As a practising counsellor, I have nearly twenty years of first hand knowledge of the counsellor-client relationship. My supervision approach is to help supervisees understand what might be going on between their clients and themselves. We consider what might be brought unconsciously into the supervisory relationship from the client relationship and how in supervision this manifests in emotions, thoughts and bodily sensations, leading to some insight into what these might be telling us.

My supervision style applies to all counselling approaches. I believe the supervisee is the greatest resource. And the supervisor’s job is not to instruct or critique the supervisee, but to help the supervisee understand what’s happening in the supervision room and how they might then work with the client.

I offer supervision to counsellors, coaches, mentors, mediators, health professionals and others whose work brings them into direct engagement with clients or service users. My approach is as set out by Hawkins and Shohet (2004) “Supervision in the Helping Professions”. Also known as the “Seven Eyed Model”, it focuses not only on the supervisee-client relationship but also on the supervisor-supervisee relationship as a parallel process for that work. We look at interventions the supervisee might have made during their work, the interpersonal dynamics of the various relationships, the emotional content of the work and how that affects the supervisee, and what might be around outside of the working relationship that is nevertheless present in the practice.

I trained with CSTD in all four supervision modules: “Core”, “Therapeutic”, “Group” and “Advanced”, which I completed in 2019. I also have CSTD’s Certificate in Supervision.