Adrian Tupper

As a counsellor myself, practising using psychodynamic and integrative approaches, I bring first hand knowledge of the counsellor-client relationship, which helps supervisees understand what might be going on between their clients and themselves. The psychodynamic approach especially values what might be brought unconsciously into the supervisory relationship from the client relationship and how this manifests in emotions 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 so much to instruct the supervisee as to help the supervisee understand what’s happening in the room and how they might work with their client with that knowledge.

I offer supervision to counsellors, coaches, mentors, mediators and others whose work brings them into direct engagement with clients or service users. My approach is 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 in their work, interpersonal dynamics and what characterises a working relationship, 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.