In Episode 196 of the Counselling Tutor Podcast – the last of this season, prior to the summer break – presenter Rory Lees-Oakes interviews student Ruth Watson in ‘Student Check-In’. ‘Focus on Supervision’ then sees Rory and Ken Kelly looking at self-care in supervision. Finally, Rory talks with Professor Mick Cooper about using goals in therapy.
Case Study: Supervisee Self-Care
Rory talks with student Ruth Watson about her experience of counselling training.
Ruth explains:
Ruth’s key piece of advice, if she could speak to her past self before beginning counselling training, would be not to overthink it: if taking the course feels instinctively right to you, then trust the process and go with it.
On-demand access to a rich lecture library covering theory, skills, and professional development for counselling students—Mapped to the UK awarding body criteria
“The Student Library has been BRILLIANT, I can’t recommend it enough!
It has been a lifeline in helping me prepare for practice and my first clients. If you’re considering it, go-for-it, it’s absolutely worth it!”
Kelly – Graduated and now in practice.
As a clinical supervisor, there is a responsibility to look at your supervisees in practice and to ensure that they are practising good self-care. Rory recounts a personal example of how he managed his practice in collaboration with his supervisor during a difficult period personally.
Ken highlights the difference between seen personal difficulties (such as when a supervisee has experienced a bereavement) and unseen ones – such as burnout, which can emerge very suddenly and with little or no warning. It is therefore important for supervisors to monitor how ‘heavy’ their supervisees’ workloads are, and to check how they are feeling in response.
Ken and Rory illustrate their discussion with examples from their own practice. Ken also draws listeners’ attention to episode 192 of the Counselling Tutor Podcast, which covers the supervision triangle, including the restorative aspect, which supports the supervisee to look after themselves in a way that fosters their own wellbeing and personal development.
In the free handout available here, you can read a case study regarding supervisee self-care. As Rory sums up, self-care is an ethical imperative for all practitioners of counselling and psychotherapy: if you are not taking good care of yourself, you can’t provide the best-quality therapy to your clients.
Also, Counselling Tutor has recently developed an Advanced Certificate in Counselling Supervision. This allows practitioners with a minimum of one year’s post-qualification experience to gain the competence and training to offer both face-to-face and online counselling supervision, in line with evidence-based practice.
The course is mapped to the supervision competences set by the Association for Counselling & Therapy Online (ACTO), British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) and National Counselling Society (NCS).
While the course is currently sold out, new dates will be released in August 2021; please visit our website if you would like to add your name to our waiting list. You will then be sent a priority email when the new dates are available.
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Rory speaks with Professor Mick Cooper – researcher and pioneer in the field of counselling and psychotherapy – about goals in therapy – a topic on which Mick has recorded a lecture for Counsellor CPD, our online CPD library containing hundreds of hours of on-demand CPD lectures, training and resources to support your professional development.
Mick talks about various aspects of this topic, including:
In Mick’s lecture, you can hear more about the benefits, limitations and challenges of using goals in therapy – as well as the principles of working well with goals, and tools for monitoring and tracking goals.
Case Study: Supervisee Self-Care
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