaxing and my diaphragm softly vibrating. A peace started engulfing me from within that I had never experienced before, slowly crawling through my entire body. I had touched a place far deeper than my stories; I had touched what later I would call my soul. An inner smile of recognition appeared from nowhere and if I had allowed it to develop I would most probably have laughed my head off.

Maybe for the first time in my life I had an opportunity to step outside my self-created box – and I did not dare to take it. Instead I stifled that smile! This experience has become the cornerstone for my personal and professional life as a psychotherapist and supervisor, not just because of the smile I had felt so unexpectedly, but also because of my determined effort to stifle it. I pushed it away, because it did not fit into my concept of my self as a suffering and confused young man. Then and there I decided to stick to what I felt familiar and my mind could identify with: ‘the story of me as I knew it’. I decided to stay in my box.

Many years I spent trying to understand the ‘story of me’, ‘polishing’ my box from inside – and with that making sure I stayed inside. However, I had never forgotten the smile. Often without me noticing it, I was pursuing it.

From time to time I met somebody who reminded me that there is life outside my box. These men and women were like a good parent listening to the sorrow of the child, knowing that what seems so difficult and overwhelming in the child’s eyes, actually loses its power when viewed from a wider perspective. They were holding a bigger picture, without denying the reality of my experience. They were seeing something I could not see yet. They were seeing my soul, while I insisted on clinging to my stories.

Then a time came when I recognized my own stories and those of others to be what they really are: just stories. Stories are like boxes we build around ourselves to give us structure, identity, security, and familiarity. We are attached to them even when they are traumatic and painful, because they feel so much part of us. Although breaking the box open would give an immense freedom, the resistance is great since outside that box we feel unprotected and so different to who we believe we are, that we desperately keep it intact. However, stories also limit us; if we grow too big they suffocate us, or if the stories grow too big they squash us and prevent us from being who we really are.

Recognizing that we continuously create and repeat stories is an important step toward breaking our boxes. The process of breaking our boxes, however, then only begins. It becomes a never ending process in which more and more of life’s events can be appreciated and seen as merely stories unfolding without needing to get drawn into them. The less we get taken over by stories the more a space opens from which we radiate an immense amount of peace, love and inner strength.

Supervisees come to us with powerful stories to tell from their clients. Whether the supervisee is a medical professional, a social worker or a psychotherapist, what every single practitioner in the helping profession has to deal with is a continuous need of clients and patients to be made to feel better. Something is broken, which needs fixing. Something has gone wrong, which needs being put right. Practitioners can easily get drawn into the presented story, the presented problems, feelings and worries – and with that, stay in the box clients have created for themselves. The more powerful the story and the more painful the feelings, the stronger the box and the more difficult to see anything else.

(I am not suggesting that boxes are all bad. They are there to hold, contain and give a sense of familiarity – at least for a time. Sometimes they even need to be rebuilt when they got shattered too early or too brutally. However, ultimately I suggest even a ‘shattered box’ is also another story that wants to be left behind.)

Sometimes therapists, social workers, or any other person in the helping profession find themselves in a place of helplessness and hopelessness triggered by powerful stories – maybe a bit similar to that of the medical professional when facing the terminally ill. What do I say to the terminally ill person who knows he will die soon? Words of comfort cannot come any more from the place of hope, the hope that soon things will be better and back to normal. (David Owen has written more about this in Chapter 3.)

When arriving at a place where ‘there is nowhere else to go’ and accepting it, at that moment life becomes more than just a life that needs fixing. Healing becomes more than saving a body. True support comes from knowing that even ‘being terminally ill’ is just another story – a powerful one, though. True support comes from knowing that there is more to life than what I experience inside my box.

Obviously it is essential to appreciate the presented story, to deal with the problems, whether it is providing medicine, listening to important life experiences or helping to solve housing or financial problems, etc. Stories are there to be told and listened to. Life is full of them; life is one big story. Stories can be very difficult to bear; they also can be rich, captivating and entertaining. I do not at all want to diminish the importance of stories. Life without stories would be very dull. Stories can be horrible, beautiful and challenging – and they can open doors.

