The right supervisory relationship doesn’t simply help you practise safely: it helps you grow. It invites curiosity where there was certainty, confidence where there was doubt, and new possibilities where you had begun to feel stuck. At its best, supervision deepens your clinical thinking, expands your awareness of yourself in relationship, and leaves you seeing both your clients and yourself differently.
This kind of supervision serves two mutually inclusive purposes. It protects clients by supporting thoughtful, ethical practice, and it helps practitioners continue to develop throughout their professional lives. As Paul Hitchings (2016) notes, when one is in the foreground, the other remains an essential background.
Most therapists and coaches can recognise adequate supervision. The hours are logged, notes get written up, difficult situations are discussed and ethical responsibilities are met. Nothing has gone seriously awry. There is genuine value in that. Winnicott’s (1971) idea of the ‘good enough’ reminds us that neither therapists nor supervisors need to be perfect.
But what if supervision could be more than ‘good enough’? Rather than asking whether our supervision is sufficient, perhaps a better question is this: is your supervision actually changing anything? Has it changed how you understand your clients, how you experience yourself in the therapeutic relationship, or how you think about your work compared, say, with a year ago?
What clinical supervision is required to do
There’s a well-established way of describing what supervision is for, developed by Brigid Proctor in the 1980s and still widely cited and taught (Proctor, 1986). Proctor identified three related and complementary strands, which I like for their clarity and precision. At different moments, supervision may be educational, helping the supervisee develop their knowledge and clinical skills (formative), concerned with ethical and professional responsibility (normative), or focused on sustaining the practitioner through the emotional demands of clinical work to avoid overwhelm or burnout (restorative). In practice, these functions overlap, with a single supervisory conversation often moving organically between them. One would expect supervision, most of the time, to be doing at least one of these three things reasonably well, and a supervisor who does all three competently is providing a genuinely useful service.
But competent coverage of all three doesn’t automatically lead to transformation. You can attend supervision every month for years and still think about your work and yourself in more or less the same way as when you started. This is not to dismiss solid, adequate supervision. Plenty of practitioners want exactly that, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting it. But if what you’re looking for is supervision that actually shifts something in how you work, we need to understand what tends to be missing when it doesn’t.
Why does adequate supervision stay the same, year after year?
In my experience, both as a supervisee over many years and now as a supervisor myself, what I would term adequate supervision tends to focus predominantly on the client and the case: what happened, what was being talked about, what you did, what you might try next. In other words, the focus is on content. This is useful, necessary even, and there’s certainly a place for it. But it treats you, the practitioner, largely as a fixed point: the person doing the reflecting, rather than someone who is also, in that very moment, part of what’s being reflected upon.
The difference sounds subtle until you notice how much it changes in practice. A model of supervision primarily concerned with the case in front of you can help you plan a better intervention. It’s less likely to help you understand why this particular client leaves you feeling defensive, or why your mind wanders when they start speaking, or why you keep steering conversations away from a certain kind of material. Nor is it likely to lead to an exploration of what in your own history makes a particular client’s presentation hard for you to sit with. What we are talking about here is process. Those things don’t show up if we never turn our attention towards you, your internal process, and the relational dynamics that unfold moment by moment between therapist and client.
What tends to be present for supervision to become transformative
It’s well known that decades of psychotherapy research has consistently found that the quality of the relationship between therapist and client is one of the strongest predictors of good outcomes, more so, in fact, that any particular therapeutic approach (Norcross and Lambert, 2018). But this applies equally to supervision (Beinart and Clohessy, 2017). The relationship in the supervisory room is not just a delivery mechanism for advice and feedback. It’s part of what does the work or fails to.
One framework that supports this way of thinking which I like very much is the seven-eyed model of supervision developed by Peter Hawkins and Robin Shohet (2012). Rather than focusing solely on the client, their story, and the interventions you used, the Seven-Eyed Model invites us to become curious about the whole therapeutic system: what is happening for you as the practitioner, what is unfolding between you and your client, what emerges within the supervisory relationship itself, the supervisor’s internal process, and the wider organisational, cultural and social contexts in which the work takes place. All of these are treated as meaningful sources of clinical information.
This means we can pay attention not only to the content of a case, but also to the processes unfolding within and around it. When a supervisee notices the same feeling of being stuck across several different clients, for example, we don’t dismiss it as a coincidence or assume that they aren’t doing a good job. We become curious about it. It’s information that may tell us something important about the therapeutic relationship, the supervisee’s own internal process, and/or the wider field in which the work is taking place as well as the clients’ processes.
The seven-eyed model is, therefore, not a checklist to complete but rather a map of where our curiosity might take us. It broadens our field of vision, helping us notice what might otherwise remain outside awareness. Sometimes we naturally spend longer attending to one ‘eye’ than another, and that in itself can become something worth exploring.
