My reflection on Supervision practice following a presentation by Dr Michael Carroll titled “Faces and Phases” for the 2025 Spring Conference of the Supervisor’s Association of Ireland. This reflection was published in the SAI Journal of Supervision, Winter 2025 edition.


Beginning
 
You are looking now straight into the heart of the Milky Way, whose pull is so strong and compelling that it feels some nights that the orbit will detach from the earth and venture there, into that deep, dense mass of stars. Billions upon billions of stars that give off their own light, so that it’s no longer true to speak of darkness.
(Harvey, 2024, p.126)
 
The week in which I was invited to submit this article three events occurred that were notable to me.  My son had to face the results of his Leaving Cert.  Famine was declared in Gaza.  The Perseids peaked in their intensity.  Three events representing increasing proportions of vulnerability: in the individual space, the socio/political space, and in the wider systemic space.  My son said it was easier before the exams because he could still prepare, review his notes, optimise his potentials.  But now, his work was being scrutinized and he felt vulnerable and powerless to change the outcome.  That famine occurs as a result of deliberate human action and with a brutality that we have all witnessed in our daily news feeds is surely, in the words of one commentator, a failure of Humanity.  In this failure I see the painful and inescapable vulnerability arising from what humans do to other humans.  And for those of us who love to watch the Perseids every August, making wishes with each shooting star we see burning across the night sky, I invite you to wider reflection.  Perseid dust particles will likely pose no threat to life on Earth.  But what of their big sisters and brothers out there, occasionally colliding with the kind of violence only geologists and astronomers dare to consider?  The potential of such a visitor renders all of us, and all of life on earth equally vulnerable. (See recommendation at end of article.)
 
I’m wondering might these be different “faces” of the same vulnerability that brings us into and emerges in the supervision space?  The word “Vulnerability” is one of the many that have stayed with me after I attended the presentation by Dr Michael Carroll at the SAI Spring 2025 Conference, “Faces and Phases”.  During his presentation, in his sharing about vulnerability, Dr Carroll asked us: What do you do when you stand at the crossroads of life and supervision?  At the time I felt like responding that I trundle through, and meander along with, and sometimes hurl myself at life.  When I cross over into a supervision space I drop into a softer, more raw and vulnerable space within myself, and between myself and my Supervisor.  I reflect on my struggles and connect them to my inner experiences and to the relational dynamics all around me.  Carroll & Gilbert relate this to the making of meaning:
 
Through reflection, reflexiveness and critical thinking the events of our lives are made to make sense for us and give us choices about how to infuse these events with meanings we choose rather than meanings that are chosen for us. (Carroll & Gilbert, 2011, p.95)
 
 
 
The Individual Space
 
Some years ago I was invited to offer supervision support to a hospital-based healthcare practitioner.  As they shared with me their professional journey to date, I learned that this person was brilliant on clinical knowledge and was now faced with the struggles to gain practice knowledge.  Since childhood my supervisee had aced their exams, all the way through to a position in the wards.  Now, for the first time in their life, they were faced with the possibility of being failed at one of their modules.  As they talked through their difficulties, I saw panic, confusion, terror in their face, in their eyes.  That my supervisee was one of a large number of trainees in the group being failed in that module meant nothing.  No.  The “I”, the person they called “me” who had walked in my door and sat in my room, that “me” was the only person in their conception of the Universe who was being failed.  It didn’t match their understanding of their identity at that time.  That “I” before me was now in their vulnerable child phase.  Drawing from Dr Carroll’s earlier work helps to get a sense of what was needed:
 
The challenge is how to make the supervisee the central focus, emphasize learning, and bring out the elements of spontaneity, creativity, invention and imagination that are part and parcel of interactive learning.  (Carroll, 2009, p.217)
 
As supervisor I listened, I contained the problem and my supervisee’s emerging trauma in the midst of the problem.  We slowed the process down, and for the next eighteen months, as trust slowly built between us, we worked together in what supervisors in my community call “inquiring together”.  I call it a co-explorative learning journey, after Davys & Beddoe (2010).  For my supervisee, those eighteen months were an entirely new phase in their personal and professional development as they learned to harness their intelligence and give it a direction out of their own personal choice rather than out of what was being expected of them.  As I understand from Dr Carroll’s presentation, it is in learning to stay with that personal vulnerability both in supervision and in our practice, that we are each led to a greater ownership of our true identity, more integrity in our choices, and a stronger commitment to those choices because they arise from a more authentic place in one’s own individual being.
 
