The workshop provides a practical hands-on approach to supervision work with novice counsellors (and similar mental health workers) in both an individual and a group supervisory environment. Contexts include individual supervision for privately practicing novices as well as community-based workers. Equally, group considerations encompass newly practicing professional group settings, assessed training supervision environments, and community agency groups that may include a mixture of seasoned professionals with either placement students and/or professional beginners. The goal of the session is to provide an Introductory How To that will both set a foundation as well as supplement current novice individual and group supervisions experience. Exploration of our own past experiences as novices in supervision and current experiences in supervising novices will assist in identifying our preferred approaches. It will be hypothesized that just as our attractions to therapeutic modalities offer important professional reflections, so too might our inclinations in supervising others.
The approach will also take a decidedly attachment-informed and trauma-informed perspective, setting out how supervision with novices may function as a secure base and safe haven. The objective of such an approach within supervision is to promote learning, increase critical self-awareness and enhance confidence in novice participants. Matters of safety, contracting and expectation setting become critical where novice (and supervisor) vulnerabilities are at play. The need to provide direction in initial sessions will be explored, making space for a range of different responses. Thereafter, particular focus will be given to setting a course for a gradual evolution of pace and depth of process. Equally, understanding how to set up a dynamic that permits a ‘good enough’ shift focus from internal to external and from the individual to group In addition to covering the basics for both individual and group process and identifying typical novice needs, two sorts of potentially parallel supervisor skill challenges will receive attention within the seminar: (1) addressing disruptive or confusing behaviours as platforms for individual and/or group growth, and (2) engaging both the individual supervisee and the group supervisees to embrace their vulnerabilities when discovering how client’s worlds may be more burdensome and lacking in hope. Case vignettes will be employed to promote deeper engagement with these two critical areas.