Supervising the Supervisor: What Happens One Layer Up

Supervision is, in a lot of ways, about holding. How you support a therapist as they learn to hold their clients — the uncertainty and the hard cases, yes, but also the curiosity, the growth, the settling into their own way of working.

Supervision of supervision is the next layer up. How you hold a therapist who is learning to hold other therapists.

If you’re an experienced counsellor moving toward supervising others, or working toward your ACS designation, you might be wondering what this part actually looks like.

Two frightened people

Patrick Casement, in On Learning from the Patient, quotes Bion: “In every consulting room there ought to be two rather frightened people; the patient and the psycho-analyst.” I’ve always liked that. It names something real — that the therapist isn’t a blank expert; they’re a person in it too, with their own uncertainty.

The same is true in supervision. There are still two people in the room — one of them newer to the work. Both of us are in it. A lot of what I do is simply to name that out loud, and to validate it. To make it safe to not know.

And not-knowing turns out to be the heart of it. Casement makes a point I keep coming back to: that students, at least, have license not to know — while more experienced clinicians often feel pressure to appear certain, as though certainty were the mark of competence. It isn’t. He argues the opposite — that the experienced therapist has to work to preserve a state of not-knowing, so they stay open to learning something new rather than deciding too quickly that they already understand.

That’s true of supervision too. And it nests. A newer supervisor is learning to tolerate their own not-knowing, and to help their supervisees tolerate theirs — to make it safe, one layer down, to not have the answer yet. My job is to hold them while they learn to hold another.

What supervision actually carries

When people picture supervision, they often picture case consultation — talk through a tricky client, get some advice, move on. That’s part of it, and a real part. But it’s not the whole picture.

Part of it is holding the experience of the therapist, not only the client’s:

Am I an imposter? Maybe this work isn’t for me. The anxiety about whether you’re really helping — and the slow, hard lesson of learning to be with someone and trust that change is coming, rather than making something happen. The tension between leading and following. Learning to tolerate a client’s pushback without collapsing into I must have done something wrong — when sometimes a person needs to say no before they can say yes.

A newer supervisor has to learn to hold all of this in someone else. Not to have the answers to it — to be able to stay steady inside it, and help another person find their way.

How I work with it

Supervising a supervisor isn’t so different from good supervision, or even good therapy. It starts with getting to know the person.

Where do they feel confident? Where do they feel scared or unsure? What was their own experience of being supervised? Someone who was supervised in a cold, evaluative way may carry some of that in, or may be working hard not to. Either way, it helps to know.

I try to offer ideas rather than answers. With my own supervisees, I’ll often share how I might language something — but always as this is what I’ve come to; you’re welcome to try it on and see if it fits, and make it your own if it does. The goal isn’t for them to sound like me. It’s for them to find their own way of being in the work.

A lot of it is building inquiry — staying curious, asking rather than telling. And it’s helping a supervisor see that there isn’t one right way into the work, and you don’t have to figure it all out at once. There are many ways in, and part of the skill is learning to sense which one fits the person in front of you.

We don’t just get better by accumulating hours

There’s a strand of research, much of it from Daryl Chow and Scott Miller, that names something most of us would rather not hear: therapists don’t reliably improve with experience. Sometimes we even drift the other way. Experience alone isn’t what makes us better.

What makes the difference is working, on purpose, at our growing edges — the things we can’t quite do yet — rather than repeating what’s already comfortable. I find that a useful and honest frame for supervision, and for supervision of supervision. Part of what I’m doing is helping a newer supervisor find their edges, and stay with the slightly uncomfortable work of growing, instead of retreating to the parts they’ve already got.

It’s also a good reminder that this isn’t something anyone arrives at finished. I’m still learning to supervise well. Supervising someone who is learning to supervise keeps me honest about that.

If you’re working toward this

If you’re an experienced counsellor moving toward supervising others, or an ACS candidate looking for supervision of supervision as part of that path, this is work I provide — helping newer supervisors find their footing, their voice, and their own way of holding the people they’ll hold.

Having someone alongside you while you learn this makes it less lonely, and I think, better.

If that’s where you are, I’d be glad to talk.