Supervision

I offer supervision to psychologists, therapists of all modalities, coaches, counselors, and other mental health care workers.

In psychotherapy, we are in intimate and intense contact with others, and with the pain, fears, and uncertainties they bring. Through this we also encounter ourselves, in all our dimensions as a person and a professional. We may feel that as caregivers, we are supposed to be ‘whole’, to know everything. That for us, uncertainty is not allowed. That we cannot feel anger, sadness, powerlessness, or shame.

This can lead us to deal with these feelings and emotions in solitude. To withhold ourselves the support we need. Support that we in turn do aim to offer our patients or clients.

When we don’t take our own experiences in therapy seriously, we can become overwhelmed or even experience secondary trauma. We can overlook valuable signals in the therapeutic process. Out of self-protection, we can become part of the problem the client brings to us and repeat the patterns that they seek our help with. Patterns that unavoidingly tend to play out within the therapeutic relationship.

As a supervisor, I can help you to:

• View your own experiences during a session as valuable information and work with them in the therapeutic process.
• Explore what you need to support yourself and to find a balance between closeness and distance.
• Investigate any psychopathological processes that may be at play in the interaction between you and your client and explore how to navigate them, so that instead of repeating old patterns, you can find new forms together.
• Understand these processes within the broader context of the system and society.
• Incorporate experiences from your own life as support and richness in your work.

My work as a supervisor is characterized by:

• Experimental and experiential approach.
• The relationship is the basis for the process, and the locus of experience.
  My approach therein is collegial, not authoritarian.
• We don’t just talk about the situations you encounter; we explore them experientially. For example, by investigating how embodied patterns play out in the therapeutic situation, by working with movement, focussing, polarities, and metaphores.
• We explore parallel processes, and there is support at an existential level.
• Working from different perspectives: intra-personal, relational (intersubjective), and field-oriented.
  • The intra-personal approach focuses on examining and intervening in the experiences and actions of the supervisee themselves. We work on understanding the (possibly psychopathological) processes that may occur in the therapeutic situation and on how to open up to novelty instead of getting stuck in them.
  • In the relational (intersubjective) approach, we focus on the therapist-client relationship or on that of supervisor-supervisee and the parallel processes therein. We work with the relationship as a diagnostic tool and as a tool for change.
    We explore how we encounter both stuck patterns and ways out in the relationship.
  • In the field-oriented approach, the therapist mainly modulates their own way of being present to enable change in the situation as a whole.
• Phenomenological attitude:
  Working from the “first-person perspective,” the phenomenological approach does not start from preconceived interpretations but approaches each experience, situation, and individual in their uniqueness. First-person experience is a diagnostic and therapeutic instrument.
• Working with diagnostic frameworks (such as DSM V) is not excluded but is merely supportive in working with unique individuals.
• Embodied work, focussing on sensings and movement.
• Consistent with the phenomenological attitude, the body, as an inseparable part and primary organ of experience, plays an important role in all aspects of my work.