based upon broad-spectrum integrative - embodied - relational – systemic principles

Would you want a qualification (CPCAB accredited), or just the learning through participating in a course? Because of its unique integrative-embodied-relational perspective, this course would also be of interest to supervisors who are already qualified and practising.

TherapyWorks Pakistan is organising an online supervision training, which will be delivered mainly by Dr Jan Mojsa and myself, with the first module intensive starting in November (Nov 9 - Nov 15; 4 or 5 hours every day in two blocks, times to be confirmed).

You can find an outline of the curriculum below.

If you want to enrol in the full course, and fulfil all the academic and qualification requirements, you need to book and pay through TherapyWorks.

If you just want to participate in the modules, you need to book and pay through me, Michael: michael.soth@gmail.com.

This training course for becoming a supervisor, designed by one of the most experienced trainers in the field of integrative psychotherapy in the UK, aims at extending your therapeutic skills into the supervisory role in the most comprehensive and efficient way possible.

This training is focusing on acquiring and practising of the crucial awarenesses, skills and models through experiential learning, to support you in becoming an integrative supervisor, able to work with therapeutic practitioners from across a range of orientations and modalities. 

Drawing from both humanistic and psychoanalytic traditions, we will focus especially on the way that dilemmas and conflicts in the therapeutic relationship become reflected in supervision as parallel dilemmas and conflicts for the supervisor. This in turn will involve a focus on the embodied experience of conflict, enactment (rupture and repair) in the working alliance, situating both therapy and supervision firmly in a relational paradigm, based on the recognition that it is the relationship that matters. However, we will not let ‘quality of relationship’ remain an abstract, amorphous and vague notion, but investigate and deepen it using your already developed perceptive, reflective and creative skills as a therapist.

We will use concepts and models from across a broad spectrum of therapeutic approaches, trying to develop a language and an experience-near awareness, that is not restricted to particular traditions, but draws from and embraces the wisdom of the whole therapeutic field.

Outline of topics to be covered

Phenomenological introduction to supervision

• participants’ own experiences of being supervised as therapists - a phenomenological exploration (what has worked for you – what hasn’t?)
• the delicate and ambiguous working alliance between supervisee and supervisor
• shaming and empowerment in supervision: recognition of supervisee’s tendencies towards unconscious misrepresentation and deliberate concealment of session material
• how does a supervisor gain information about what actually happened in the sessions between therapist and client?
• a neuroscience-informed (mirror neuron) understanding of parallel process
• an object relations informed understanding of parallel process via empathic and projective identification and evacuation

Models of supervision

• the paradigm clash between humanistic and psychodynamic supervision
• Hawkins/Shohet standard 7-eye 2-matrix parallel process model
• Soth extended ‘fractal self’ 5-matrix parallel process model
• supervisee as reflective practitioner – supervision developmental model in response to supervisee’s evolving therapeutic competence
• mode of therapeutic action of supervision: spectrum from collegial support to containment of unconscious process
• the 5 conflicting roles inherent in the supervisor position

Skills, theories & techniques of supervision:

Supervisor’s perception:

• perceiving the therapist’s conflict as bodymind process
• assessing and estimating degrees of working alliance and its oscillations
• two kinds of countertransference: habitual countertransference - situational countertransference

Supervisor’s understanding:

• perceiving & understanding the supervisee’s ‘habitual position’ as a therapist
• the characterological origins of the therapist’s habitual position/habitual countertransference (the therapist’s construction of the therapeutic space) – the therapist’s therapeutic ‘credo’ as a defence / the therapist’s counter-resistances / how the therapist’s habitual position reacts against paradox and enactment

Focusing on the paradoxical nature of the working alliance:

• the client’s wound enters the therapeutic space - three kinds of contact between client and therapist - charged moments in therapy
• enactment: the client’s conflict becomes the therapist’s conflict
• what is the enactment ? - fractal parallel process of levels/dimensions of enactment
• a complex characterological model of the client’s conflict
• two kinds of transference: the client’s unconscious construction of the therapeutic space - transference specific to the therapist
• two kinds of countertransference: habitual countertransference - situational countertransference
• gathering the fragments of the enactment ?

Supervisor’s interventions:

• which level of parallel process to focus on as most helpful/charged?
• countertransference amplification
• countertransference disclosures (incl. countertransference dilemmas)
• parallel process interventions (embodied parallel process / mirror neurons)

Experiential supervision:

• session recall: embodied memory/visualisation; recalling charged moments; transcript/verbatim notes;
• two-chair work / role-plays of charged moments

Problems and difficulties of supervision:

• diversity (self and other): differences in socio-cultural-racial background, heritage and status; similarities and differences in therapeutic approach between supervisor and therapist (working within the supervisee’s modality - stretching towards integrative diversity)
• multiple supervisor functions/roles: supervisor – consultant - colleague - tutor/teaching - mentor - therapist - organisational
• different supervisory styles and modalities
• the dilemmas between the therapist’s therapy and supervision / therapeutic versus supervisory process – splitting between therapy and supervision
• power dynamics between supervisor and supervisee (supervisor as super-ego of the profession; reverse parallel process: giving advice, interfering in the work, etc)
• lack of working alliance between supervisor and therapist: different roots of ruptures/levels of difficulties in alliance
• the dangers of collapsing the triadic space: maintaining client advocacy
• supervisor unable to support and get behind therapist’s practice / challenging unethical and ‘not-good-enough’ practice
• containing clients’ extreme states: suicide, complaints, borderline, etc