In this post, I want to review some of the ways attending appropriate supervision will help you practice to a safe standard.
Every profession has its ethical codes. The medical profession has the Hypocratic Oath (in a few words – do no harm).
The Counselling and Psychotherapy profession also has ethical codes. I follow the BACP’s Ethical Framework, but have also learned more about ethics from courses I’ve gone on and from experience itself.
These codes are set for a reason.
Unfortunately there are people out there that believe they can work as a counsellor or psychotherapist with some basic training and very little supervision.
This is dangerous and should be flagged up and dealt with by Membership Bodies and other organisations involved in regulation and protecting professionals as well as their clients.
Yes, the knowledge we gain through a PgDip or a B.A. course, or the other options out there, is great, but it is certainly not enough.
Good supervision needs to exist from our very first session, and should continue throughout our practice.
It is not just something for trainees (I think in the USA, once you are licenced you don’t need to have supervision regularly anymore, I’m not so sure this is a great idea but they must have things in place for this).
Supervision helps us keep practicing to a safe standard, as it’s a regular space to keep ourselves accountable about the work we do, how we do it, and whether we need a break or are in a good place to continue and work with even more clients with a varity of presentations.
As we’ve spoken about in other posts in this series, good supervision will allow you to develop these areas, which will in turn benefit your practice and your clients and supervisees (see links further down the page):
- reflective practice
- supervisor challenging your practice
- developing autonomous practices
- developing more skills to benefit your clients
- learning new ways of therapeutic interventions in a session
- work through difficult emotions client sessions might bring up
Follow this link for a video describing this process.
If you’d like to see me teaching on these topics, you can check out my workshops on supervision here. They align with this blog post series very well and encourage you to critically think and consider what you need from supervision, which is also my aim with these blog posts.