I realise that if you are a newly qualified or trainee therapist seeking supervision, the seven-eyed model might seem daunting. I want to reassure you that this model is not a test or a rigid structure to follow. Rather, it’s a framework to support our thinking. Moreover, much of this process unfolds naturally within the supervisory relationship, as we gently explore what arises in your clinical work. My approach is to provide as much support as the challenge requires, helping you develop confidence, curiosity and trust in your own therapeutic capacities. Supervision is not about you proving what you already know, although I will aways be interested to learn it, or about me adopting a superior, expert stance; it’s a space where we explore together, including thinking about uncertainty, difficulty and the moments when you do not yet know.
There’s an older idea underneath all this, from Donald Schön’s work on reflective practice, which is that professional expertise doesn’t come from simply applying learned procedures to each new situation. It comes from a continuous, sometimes uncomfortable process of reflecting on what you’re doing while you’re doing it, and afterwards, in a way that lets your understanding actually shift rather than just accumulate. Supervision that stays at the level of technique can support the accumulation. It’s the reflective, relational layer that tends to produce the shift.
How relational supervision shapes the way I work
Relational supervision treats what happens between supervisor and supervisee, not just what’s discussed, as a genuine source of clinical understanding. My core training is in relational integrative psychotherapy, and the same underlying commitments inform how I supervise as a UKCP-registered supervisor. In supervision, I’m interested not only in your clients, and how you work with them, but also in what it’s like to be you, sitting with this particular caseload, in this particular season of your working life. I’ll ask about the case. I’ll also, sometimes, ask what it was like to bring it to me today, or notice aloud if something in how you’re describing a client seems to be doing more work than the words alone would suggest.
In short, transformation happens when supervision becomes curious about the practitioner, not just the client or the issue they bring to therapy. This isn’t about turning every session into an exploration of your inner world and certainly not at the expense of your clients’ needs. Plenty of sessions are, quite rightly, mostly about the client and what would help them. But the two are connected. Understanding your own process usually turns out to be one of the more direct routes to understanding your clients.
Who this approach to supervision tends to suit
This way of working suits therapists and coaches who want supervision to do more than reassure them that they’re doing well. Of course, it’s absolutely fine to want reassurance from supervision and as a supervisor I very much hope that you will experience supervision as affirming. But we can do so much more than just that! It particularly suits practitioners who are willing to bring the case that isn’t going well, rather than the one that makes them look most competent, people who are curious, even when that curiosity is uncomfortable, about their own experiences of their work. This also tends to resonate especially with practitioners who are neurodivergent themselves, or whose caseload involves a significant amount of neurodivergent or traumatised clients, though it isn’t limited to either. Whether or not the supervision space feels safe enough for you to be vulnerable or to unmask depends as much on me as you, as we co-create the conditions where this doesn’t feel risky.
Earlier I asked whether your supervision was changing anything. If you’re wondering that too, I’d be delighted to have a conversation. Whether you’re a trainee, newly qualified, well established, or working as a therapist-coach, I offer a free 20 to 30-minute initial conversation to see whether we’d be a good fit, with no obligation to proceed beyond that. You can find more details about my supervision practice, along with current fees, on my supervision page.
Garthine Walker is a UKCP-registered psychotherapist, clinical supervisor and EMCC-accredited coach based in Cardiff. She holds the Certificate in Clinical Supervision from the Metanoia Institute, which meets UKCP and BACP criteria for supervision training, and offers relational integrative supervision to therapists and coaches online across the UK with a particular interest in neurodivergent-affirming and trauma-informed practice.
REFERENCES
Helen Beinart and Susan Clohessy (2017). Effective Supervisory Relationships: Best Evidence and Practice. John Wiley & Sons.
Peter Hawkins and Robin Shohet (2012). Supervision in the Helping Professions, 4th edn. Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw Hill.
Hitchings, P. (2016). Becoming a Supervisee. In B. Douglas, R. Woolfe, S. Strawbridge, E. Kasket, & V. Galbraith (Eds), Handbook of Counselling Psychology (4th edn). SAGE Publications.
John C. Norcross and Michael J. Lambert (2018). ‘Psychotherapy relationships that work III’. Psychotherapy 55:4, 303–315. DOI: 10.1037/pst0000193
Brigid Proctor (1986). ‘Supervision: A Co-operative Exercise in Accountability’, in A. Marken and M. Payne (eds), Enabling and Ensuring: Supervision in Practice. Leicester: National Youth Bureau/Council for Education and Training in Youth and Community Work.
Donald A. Schön (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. Tavistock Publications.