Clinical Supervision
Helping new professionals increase clinical skills and experience and work towards licensure holds great personal and professional appeal for me. Serving as a clinical supervisor for master's level, pre-doctoral, and post-doctoral counselors and psychologists, I have developed an approach for supporting the holistic development of evolving professionals.
Drawing from my experience and training, my supervisory approach focuses on the 4 parts.
(1) Clinical Skill Building
Helping mental health professionals continue to cultivate their clinical skills is essential to professional competence. Sound clinical work requires case conceptualization, treatment planning, relationship building, intervention choice, intervention timing, self-disclosure, and termination that is aligned with therapy process and the client. Grounded in my supervisory approach, I work to assist mental health professionals tailor these areas based on both the unique features of the client and the specific mode of therapy (e.g., individual, couples, or group).
(2) Self-As-Therapist
Helping mental health professionals be aware of their own reactions, skills, competence and growth edges is a critical part of professional growth. In using a self-as-therapist approach, supervision is used to examine internal factors influencing transference and countertransference issues, performance anxiety, and clinical decision-making. Attunement to these areas allows mental health professionals to maximize the tool of the self in providing effective therapy and translating clinical growth edges into opportunities for further development.
(3) Professional Identity
Our professional identity is being shaped in great and small ways constantly. Figuring out the nature, scope, and type of professional we want to be is a life-long process. Themes examined in supervision in this area include ideal job and work context, areas of clinical interest/specialty, steps towards licensure, finding work-life balance, self-care, job search skills and preparations, and building/fostering professional relationships.
(4) Managing Work Context
The context we work in has a significant impact on all aspects of our job. Awareness of the written and unwritten rules of a system and the personalities that exist within a system are critical to understand. This area of supervision helps growing professionals understand policy and procedural issues, power dynamics in a system, managing administrative responsibilities, clarity of the evaluation process, and managing diverse people and personalities.
I look forward to the possibility of working together in supervision. Contact us and we can speak further to assess a potential match between my approach to supervision and your supervisory needs.