Sustaining a Legacy of Care: Self-Energy as a Foundation of Supervision (SUPERVISION)
The supervision experience is our first glimpse at what it means to be a therapist. It sets a foundation for what we believe about ourselves as therapists and what we believe about our clients. Let's explore our legacies of supervision.
"Our experiences in supervision set the tone for much of our work as mental health professionals. Sometimes that tone keeps ringing beyond our provisional license period and into full-licensure, including when we become practice owners or supervisors of new therapists. For some, supervision set(s) a precedent of self-efficacy, compassion, and connectedness. For others, it set(s) a standard that feels impossible to meet, resulting in ongoing feelings of imposter syndrome, burnout, and isolation. Our goal is to facilitate a discourse about the elements of supervision that sow the seeds of either balance or burnout, and provide tools for supervisors and supervisees to identify parts of them that obstruct restorative supervision processes.
In our training, we will explore a qualitative review of therapists' experiences in supervision and how their experience impacted their relationships with their colleagues, their clients, and themselves. We will address ways the self-of-the-supervisor and self-of-the-supervisee emerge in transference, counter-transference, and power dynamics in ways that detract from the well-being of both parties and contribute to ongoing burnout and isolation in our field.
Additionally, we integrate a model of supervision based in Internal Family Systems (IFS) that can support supervisees and supervisors to engage with each other with compassion, confidence, courage, clarity, and connection. By exploring various protective and exiled parts of supervisors and supervisees, we hope to open a conversation about power dynamics that constrain the expression of supervisees' internal experience in supervision, including the impact of destructive entitlement. Lastly, we will explore how Self-led supervision processes can lead to legacies of care that perpetuate through generations of mental health professionals.
Attendees will be invited to participate in experiential IFS activities to increase awareness of their past or current supervision experiences and how those experiences have impacted their capacity to engage in our profession from a place of balance or burnout. We will also expand on restorative supervision processes that actively help supervisees and supervisors to support protective parts that emerge in supervision."