When supervision provides a space in which stories and problems are seen as a gateway to a new dimension of reality, rather than merely as issues which need solving, for me at that moment it becomes ‘passionate supervision‘.

I call it passionate supervision because I believe passion is the essential ingredient to breaking through intellectual and emotional resistance. Passion as I see it is not a feeling; it is a force capable of deeply affecting others in a subtle and profound way. Any action, any thought or feeling when fed by passion has a hugely transformative power. Passion is not fanatical. Passion is not noisy. Passion is gentle and patient while at the same time fierce and determined. Passion arises when the essence of one’s life has been touched and one starts dealing with the world from that place. For me passionate supervision has become this essence. This work has taken me over and has infiltrated my whole being. It is not something I only earn my living with; it is something that occupies every second of my life.

Let me continue with an analogy. Going beyond the stories is a bit similar to seeing a 3-dimensional picture.

At first glance you only see a flat 2-dimensional picture or a large amount of dots in different colours, until you re-adjust your eyes and suddenly a very clear 3-dimensional image appears where the 2-dimensional picture or meaningless and randomly displayed dots had been. It is by looking through the dots and softening your vision, by basically disregarding the 2-dimensional picture, that you discover the new dimension. It is essential for somebody to be there who knows and passionately insists there is more to that 2-dimensional picture and can show you the different way of looking; to find it you have to do it by yourself. Once you know how to re-adjust your eyes it becomes as real as the 2-dimensional picture. It is wonderful and rewarding to watch the faces of those who suddenly for the first time can see this new dimension.

Similarly, first you look at life filled with your stories seemingly happening at random without any reasons or connections. Stories are like these randomly displayed dots. They are useful and meaningful, but only if you can allow them to be there as they are without focusing on them. Then by looking through them tenderly suddenly a whole new world opens, a world which will dwarf any story.

Passionate supervision as I see it does not change the outline of a supervision session in obvious ways. The passionate supervisor like in any other form of supervision will talk with the supervisees about their clients. Their stories will be the obvious focus of the work. The dynamics between practitioner and client and the stories will be explored together and other possibilities to intensify and deepen the work will be discussed. This is how traditionally supervision works and this will also happen in passionate supervision.

The new dimension passionate supervision brings into the work comes from the supervisor’s presence and passion, not from what actually is talked about in the supervision session.

When I think back of my first experience with the psychotherapist – as mentioned at the beginning of the chapter – it was not what he said or did, but his obvious awareness of and presence in a different space that affected me so deeply.

The passionate supervisor has not merely an intellectual concept of a reality beyond the box, but actually experiences life beyond stories. Similar to a parent he not only knows that life is bigger than what it seems to be, but actually lives in that bigger space. The stories then are merely used similarly to how the randomly placed 2-dimensional dots are used to get to the 3-dimensional picture: they are the starting points to a deeper experience.

In supervision, the stories like the dots are all there are to focus on. They are appreciated. However, by also keeping a loving and determined detachment from the stories the passionate supervisor will create an atmosphere in which the supervisees can slowly disentangle themselves from the involvement in their clients’ reality. The passionate supervisor knows that the solution of a given problem cannot be found on the level the problem is presented, and therefore he will not invest much energy in the presented stories. What does this mean?

Imagine you have six matches of equal length and are asked to create four triangles of equal sizes. The solution of this problem cannot be found on the 2-dimensional level. Whatever you do on a flat piece of paper does not lead to the solution. Once you incorporate a 3rd dimension it becomes easy: three matches you leave in a triangle flat on the piece of paper, on top of it you erect a pyramid with the other three matches.

