 |
Home > Focusing and ... > Psychotherapy > Articles > Focusing-Oriented Supervision
As an inexperienced training therapist, I was anxious about seeing my first clients, so I willingly acquiesced to the requirement of weekly group supervision. Supervision was a strange new activity that consisted of meeting with fellow students and a seasoned practitioner in order to explore what was really happening behind the closed door of therapy. I soon looked forward to these meetings as an opportunity to compare myself with my colleagues and to exchange real or imagined transgressions for the reassurance and advice of my more experienced supervisor. Unless my colleagues and I were entirely unrepresentative, such 'comparison' and 'confession' seems to constitute significant aspects of supervision, at least for training therapists.
However, my needs within supervision changed as I neared the completion of my training. This may be a logical and positive consequence of gaining practical experience as a therapist. The problem was that the supervision offered, or my use of it, did not evolve with these changing needs. Now as a training supervisor, I am conscious of looking for ways to enable supervision to evolve along with the needs of my supervisees so that our meetings remain personally and professionally engaging rather than merely compulsory. My question is, "How can we develop forms of supervision that are responsive to the needs of supervisees at various stages of experience and thereby more likely to be of benefit to our clients?"
With supervision being so embedded in training programs and/or continuing professional practice, how do supervisors and supervisees keep their discussions challenging, spontaneous and useful, and avoid supervision becoming a reluctant obligation or professional habit? What in fact comprises our supervisory time, and how central or ancillary is it to our actual work with clients? How can we make supervision sessions more directly relevant to our work with others and to our own personal development?
In the following chapter I propose that regardless of therapeutic orientation or years of experience, incorporating the experiential dimension of Focusing into supervision may enhance the awareness of the supervisee/therapist and carry forward the work of therapy. I am not suggesting that Focusing, as outlined by Eugene Gendlin (1981), should replace all other aspects of supervision, but that it offers a major avenue of exploration within it.
Incorporating Focusing into supervision sessions may address some of the questions raised above by reducing what I perceive to be a common obsession with the content of the client's narrative (or the supervisee's, for that matter). Supervision can at times concentrate so much on the client's story that we may well ask ourselves: "Although with the best of motives, are we just gossiping about the private struggles of another human being?" "Are we only impressing ourselves with the depth of our concern and compassion for others?" The assumption may be that these discussions of content affect the supervisee's awareness in some way and thereby their work with their client. Doubtless this can sometimes be the case. However, I have partaken in too many long (sometimes theoretically based) conjectures about clients not to wonder if these are really of use in developing supervisee awareness. Depending to some extent on one's theoretical orientation, such supervision sessions are more or less likely to evaporate into the ethereal air of intellectual theorising or descend into the dark undifferentiated mysteries of synchronicity, parallel process, intersubjectivity etc. The question is whether and how we are able to transfer these speculations back to our therapeutic relationships in a way that is beneficial to our clients and not only intellectually or emotionally satisfying to ourselves. Without explicitly exploring how to take supervisory discussions back into the actual process with the client, how does this kind of supervision help with what happens in the next therapy session?
A Focusing stance may help address these tendencies to over-emphasise content, to adopt a paternalistic attitude to clients, and to apply general theories to intricate human processes. Focusing may contribute towards a 'demystification' of supervision, and of therapy in general. It could offer a kind of supervision that is more 'grounded' in the process of what is being experienced between the two people in therapy as well as the people in the supervision session. This emphasis remains responsive to the supervisee’s needs as they are presented session by session. Received knowledge and common therapeutic assumptions may be challenged by this return to how we are actually living our situations. In this chapter I will outline some commonly held ideas about supervision and will follow this by a short description of Focusing before giving examples of how Focusing might function in supervision sessions.
I recently commented to a supervisee that I wanted to begin to use Focusing in our group supervision sessions. His response was: "But you do that already, it's obvious". Upon reflection, I realised that I was weaving a Focusing style and attitude naturally into my work as a supervisor. However, there are also more explicit ways of adding Focusing to the supervision that we usually do. In the following discussion I will demonstrate how Focusing can expand upon supervision from various angles; the reader may wish to consider further how it could be incorporated into different orientations as well as how it could be a distinct orientation itself.