 
The Socio-Political Space
 
As supervisors, we are not only working with individuals.  We are also having an impact on their clients/patients.  We are indirectly impacting our supervisees loved ones, colleagues, and their not so loved ones.  We belong in a community, and our actions, intentions and prayers, all ripple through that community.  Our supervisory work has a socio-political dimension.  Ellison et al (2024) argue that:
 
…a reciprocal relationship exists between social justice and the working alliance in supervision.  A commitment to broaching intersectionality and disrupting oppression is expected to facilitate a secure, trusting working alliance. (Ellison et al, 2024, p.7)
 
The challenge is to bring our vulnerabilities into our communities in a way that is grounded and transformative.  As Dr Carroll in his presentation reflected on the role of power in relationships he noted that the conversation of relationship is dialogue leading to togetherness and difference in life and supervision.  How we change suffering across socio-political boundaries depends upon how we engage in dialogue in our immediate socio-political relationships.  Myira Khan points out:
 
Paying attention to the power and oppression inequality in consultation, supervision and therapeutic relationships enables us to identify where power and oppression exist and how they get enacted, so that we can address their enactment and work out how to rebalance and flatten the power between everyone.  (Khan, 2023, p.217)
 
Shortly after I graduated as a Cross-Professional Supervisor, I was invited to facilitate a supervision group made up of a local community team working with marginalised families.  They made my job easy as they were used to working with each other and my role was very much to facilitate a shared reflective learning process.  The elder member of the group spoke up, a man with many years of community experience behind him and in many ways a mentor to the younger members of the team.  He said “I have a problem with one of my families and I’m wondering if you can help me.”  He then went on to describe a mistake he made in his work which had begun to create more and more difficulty for him and more conflict within the community.  He spoke openly of his embarrassment, his frustration and his fear of making things worse, and he asked his effective “juniors” for help.  The wisdom of the group took hold and the issues were explored, the elder member supported, and possibilities for progress confirmed.
 
However, in my experience of this event there was something much more important happening.  In asking for help, I felt this experienced, and somewhat more powerful, team member was modelling a trust in the relational dynamics of the supervisory group space, an openness to sharing what makes him uncomfortable, in many ways offering the gift of his vulnerability at a team level.  Dr Carroll commented in his presentation that asking for help isn’t giving up, it’s a refusal to give up.  However, there is more involved in this.  Chris Mawson writes:
 
Before such difficult feelings can be openly explored in a group, it is necessary to provide conditions of safety, respect and tolerance, so that anxiety and insecurity can be contained and examined productively. (Mawson, 2006, p.69)
 
In other words, the relational space of supervision needs to be safe.  The power differentials within that supervision space need to be carefully managed.  Trust is essential in this work if our supervisees are to experience valid connection and valuing of difference in their immediate environment.  Nurturing this kind of trust in the supervisory space thus sets the foundational matrix needed for our supervisees to bring their relational dialogues across socio-political boundaries where change becomes possible.
 
 
The Wider Systemic Space
 
A lot of my experience as a supervisor is within organisations.  One of the uphill challenges in this context is building relational trust as the dynamics within organisations may encourage staff to develop defences, sometimes understandably out of necessity.  To draw upon one of my opening metaphors, some current day astronomers are tasked with distinguishing those cosmic particles that offer beautiful effects from those other larger bodies that can do great damage.  Supervising within an organisation can be similar.  We need to be able to pick up on all the different relational dynamics at work (shooting stars), without being distracted from addressing the bigger issues in the systemic space that may cause real harm (the large meteorite).  Shohet & Shohet comment on this in terms of love and fear:
 
Examining some of the belief systems that keep fear locked in place is very releasing. If we make this fear more conscious and do some work to see some of the beliefs behind it, we make more space for love to emerge.  (Shohet, R. & Shohet, J., 2020)
 
Therefore, building relational trust within the supervisory work depends upon bringing these dynamics to conscious awareness as they manifest in the culture, management styles and communication pathways that are fostered systemically within the organisation.  In my experience of supervising within organisations, its not simply a question of whether I as a supervisor can hold my supervisee’s unfolding self with dignity and trust.  Its also a question of whether the system can hold with dignity and trust the unfolding selves of each staff member.  As Charles Handy notes, it is a systemic setting-free of the individuals within the system:
 
Organisations need therefore to think of themselves as schools, although schools of a very different sort, places where individuals can acquire, develop and practise skills which will be useful all their lives… They need, in other words, to encourage people to acquire the means to freedom… (Handy, 1991, pp.254,255)
 
