Monthly Supervision & Professional Development Group (Friday evenings, online)

Purpose and scope of group

This ongoing integrative group for counsellors and psychotherapists from different therapeutic approaches, orientations and trainings, meeting 11 times per year, has been running since 2022.

To some degree, there is an established group dynamic and cohesion, and as new participants join, you, me and the existing group would have to work with how you would fit into that, to develop a new shape and a new group.

Michael’s supervision style is integrative, so therapists from all modalities and orientations are welcome, and will find plenty of opportunities to learn from the diversity within the group.
Michael pays attention to parallel process on all levels (see resources on ‘Fractal Self’ for how he has extended the notion of ‘parallel process’, for the purposes of supervision, as well as an organising principle for therapy generally), including how the client-therapist dynamic is picked up by the group and reflected within it. He is welcoming of experiential exploration of ‘charged moments’, via roleplay, within participants’ need and willingness for exposure in the group.

He will focus on speaking in the language of each supervisee’s approach, but an exploration of transference-countertransference dynamics is likely to be included, unless a supervisee explicitly declines this. In his approach to supervision, Michael pays attention to the embodied, non-verbal communications and unconscious processes, how they oscillate between working alliance and enactment, and how the therapist’s habitual stance/position becomes involved in these conflicts and tensions. Whilst the exploration of the therapist’s relational entanglement is an important aspect of the supervision, the focus is on the deepening of the client’s process, and the therapist’s continuing learning process. Michael believes that by embracing whole-heartedly the difficulties, paradoxes, shadow aspects and complexities of the therapeutic process, therapists stand the best chance of doing justice to their clients, as well as their own authority, effectiveness and satisfaction as a practitioner.

Participants (currently maximum 4 places)

The group invites new members from March 2024. Most members come from integrative training backgrounds, but there is considerable diversity and richness in different orientations. There is a solid emphasis on the relational dynamic between client and therapist, including transference, countertransference and enactments.

Format and ways of working

The idea is for the work of the group to be grounded in clinical experience and to have a solid supervision element, but to include additional reflections and theoretical input arising from the process - this will be from an integral-relational perspective, but always stay relevant and applicable to your own style and modality. Working with the general notion of the 'reflective practitioner', we will try to integrate individual and group process as well as experiential and theoretical learning and clinical reflection.

Michael will attempt to make explicit and accessible some of his internal process and working models as a supervisor and group facilitator, including hand-outs and references, depending on your individual learning needs and development goals as a person and as a therapist.

Practicalities

The dates and  times are established and fixed (monthly Friday evenings 18.30 – 21.30 on Zoom), but apart from that the group is open to the needs and interests of further participants.

If you are interested in joining this group, an interview with Michael is required. You can contact him on: michael.soth@gmail.com