Choosing what to bring to supervision
As supervisees it can be difficult to decide which client or what kind of issue we want to present in supervision. We often think our problems with each client are discreet, about only that particular relationship and in some respects that is probably right. But we may find, by inviting a 'felt sense' of specific clients, that there is also a similar feeling to our work with more than one client and that by presenting our work with one client, we are in fact addressing aspects of our work with other clients as well…
Rather than the supervisee consciously choosing what to concentrate on in the supervision session, he or she can ask themselves: “What feels most important today” or “What feels most important about this client” and wait for a felt sense to form, usually in the middle part of their body; throat, chest, stomach, or abdomen.
When supervision touches upon an issue for therapy
The distinction between therapy and supervision can be simultaneously clear and flexible. It is usually apparent when someone is not bringing enough of themselves into the supervision forum or when they are using supervision solely to explore their own personal issues rather than their client work. From a Focusing point of view supervision should, by nature, be deeply self-reflective and experiential and thus it will generate issues for the supervisee and supervisor to take to their personal therapy or personal Focusing sessions.
The Supervisor's Issues
Just as the therapist/supervisee's issues can affect the therapy, so the supervisor's issues can also affect the supervision, in a productive or adverse manner. In order to best manage this effect, Lees (1999) suggests that supervisors and supervisees should be seen as 'co-workers' rather than the classical view of supervisor as mentor or overseer.
Working from the implicit phenomena
Taking a phenomenological approach to psychotherapy is more an attitude or intention than it is an accomplishment. Basics of this approach include describing rather than interpreting experience, bracketing our expectations and assumptions in order to approach immediate lived experience, and having no pre-set hierarchy regarding what is significant and what is trivial (see Spinelli, 1989:pp.16-23). We can never access experience, ours or another’s, free from prejudice, but the phenomenological attitude nonetheless enables us to be much more open than we would be if we were explicitly bound to a pre-set theory. Focusing enables supervisors and supervisees from any theoretical orientation to work phenomenologically. This supports our intention to stay close to the client's experience rather than intellectualising, generalising, or distancing ourselves with theories.
'Parallel Process' and other Occult Influences
At times it seems as if the 'client's issues' are repeated in the supervisory relationship through the behaviour of the supervisee. This has been understood in various ways and is often referred to as 'parallel process'… Focusing not only offers a parsimonious description of 'parallel process' but it also allows us to invite this experience to occur more often. The phenomena of parallel process are not mysterious or especially surprising when we recall that our bodies can create a holistic 'felt sense' of our life situations. Just as the client might recreate the experience of actually being with his lover simply by talking about him or her in a session, so the supervisee can recreate the situation of a specific session simply by recounting it in supervision. Likewise, the supervisor will begin to live that session while listening to his supervisee's account. It is not necessary to assume that someone is doing something to someone else when so-called parallel process is experienced. Nor is it necessary to assume that this phenomenon displays a ‘problem area’. It may simply be that in supervision our bodies each form a felt sense of being in that situation, so we sometimes more than recount it, we live it in a shared way. If this sense of the session being re-lived in the supervision is missing, it can be invited by asking ourselves the question: “And how does it feel to be with that client in the room? How does it feel for us to be exploring that here, now? What happens between us as we talk about your client?” As always, after the experience is explored, it is possible to return to the context of our own theories if that is actually useful.
Clearing the Space to Supervise
The first step in Gendlin’s original way of teaching Focusing is called 'clearing a space' (Gendlin,1981). When applied to supervision, this involves checking which issues the supervisor/supervisees are carrying bodily from their own lives as the supervision session commences.
Self-supervision
Focusing is an easily learned and effective form of self-reflection. When leaving the consulting room after a session, or later while writing up notes, a therapist might become aware of a feeling related to the session. If she knows Focusing, she has the option of pausing and letting her attention drop down to where her body makes this feeling, and quietly staying with it until something emerges from the feeling itself.
