Supervision with Clare Murphy

My role as supervisor is to guide, mentor, inspire, emotionally support and help develop insight and understanding. As a supervisee, your role is to set an agenda for us both to explore, experiment with, and evaluate.

In our sessions together I endeavour to:

• Help you to connect theory and practice
• Facilitate your understanding of your role in the wider social, legal, historical, political context
• Assist you to be sensitive to issues of gender, power, difference, and culture
• Guide you to further develop your knowledge and professional competence
• Facilitate you to further develop your emotional competence, self awareness, congruence and professional identity
• Support your autonomy and uniqueness
• Validate and support your own personal style
• Guide you to establish and manage your ability to recognise limits
• Help you develop skills and strategies that allow you to be more effective in your role
• Provide opportunities to reflect on your work
• Provide a space to offload and express personal responses and feelings that arise as a result of your work – with clients and third party stakeholders
• Assist you to gain insight and understanding
• Help you to plan and utilise personal and professional resources
• Discuss decisions and choices you have made in the course of your work
• Assist you in problem solving
• Reflect on and explore ways you are affected by your work with clients (e.g. effects on your feelings, actions, beliefs, values)
• Reflect on and develop effective and ethical practice
• To work as a collaborative team to make potentially tough decisions about safety and accountability with respect to some client

Cost of supervision:

Theories and modalities underpinning Clare’s Supervision work

Hawkins and Shohet Process model of supervision – this model of supervision fits with post-modern narrative and feminist theories. That is, supervisees, counselling clients and supervisors are positioned variously in a complex interconnected social web. Supervision entails looking through different lenses shining a light on different views of our work together and your work with your clients.

Narrative theory – post-modern, post-structural perspectives that account for complex and contradictory thoughts, feelings and behaviours

Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) – how to understand irrational thoughts how they lead to anxiety, depression, low self-esteem and confidence. Techniques to change and manage thoughts and feelings. Behavioural therapies – assertiveness training, boundary setting, communication skills, behaviour management

Mindfulness techniques – impressive for growing moment-to-moment awareness of emotional and thought processes, and for managing anxiety, chronic illness, chronic pain, uncomfortable emotions, PTSD and stress in general. Also very good anger management tool. I’ve personally used mindfulness to manage physical and emotional pain since 1987

Logotherapy – an approach that helps clients find meaning in life. Explores the attitudes we hold towards unavoidable suffering

Gestalt – chairwork, psychodrama

Positive Psychology – focus on what helps people to flourish by enhancing strengths, resources and positive emotions that already exist

Interactive drawing therapy (IDT) – excellent therapy for helping clients make decisions and come to terms with contradictory and conflicting discourses. Also a great tool for gaining insight into feelings, and for developing new behaviours

Motivational interviewing – to uncover the costs of not changing and the benefits of changing

Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory – sociological analysis of society – fits with strengths based approach – demonstrates how and why we behave differently in different contexts – leads the way to greater choice

Feminist theory – post-modern approach to how gender and power are socially constructed – important for understanding school bullying, workplace bullying, and family and domestic violence – regardless of whether the perpetrator is male or female

Critical studies of men and masculinities – critical analysis of men-women and men-men relationships, gender roles, violence, and emotions. It’s vital to critique social construction of gender otherwise practitioners can collude with men’s issues believing it’s just the way men are – that of course they should not cry. But the burden of suppressing half their humanity leads to isolation, suicide, ill health – physically and emotionally and a lack of safety and trust amongst men

Social Justice – My work is driven by a strong ethic of social justice

Social Ecological Model – influences on our behaviours stem from multiple places from the individual, to family and peer relationships, to institutions such as legal, education, and sports, to communities and the wider political arena

What Supervisees say about Supervision with Clare . . . .

Thanks so much Clare, for letting me just go with what’s inside me without having a controlling system even in the way we work together. I can always get to the guts of the issue. I so need that and haven’t had that for so long! I finally feel like I can REALLY be internally challenged in the best way possible and push my way through! Lucelle Heartlyn – founder of Safe Places 1 on 1’s and Group-Based Life skills Education and Therapy Practice, Tauranga, NZ.

Clare was my counselling supervisor during my 2nd and 3rd year as a counselling student. I found Clare to always work with the utmost respect for me as her supervisee and also for my work with my clients. She has always been honest with me, and has a way about her that always left me leaving supervision sessions encouraged about my ability to work with clients. She built me up and I would leave with my head high and feeling really refreshed in my spirit and soul with the input she gave me. I would feel strengthened by her words of affirmation around my practice abilities, teasing out deeper meanings of why I might be feeling a certain way about a client situation and giving great suggestions of different ways I could view a situation and suggesting new ideas I could try to help my clients find the greatest benefit in therapy. I would thoroughly recommend Clare as a supervisee to anyone, whether they are Christian or someone from another faith. Clare was an amazing supervisor and the support I found from her I believe is testament to the great results I achieved with my practicum grades during my study time. Any one having Clare as a supervisor in my opinion is very blessed indeed. Linda Naniseni – Bachelor of Counselling

This page was updated 11 June 2012