How Do We Know When Supervision is Psychologically Safe? Organisational Considerations, Relational Dynamics and Professional Vulnerability

Jenny King, a third-year Trainee Educational Psychologist at Highland Council, reflects on her experiences of supervision throughout training and how these have shaped her developing practice.

In this blog, “How Do We Know When Supervision is Psychologically Safe? Organisational Considerations, Relational Dynamics and Professional Vulnerability,” Jenny explores the conditions that enable genuine professional vulnerability, and why psychological safety sits at the heart of effective supervision.

…I clicked on a Teams link to join supervision and was more aware of my body language, posture, and facial expressions than usual. I felt awkward. My current supervisor, who is warm, empathetic, and consistently present, asked me how I was doing. I found it hard to get started, knew what I wanted, or rather needed to say, but the words didn’t come out; my internal dialogue started to say, “Don’t be weird, don’t be a difficult supervisee…say something!

The above description would not have been unusual when I was new to supervision at the beginning of Educational Psychology training. As a current third year, I now find this happens less frequently and less intensely. During my training, I have found supervision both challenging and transformative, which has led me to develop a passion for all things related to supervision. I have had frequent conversations about supervision with experienced and trainee Educational Psychologists (EPs), and a common theme is that we sometimes question whether we are using supervision effectively.

This has led me to reflect on whether a measure of supervision's effectiveness is whether we feel psychologically safe enough to be professionally vulnerable. And what do we mean by professional vulnerability? Brown (2012) defines vulnerability as involving “uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure” (p.40). Being vulnerable in supervision could look like discussing mistakes, values, intersectionality, emotions engendered in practice, and inviting feedback; the specifics look different for everyone. Bringing vulnerability into supervision has been shown to increase the connection between supervisor and supervisee, supporting the supervisee to explore challenging topics, meet their learning objectives and develop as a reflective practitioner (Bradley et al., 2019).

Being professionally vulnerable in supervision is not, in my experience, an easy process and is shaped by many factors. However, for us to develop as practitioners, understand ourselves and what we bring to the work of educational psychology, we do need to be able to be professionally vulnerable in the supervision space, so at the very least we can experience something of what it is like for our stakeholders who are vulnerable in their relationship with us. To be professionally vulnerable, however, we need to feel safe. Throughout, I have included brief vignettes from my recent supervision sessions. Why? Because I can’t write about vulnerability in supervision authentically without engaging with my own vulnerability here. I have included reflective questions throughout that you may wish to consider as you reflect on whether you have psychological safety in your supervision.

Organisational cultures and supervision:

Supervision does not take place in a vacuum. Within our services and organisations, the supervisor-supervisee dyad is situated within the organisational culture in which it occurs. This means that supervision is not just interpersonal; it is organisational. Positive or problematic processes within our organisations are likely to be felt at some level within our supervision. Therefore, when we consider how we feel as individuals within our own supervision, it is important to reflect on how supervision is approached, thought about, and discussed systemically.

For example, if we have been in an organisation where we are told explicitly or implicitly some version of ‘don’t rock the boat’, then we can end up consciously or unconsciously enabling this dynamic or, conversely, rebelling against it and becoming a ‘problem’ or scapegoat within the organisation. Hawkins and McMahon (2020) refer to this type of organisational culture as ‘hunt the personal pathology’ (p. 224.) Another example is that if an organisation is particularly reactive or resources are stretched, supervision may happen infrequently or be routinely cancelled; perhaps it is only utilised when there is deemed a ‘crisis’ and therefore supervision sessions have a sense of urgency, rather than a measured calm.

We might hope that psychological organisations are more immune to some of these elements because we are in the business of making the unconscious conscious; yet organisational dynamics are powerful, collective denial is real, and systems are self-regulating. Another way of thinking about it is that organisational cultures can be akin to family systems where unconscious rules influence all members, e.g. ‘we don’t talk about our feelings’ (Bowen, 1978), and if this exists at an organisational level, what are the implications for supervision? If a supervisee is scapegoated within their team or organisation and their supervisor enables these dynamics, psychological safety is not possible.

How psychologically safe do you feel within your wider team or organisation? Do you feel a sense of belonging and acceptance? What kinds of responses do you get if you raise issues or difficulties?

How is supervision discussed within your organisation? Positively, negatively, or not talked about at all.

Supervisor-supervisee dyad:

I have spent time discussing the ‘here and now’ of supervision with my current supervisor and what might be happening between us. Having recognised the feeling of anxiety engendered by supervision as vulnerability, I have found it helpful to think about and articulate in supervision early on with a new supervisor what I think I am like as a supervisee. This has included discussing some of my likely defences and ways I might respond if I am feeling vulnerable, for example, thinking I am a difficult person to supervise, overexplaining or being overly self-critical. My supervisor, in turn, has shared similarly. These discussions have increased my felt sense of being accepted and reduced my anxiety related to supervision, which is the core of psychological safety (Shein & Bennis, 1965). Through having these discussions, I think we have pre-empted some potential relational misunderstandings and made it easier to name others in real time. I am not advocating that others do this activity specifically, but rather prompting you to consider what would make supervision feel more relationally safe. For example, it could be finding out more about your supervisor as a person or outlining intersectional differences and similarities. This could happen at the outset of a new supervision as part of contracting, or it can be worthwhile to do so at any stage.

What would make supervision feel relationally safe for you?
If you wanted to, could you discuss the supervisory relationship itself within supervision?