Focusing is our natural ability to 'be with' the unclear process that always exceeds what we can articulate in symbolised content (words, concepts, images, memories etc.). As humans, we can refer directly to this on-going bodily experience, and in supervision there are specific activities that can be explicitly enhanced by Focusing. The resultant form of supervision would be ‘process-centred’ rather than content centred – regardless of whether that content originated from the supervisor, supervisee, client’s story, or theoretical assumptions. Concentrating on the experiential process as I have suggested, could give us forms of supervision that are responsive to the changing needs of supervisees, keeping supervision challenging, exciting, and relevant to our client work and our own personal lives…
Tudor, Keith and Worrall, Mike (2004) Freedom to Practice. Person-centred Approaches to Supervision. LLangarron UK: PCCS Books
Bond, Tim (1990) Counselling Supervision - Ethical Issues, Counselling. May: 43-5.
British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (2000) Ethical Framework for Good Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy. http://www.bacp.co.uk/
Cartwright, Alan (1996) Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. In Michael Jacobs (Ed. 1996) In Search of Supervision (36-52). Buckingham: Open University Press
Conradi, Prue (1996) Person-Centred Therapy. In Michael Jacobs (Ed. 1996) In Search of Supervision (53-74). Buckingham: Open University Press
Cornell, Ann Weiser (1996) The Power of Focusing. Oakland CA: New Harbinger Press
Friedman, Neil (2000) Focusing: Selected Essays, 1974-1999. USA: Xlibris Corporation
Gendlin, ET (1981) Focusing. New York: Bantam Books
Gendlin, ET (1986) Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams. Wilmette Ill: Chiron Publ.
Gendlin, ET (1996) Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy. A Manual of the Experiential Method. New York: Guilford
Gendlin, ET (1997) A Process Model. Focusing Institute website. http://www.focusing.org/process.html
Gendlin, ET (1999) 'A new model', Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol.6: 232-7.
Hawkins, Peter and Shohet, Robin (1989) Supervision in the helping professions. An individual, group and organisational approach. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Hendricks, Marion N (2002) Research Basis of Focusing-Oriented/Experiential Psychology. In David Cain and Jules Seeman (Eds.), Research Bases of Humanistic Psychotherapies. American Psychological Association (in press)
Jacobs, Michael (Ed. 1996) In Search of Supervision. Buckingham: Open University Press
Lees, John (1999) An approach to supervision in health care settings. The European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling and Health. Vol.2, No.2, August: 131-41.
Levin, David Michael (1997) Language Beyond Postmodernism. Saying and Thinking in Gendlin's Philosophy. Evanston Ill: Northwestern U. Press.
Madison, Greg (2001) Focusing, Intersubjectivity, and “Therapeutic Intersubjectivity”. Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol.XXVI, No.1: 3-17
Page, Steve and Wosket, Val (1994) Supervising the Counsellor. A Cyclical Model. London: Routledge
Pett, James (1995) A Personal Approach to Existential Supervision, Journal of the Society of Existential Analysis, 6(2):117-26
Purton, Campbell (1998) Psychotherapy, philosophical privacy and knowing what we feel. Paper presented at the University of East Anglia Philosophy Society. Oct. 1998 http://www.cpurton.freeserve.co.uk/website/focusing.htm
Rapp, Hilde (2000) Working with difference: Culturally competent supervision. In Barbara Lawton and Colin Feltham (Eds.), Taking Supervision Forward. Enquiries and Trends in Counselling and Psychotherapy. London: Sage
Searles, H.F.(1955) The informational value of the supervisor’s emotional experience. Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects. London: Howgarth Press
Spinelli, Ernesto (1989) The Interpreted World. An Introduction to Phenomenological Psychology. London: Sage
Wallulis, Jerard (1997) 'Carrying forward: Gadamer and Gendlin on history, language, and the body', In David Michael Levin (Ed.) (1997) Language Beyond Postmodernism (pp.270-82). Evanston Ill: Northwestern University Press.
This page was last modified on 14 September 2004
|
|