One staff member whom I was asked to supervise had been experiencing difficulties in both personal and professional aspects of her life for quite some time beforehand.  I realised early in this piece of work that the problems were immensely more complex than I had the authority to help my supervisee to resolve.  I could offer my supervisee space to explore her clinical practice, and to tease through her personal and organisational struggles.  However, when it came to unresolved tensions with management we were both aware that it was the same management that asked me to take on this piece of supervision.  Here was the obstacle to building trust in the supervisory relationship.  Here is where my supervisee would say things like “I feel sorry for you, Ray, because you’re caught in the middle of all of this,” leaving me feeling somewhat de-skilled.  I had to think on my feet and, as Dr Carroll mentioned in his presentation, I had to trust my experience.  This is a fully immersive, mind-body activity, as Therese O’Driscoll writes:
 
Thus, we begin by weaving our own bodily matter with the matter we are situated within and from here spread awareness to the human-to-human relationships.  (O’Driscoll, 2023, p.53)
 
So, energetically, I made myself smaller, a kind of emotional version of sitting down on my hunkers.  I cleared my own inner space of my loyalties to the organisation and to my own need to look professional.  I listened, I tried to understand, I imagined in my bodily matter what my supervisee was going through.  A new phase in the supervision work began.  What emerged as we worked this way, what my supervisee began to disclose, was the true inner experiences she was having of life and of work, the big problems.  And I realised that while my supervisee and management were caught with the growing intensity of performance difficulties (the shooting stars), there was a significantly more vulnerable situation developing deeper within my supervisee than anyone in the organisation had been aware of (the large meteorite).  As I worked with this supervisee on her inner struggles and the potential risks, we were able to bring it back to management, subsequently leading to a more holistic and supportive response by management for this staff member.  By trusting my own experience, we could work together to build trust in the supervision space, and ultimately rekindle trust, albeit a fragile one, within the organisational system. 
 
 
Ending
 
Davies & Beddoe (2010, Kindle locations 690-691) write that one of the ways to establish trust is to take risks through the willingness to be open.  This is another way to speak of the role of vulnerability in our supervisory practice.  And it is a supervisor’s willingness to trust their own vulnerability that renders them a leader in whatever relational context they work in – one to one spaces, local community spaces, or within wider systemic/organisational spaces.  As supervisors, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable is a core element of building trusting relationships through which our supervisees have the opportunity to let themselves be seen, valuing their own vulnerabilities as integral to their identity, and learning to engage with change as a clear choice.  They have the opportunities to create changes within their communities, and out in the world by firstly taking the risk of change within themselves and their practices. 
 
What we know matters, but who we are matters more. Being rather than knowing requires showing up and letting ourselves be seen. It requires us to dare greatly, to be vulnerable. (Brown, 2015, p.16)
 
 
References
 
Brown, B. (2015) Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, Penguin Books Ltd.
 
Carroll, M. (2009), “Supervision: Critical Reflection for Transformational Learning, Part 1”, in The Clinical Supervisor, 28:2, 210-220, Routledge.
 
Carroll, M. & Gilbert, M. (2011), On Being a Supervisee: Creating Learning Partnerships, 2^nd ed., Vukani Publishing.
 
Davys, A. & Beddoe, L. (2010) Best Practice in Professional Supervision: A Guide for the Helping Professions, Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
 
Ellison, S.E., Tierney, P. & Taylor, M. (2024) “A Target Model for Social Justice Supervision,” in Teaching and Supervision in Counseling: Vol. 6 : Iss. 3 , Article 1.
https://doi.org/10.7290/tsc06czbz
 
Handy, C., (1991) Gods of Management: The Changing Work of Organisations, Arrow Books.
 
Harvey, S. (2024) Orbital, Random House.
 
Khan, M. (2023) Working Within Diversity: A Reflective Guide to Anti-Oppressive Practice in Counselling and Therapy, Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
 
Mawson, C. (2006) “Containing Anxiety in Work with Damaged Children”, in The Unconscious at Work: Individual and Organizational Stress in the Human Services, pp. 67-74, eds. Obholzer, A. & Zagier Roberts, V., Routledge.
 
O’Driscoll, T. (2023) “Eco Supervision: Embodied, Embedded, Emergence in Supervision”, in Embodied Approaches to Supervision: the Listening Body, eds Butté, C. & Colbert, T., Routledge, pp. 48-61.
 
Shohet, R. & Shohet, J. (2020) In Love with Supervision: Creating Transformative Conversations, PCS Books.
 
 
Recommendation
 
I recommend viewing the 2011 movie Melancholia, by director Lars von Trier, as it offers a provocative exploration of human vulnerability and relational trust in the face of planetary collision.  For opera lovers, I recommend following this up with a viewing of the 2023 operatic interpretation of Melancholia by composer Mikael Karlsson.