Personal development goes hand in hand with professional development.
As therapists, it is vital that we have a good support system in place for our professional and confidential work.
Personal therapy is one way in which we can get this support. Supervision is another, and it will be the focus of these posts.
As therapists, we know that we can (and sometimes might need to) access therapy for our personal development.
Supervision is seen as more of a professional development tool.
I hope that from this series, you can see the benefit of supervision on your personal development as well.
A brief summary, taking items from the previous posts, on how supervision can help with your personal development:
- Developing self-awareness helps us in the therapy room with clients, but it also allows us to work on our personal relationships. We can learn how to set boundaries and avoid resentments from and towards our loved ones, as well as learning how to meet our needs and not only everyone else’s. This is the self-care aspect of supervision.
- As humans, we all need to feel contained and held at one point or the other. Practising allowing the supervisor to do this for us in our supervision sessions builds the ability to permit others to help us in our time of distress or need.
- We might experience tough times in our lives that might require the support of more than one person – our therapist, our supervisor, our friends and family. All of this support will come in handy and help us get back on track and build our resilience to get back into the swing of things.
- In supervision, the focus is mainly on you as a practitioner. Sometimes we might be introverted or not know how to ask for help or even be comfortable with the spotlight shining on us. The fact that supervision is a space where we talk about ourselves and ourselves with our clients is a great way to “normalise” the fact that we are also allowed in the spotlight at times.
- We all have things we need to vent or get out of our systems. If we can’t do it in our supervision space, then we might need to reconsider our supervision arrangements!
- Processing client material or situations in our work life is something to work on in Supervision. Sometimes the focus is on the clients, other times it’s on aspects of our work or life that need to be worked through in order to keep on top of things and be great practitioners.
Fancy watching a video intro to this post instead?
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.
