Supervision is a joint endeavour in which a practitioner, with the help of a supervisor, attends to their clients, to themselves as part of their client practitioner relationships, and the wider systemic context, and by doing so improves the quality of their work, transforms their client relationships, continuously develops themselves, their practice and the wider profession.
We provide supervision for both qualified and student counsellors and psychotherapists, and to other professionals who work in the mental health sector. We facilitate reflection on the client's process, the therapist's process and the therapeutic process.
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Supervision falls into three main areas, with ethics always being in the forefront of both the supervisor's and counsellor's mind:
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1. Formative (supervisor sharing their experience to teach the counsellor)
2. Normative (supervisor asking the counsellor to account for and justify their work)
3. Restorative (supervisor offering support if the counsellor is struggling with an ethical issue or an aspect of their practice)
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The BACP requires registered counsellors to have a minimum of 1.5 hours one-to-one supervision per calendar month, student counsellors should have supervision every 2 weeks. I therefore offer both 60 and 90 minute supervision sessions.
It can be useful to loosely break the supervisory relationship into 7 parts, as defined by the seven-eyed supervision model of Hawkins and Shohet. The diagram below shows these seven aspects of relationship.