Embodiment Matters: Supervision

I offer individual supervision to support: one to one work with clients, group work, supervision of supervisees, and work in counselling and psychotherapy training organisations.

My expertise lies with supporting you to work with embodiment, and with how to encourage your clients to explore their body process. The ground for this is always a close attention to the therapeutic relationship, following parallel process, and co-regulating the field so that we can deepen our understanding of clinical process.

I believe it’s important to include conversations that bring into the therapeutic frame issues of social justice, privilege and marginalisation.

I have twenty-five years of experience supervising therapists working in a broad range of contexts and from a variety of training backgrounds including: Body Psychotherapy, Gestalt, Integrative, Dance Movement Psychotherapy, Psychoanalytic, Attachment-based, Cognitive Analytic, Somatic Coaching, Embodied Relational Psychotherapists and practitioners of Wild Therapy.

I am on the UKCP approved supervisor register and have written a chapter in ed Colbert & Butte Embodied Approaches to Supervision: the Listening Body. This is an excerpt:

“Being a therapist is a vocation, involving participation in others’ lives in a way which requires both great openness and quiet reserve and reflection. It asks for deep human participation and a capacity for subtle responses arising from our sensitivity to the moment by moment context. Today it increasingly feels a political activity; although I work with individual clients, I feel a connection to the socio-political context (lykou, 2021) and the collective – of history, and now – and that is also part of what I need to digest.

Elaboration is a key tool of supervision – the back and forth between supervisor and supervisee(s) is a creative dialogue of questioning, reflecting, tracking felt changes and gestures, moving and commenting in joint free-association.

Embodied reflexivity is a loop: a complex sequence of sensations, feelings, and images that are digested and reflected upon, with formulations and understandings that are revised and recalibrated, over and over. As Shoshi Asheri says, ‘It’s a bottom up process – the reflexivity or the mentalisation is guided and monitored by an embodied experience (…) moment to moment’ (Asheri & Carroll, 2015).

Ideally the fluidity of embodied thinking is held within an ethical intention of rigorous self-scrutiny. ‘Critical analysis requires the ability to shift one’s position in such a way that one can see how one is being pressured, pushed, shaped by either dominant discourses, or particular contexts or roles’ (Best, 2008: 140).

The phenomenal body is the central reference point acting as a somatic knowledge bank (Best 2008 p.150).

The semi-structured network of therapy – with clients, therapists, supervisors, trainers and supervisors of supervisors in multi-situated positions – does support resilience, flexibility, turn-taking and creativity. It is remarkable, really: the holding of space to process and the way this is passed on, and handed back, in a ritual which is as old as the circle around the fire and as contemporary as its continuation now in many settings and contexts.