Regular supervision is considered to be an essential element in the personal development of a counsellor. It ensures that counsellors work ethically and competently, and serves as a safeguard for counsellors (and indirectly their clients) should counsellors experience difficulties in their work, or need to discuss their concerns about a particular client – for example, a suicidal client.

What Is Supervision?

The function of the supervisor is to help counsellors to increase their skills and develop the understanding of their own and their clients’ feelings in such a way as to increase their sensitivity and awareness. While this relationship is concerned with the emotional development of the counsellor, the focus is not therapy for the counsellor. The counsellor will normally be in a therapeutic relationship with someone else. Thus the task of the mentor differs from that of the counsellor, falling between the polarities of counselling and tutoring.

Increasing Your Self-Understanding

For counselling to be productive counsellors must be continually moving forward towards increased understanding of themselves in relation to other people.

Time and again they will be brought into contact with clients whose problems will awaken within them something which will create resistance or conflict within that relationship and specific to it. The client’s difficulty will not be adequately resolved until the counsellor’s own resistance or conflict is resolved. It is true that the client may seek help from other sources, but if so, the counsellor’s personal development may be retarded.

When faced with a situation where our own emotions are thrown into turmoil, or where counselling appears to have reached stalemate, there are three courses of action the counsellor may take. We can pull the blanket over our head and hope that the problem will go away; we can work at it on our own or we can seek help.

In counselling we hope that the client will achieve a degree of insight so that he can see his problem more realistically. If insight is essential for the client, how much more is it essential for the counsellor? If it is necessary for the client to seek help from someone to work through his problem (if he had been able to work it out for himself, surely he would), it is equally important for the counsellor.

There is an element of truth in what people say: that one must have experienced something before one can really help others. This does not mean that the counsellor must have been through an identical experience, but it is important that every person who engages in counselling has been the recipient in a helping relationship.

Making The Most Of The Help Available

Many people who counsel have personal experience of what it is like to be a client, and it has been this experience that has prompted them to become counsellors.

Not everyone has had this first-hand experience and yet it is possible to experience similar feelings when it becomes necessary to seek the help of a mentor during counselling.

The person in need of counselling has probably put off seeking help and has tried to work it out for himself, but to no avail – the problem is still there. He is bound to feel inadequate; that he should have been able to manage. He may think, ‘Can this other person really help?’

The counsellor may experience similar feelings when it is obvious that the counselling relationship has turned sour; that the client is being difficult, resistant, hostile or whatever, or just simply that movement seems to have stopped.

It is no easier for the counsellor in this position to go to someone else for help than it was for the client to approach the counsellor in the first instance. At that stage counsellors, in their heart, come near to knowing how their clients feel. We may resist it and rebel against it, but only if we submit to this experience, when it becomes necessary, will our counselling once more assume accurate empathy.