Psychotherapeutic supervision is essential for trainee psychology students, as well as for the first steps of many other professionals, the goal of this framework is that the mistakes that the professional may make because of his lack of experience are corrected before having consequences. In addition, it offers a more progressive approach and a very valuable accompaniment in situations where responsibility is very high.
This is part of the essential process for psychotherapeutic training, as we have already said it is highly recommended for beginners, which does not mean that experts cannot benefit from it either, although the experience helps us to be better professionals, does not release us. the need for psychotherapeutic supervision in some cases.
- We will talk about psychotherapeutic supervision throughout this text.
- Step by step we will discover what this means and how important it is for students and professionals.
- We will also talk about the benefits of having psychological supervision in different contexts.
Psychotherapeutic supervision consists of the presence of a specialized professional, able to evaluate the evolution of therapy and the behavior of the supervised person in his professional activity.
In this way, the supervisor performs a constant analysis of the interventions that the therapist performs or stops performing, to do this, it includes the exploration of aspects of the inner world of the person who supervises, explores their cognition, their behavior and their emotional part.
From a psychoanalytic point of view (branch of psychology where supervision has a significant weight), during the intervention made by the supervisor, the supervisor:
This process can occur with students and professionals. See
Coaching is worked as part of the training so that the person learns how psychotherapy is performed, so the supervisor decides when the student should start doing so and intervene if necessary. To avoid the consequences of possible errors, students receive low-risk cases for both the patient and the student, allowing the supervisor to give the supervisor more freedom of action without intervening.
Monitoring can occur in several ways:
Professionals can use supervision to evolve in their work, for example, to understand what happens in therapy, when they don’t feel comfortable, when they don’t know what to do, etc. , this allows them to see their intervention from a different perspective and what to do.
In addition, some specialties require supervision, as is the case of psychoanalysis, an area that suggests that the future psychoanalyst has been psychoanalyzed and, in his analysis, can speak of the residual product that remains in the analyst as a result of the interventions he performs.
Therapeutic supervision has great advantages. Let’s look at some of them:
Despite all this, it should be noted that there is some controversy surrounding supervision, as suggested in his article by Dr. Héctor Fernández Alvarez, who comments that “the results presented by the research are not yet sufficient to empirically demonstrate that supervision, as has been used to date, contributes to increasing the benefits of psychotherapy”. However, many areas of psychotherapy have not been involved in these surveys, which does not negate the subjective feeling that those under supervision can rely on.
On the other hand, it should be noted that supervision is an active process in which knowledge is built, a process that favors the supervised, for their learning, and the supervisor, because it is in constant training to be able to provide an adequate evaluation.
Now, how do you find good supervision? If you’re a student, there may be someone in your university who’s in charge of playing that role. If you’re a pro, you can contact more experienced colleagues. You can even search for online monitoring options; there are several professionals who offer it.