Who is looking after the therapists?

"Supervision can be a place where a living profession breathes and learns"

-Hawkins and Shohet

Over the last few months I have been completing training to be a clinical supervisor.

What is a clinical supervisor? They are a qualified practitioner with an appropriate level of experience in practice who has been trained to offer mentoring, teaching and support to other practitioners in the field. They are the gatekeepers that ensure a quality of service to the public and the standards of a profession. In my case, I am now trained to supervise other counsellors and support them in their work with clients.

I finished this training yesterday.

While I would like to say that I signed up to do this training because I felt ready and it was "my time", I actually found myself reluctantly attending, more out of curiosity than a motivation or ambition to take the next step. It had been suggested to me by others, including one of my own supervisors, that I should be doing it. I appreciated their confidence in me but I still felt something holding me back.

Over the course of the training, like any training in the counselling and psychotherapeutic world, we were required to reflect on our experience and the teaching. Indeed, supervision itself is a reflective practice. We were encouraged to identify what model of supervision best aligned with our values, our own way of working and how that would influence the way we would work with supervisees. The process of critical reflection quite often brings up our own personal themes or activates our own wounds. I have my personal counselling sessions regularly booked so I was able to attend to these concerns as they arose as I moved through this training. This reflective practice, coupled with my own therapy and supervision, helped me achieve clarity around why I was training to be a supervisor. More importantly it helped me recognise the type of supervisor I want to be.

Counselling (and psychotherapy) is a profession that sadly does not have the professional standing in the community that it warrants. Many assume that counselling is the poor relative of psychology, that we are light and fluffy and only capable of assisting people with mild stress or anxieties. Others might consider us a little woo woo and not really qualified to be tackling mental health issues. The other regrettable thing is that currently anyone can (and do) call themselves a counsellor despite the fact that there are two professional registration bodies in Australia for counselling. Thankfully the Australian Government is very close to signing off practice standards for counsellors that will have us recognised professionally and hopefully limit the incorrect use of the term. It is hoped that these standards will educate the public, and other members of the health care community, of the quality and qualifications of our practice. We are not lesser than other professions. We offer a different service that is complimentary, or an alternative, to offerings like psychology.

When Covid hit and the usual coping strategies (like socialising) were limited or eroded by the restrictions put in place, a mental health crisis quickly became apparent. Attempting to seek assistance, individuals often had to turn to counsellors for support due to the bottleneck in the system that makes it almost impossible to get in with psychologists. In doing so, greater recognition of our worth became apparent. At least that is what I hear from my clients. Like the psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers that provided great support during this time and burnt out in the process, many counsellors were working hard and also burning out. The mental health crisis has not really relented and there is still a great need for support of these practitioners.

This leads me back to the question posed above, who is looking after the therapists? The short answer is that we are looking after each other. The deeper answer is that supervisors are looking after their supervisees and counsellors are counselling other counsellors. We are also well supported and held by our families and friends. I have been so well supported by my colleagues, my counsellor and my supervisors over the last 5 years (and the years before covid hit). Now, as I complete this training, I recognise that I am ready to pay that forward. I also want to contribute to building the profile of my profession by helping other counsellors be the best they can be in their work.

I now see that my reluctance to do this training was that I was not connecting with a purpose for doing so. Thankfully the training has helped me recognise this purpose. To that end, I am now offering supervision services in addition to counselling. Like my experience being supervised, I expect that this work will continue to deepen my own experience and expertise as a counsellor and continue to benefit my own clients.