What it means to find a larger context I learnt some years ago when my very close friend became terminally ill. During his last months everybody experienced an immense peace and love radiating from him. He increasingly was less concerned about his illness and future, but became more open to us. Shortly before his death he took me in his arms and said: ‘If I had the choice between a healthy body and the love I am surrounded by, I would without a hint of a doubt choose love.’ Although this was incomprehensible for my mind at that moment, I could clearly feel this was his reality. He was outside his box. Love and deep feelings of peace and acceptance were holding him on a different level of consciousness. This touched everybody. It was such a powerful experience that even death dwindled in its presence.

The time with him has affected me deeply. Knowing that there is a power in all of us and a level of consciousness, which can make what we have thought of as important totally lose its potency, is indeed a very liberating experience.

Many spiritual traditions point to the importance to stop thinking, to stop the mind’s activity. We can try to fight the mind. Or we can find something bigger to take us over and discover how suddenly that what has bothered us loses its power.

The solution of my friend’s ‘being terminally ill’ did not come from having found a cure, but from having discovered something so much more powerful it even dwarfed death. A cure has not been found for him but healing has taken place. He was living his soul, not experiencing life any more through his stories.

There is no tool, no technique to find that peaceful and open place outside the box and beyond the stories. The mind cannot possibly understand or create this place. The mind is always only interested in creating stories. I am not talking about learning something new. I am talking about re-connecting with a place in ourselves, which has always been there, but has been covered up by a huge amount of stories that we have learnt to accept as ‘reality’. The passionate supervisor just carefully points to the possibility that stories are just stories, however powerful they may be. This has to be done gently and lovingly; the process itself, though, can be quite fierce, surely challenging, at times painful – and irreversible. That is why I talk about breaking a box, rather than melting or softening it.

In order to explore this a bit further, let us for a moment turn to Aikido, a Japanese Martial Art, which I have been involved with for many years.

Aikido teaches how to use the power of the attacker to one’s own advantage. By absorbing the attack one learns to move one’s body in such a way that the power of the attack is turned back towards the attacker. The more powerful the attack the stronger the response then becomes. The strength comes from not resisting so that the attacker loses the sense of some-body actually being there to attack. He falls into an empty space. Aikido talks about ‘Zanshin’, which means stillness, when it tries to explain what this empty space is about. But it is more than stillness and surely not really empty at all. It is a presence that is soft and open, alert, solid, focused, centred and explosive. It is a presence not disturbed or unbalanced even when physically attacked, or when surrounded by difficult or threatening life issues. Zanshin is there when all the attacks, all the problems, all the stories just pass gently through us.

Aikido cannot be taught theoretically; it is not a mental exercise. Through observation, constant repetition and close contact with the teacher, old acquired patterns slowly dissolve to give way to new and more effective behaviour. Aikido is more than a physical exercise. It shows who we are when we welcome life. If we complain about or fight against what is, if we argue with reality, we always lose. By not resisting, but using whatever life throws at us und turning it into our advantage, we radiate a loving, passionate, fierce and fearless energy – an energy which makes passionate supervision possible.

Here are some thoughts about the process of passionate supervision with an organization I have been working with for some years. This organization consists of eight social workers, and is working with the homeless, especially those who are severely destitute and traumatized.

There are no quick fixes when we deal with deep transformation and change. Passionate supervision is always a long-term process. (See Chapter 5, where Joan Wilmot writes about long-term work.) Obviously passionate supervision needs to take into account the day-to-day problems practitioners are experiencing in their work and has to deal with them, but at the same time it is also holding a space for a wider transformation.

In my experience, we all ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Other Books
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Introduction to Chapter 1
• Introduction to Chapter 2
• Introduction to Chapter 3
• Introduction to Chapter 4
• Introduction to Chapter 5
• Introduction to Chapter 6
• Introduction to Chapter 7
• Introduction to Chapter 8
• Introduction to Chapter 9
• Introduction to Chapter 10
• The Contributors
• Subject Index
• Author Index