The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes. – Marcel Proust
Providing clinical supervision to gestalt psychotherapy students, RP (Q)s, and RPs has been a deeply fulfilling and humbling experience for me. Supervision leads to:
- Understanding Client Dynamics: I help student therapists and qualifying therapists understand their clients better, both in terms of what they’re saying (content) and how they’re interacting (process).
- Increasing Self-Awareness: Therapists become more aware of their own reactions and responses to clients, fostering self-reflection and insight into their own dynamics in the therapeutic relationship.
- Supporting Transformation: Gestalt therapy focuses on transforming clients’ relational patterns. I assist therapists in helping clients become aware of how they function in their lives and explore new, creative ways of adjustment for greater choice.
- Balancing Support and Challenge: In supervision, I maintain a balance between providing supportive guidance and challenging the therapist to grow, fostering their development and competency.
- Phenomenological Approach: My approach is phenomenological, focusing on the unfolding experience in the therapy room, including bodily sensations and the therapist’s own feelings within the therapeutic field.
- Developing Therapist Competencies: I support the development of therapist competencies by encouraging openness to experience, curiosity about personal resonances, tolerance for uncertainty, and expansion of attention to emerging phenomena.
- Presence and Intentionality: Supervision involves modulating therapist’s presence to support intentional contact with clients, facilitating the flow of emerging dynamics in the therapeutic process.
- Art of Being Present: Psychotherapy is viewed as the art of being present to emerging absences. I help therapists recognize and respond to these absences through their presence in the therapeutic relationship.
My supervision approach focuses on helping student and qualifying therapists to deepen competencies, all within a phenomenological framework that emphasizes presence and intentionality in the therapeutic process.