…After a long silence, I said something to the effect that I was feeling awkward and embarrassed about a realisation I had after the previous supervision, and that I was finding it hard to talk about it.
…In the previous supervision, I discussed a professional context in which I had a particularly strong emotional reaction to another professional, not during the interaction but later. I had focused a lot on this person's actions that had led to my subsequent response, but what I didn’t discuss (because I hadn’t realised it at the time) was that there was an additional dimension whereby my response to this person was not just related to their actions in the present but also because of who they reminded me of from my past…

Ghosts and stakeholders:

Encountering people within a professional context who remind us of someone from our past is common. In any present interaction, we have past and current people and relationships influencing us, largely unconsciously. These ‘ghosts and stakeholders’ (Hawkins & McMahon, 2020) are not physically present but are ‘in the room’ in terms of their potential influence. They are present for both the supervisee and the supervisor and may include previous supervisors, supervisees, line managers, and family members. If, for example, one of our ghosts is particularly authoritarian, we may be more likely to try to conform to what we think our supervisors are looking for, or perhaps we are less likely to challenge them when we don’t agree with something. Our relationships outside of the supervision space, past and current, will influence our ability to feel psychologically safe in supervision.

Who are your ghosts and stakeholders that might be influencing your supervision?

…It was enough to name and acknowledge that part of my response to this professional stemmed from who they reminded me of. What made naming this challenging was that I thought acknowledging this personal dimension would make my present response less valid, but, in actuality, by naming and discussing it, it brought about another layer of understanding and self-awareness.

…I also felt awkward because I was aware that when I originally discussed the situation, I had employed a defensive routine – The Self-flagellation approach (magnifying one’s own shortcomings) (See Hawkins & McMahon, 2020, p.40 for a full description of common defensive routines in supervision.) At the end of my lengthy monologue describing what happened, my supervisor said, “I am hearing a lot of shoulds,” drawing attention to my self-criticism. My supervisor's statement served as an intervention, helping us both understand what had happened.

Defences are self-protection against vulnerability and exposure. We have them, and so do our stakeholders. We might be able to recognise our most common defences over time in supervision, and becoming aware of them means we are more likely to understand their purpose for ourselves and, at the same time, recognise them when we think we are encountering them in our work with stakeholders.

Parallel processes:

Parallel processes are unspoken dynamics or issues in our interactions with stakeholders, which may be mirrored in the supervisor-supervisee dynamic (Hawkins & McMahon, 2020). Within my current work as a trainee EP, I am aware of my (often unspoken) role as a container, supporting stakeholders with processing and making sense of distress (Bion, 1962). This containment ideally happens in a series of parallel processes: an adult provides this for a child in distress, an EP for that adult, and a supervisor for that EP. The containment I receive in supervision supports being able to be professionally vulnerable, and the containing presence my supervisor provides can be understood as a parallel process called role modelling. My supervisor is a relational role model for me to bring into my work with stakeholders. If we experience relational safety in supervision, we are more likely to provide it to our stakeholders in practice.

What qualities does your supervisor role model to you (e.g. active listening, unconditional positive regard) that you apply to your work with stakeholders?

The ‘internal supervisor’ and self-supervision:

When we prepare for supervision, formally or informally, consciously or unconsciously, we draw on our own reflections and developing processes, what to bring, and what not to bring. As our experience of receiving supervision accumulates, we repeatedly witness our supervisor's process: the questions they ask, the ways they reframe or reflect things back to us, how they reassure and challenge us and the way in which they provide and invite feedback. Self-supervision is essentially the process of learning to do this for ourselves (Henderson, 2009). Not intending to replace the structure of formal supervision, but so that we develop our capacity for reflection beyond it. Between the two supervisions, the first where I discussed my reaction to a professional and the subsequent one where I discussed realising the personal dimension to this, I engaged in self-supervision.

…My own reflective process, or ‘internal supervisor’ (Casement, 1985), was initially resistant; I wanted to focus on the present dynamics of the interaction I had rather than its resonance with past relational dynamics of my own. My actual supervisor has repeatedly approached everything that I have brought with non-judgmental openness and curiosity, which has increased my capacity to be open and curious about my thought processes. Therefore, I was able to move beyond the resistance (which looked like continuing to mentally list the reasons why I was angry with this professional) and instead wonder why I had been emotionally affected by them. I moved from being self-critical of my reaction to being curious about it. The curiosity created space for me to realise when I had felt like this before…

What does your reflective process outside of supervision sound like? Is it self-critical? Supportive? Curious? or something different?

Why is being able to be professionally vulnerable in supervision so important? Because working in our profession is a privilege, we hold despair and hope simultaneously; we meet people where they are at; we see resilience and people doing their best every day in systems that no longer support them. Above all, we meet and work with our stakeholders at their most vulnerable, and we owe it to them to ensure that we are in touch with our own vulnerabilities and are working on them. And we can only do this if we have psychologically safe supervision. Throughout, I have utilised examples from my own supervision to illustrate how professional vulnerability relies on psychological safety. To an extent, psychological safety is individual; each supervisee is unique in the way they experience that felt sense, and so is every supervisor-supervisee dyad. I will leave you with one final reflection question:

Are you able to be professionally vulnerable in supervision and trust that you will be met with support and curiosity?

Jenny King, Highland Council Psychological Service

References:

Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from experience. Heinemann.
Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. Jason Aronson
Bradley, N., Stargell, N., Craigen, L., Whisenhunt, J., Campbell, E., Kress, V. (2019) Creative Approaches for Promoting Vulnerability in Supervision: A Relational-Cultural Approach, Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, 14:3, 391-404, DOI: 10.1080/15401383.2018.1562395
Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. Gotham Books.
Casement, P. (1985). On learning from the patient. Tavistock.
Hawkins, P., & McMahon, A. (2020). Supervision in the Helping Professions: Supervision in Context Series (5th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.
Henderson, P. (2009). Supervisor training: issues and approaches (1st ed) Karnac.
Schein, E. H., Bennis, W. G. (1965). Personal and organizational change through group methods: the laboratory approach. Wiley