What Supervision Is Actually For: A Relational Perspective
If you’re in supervision primarily to tick a professional requirement, you’re probably getting less from it than you could. That’s not a criticism. Most training programmes explain what supervision is structurally, who attends, how often, what gets recorded, but they spend less time on what it’s actually for at a relational level, and what it can offer when it’s working well.
This post is aimed at supervisees, trainees and qualified practitioners, who want to understand supervision from the inside rather than as an external obligation.
The Relational Web
Clinical supervision sits within a web of relationships that are constantly influencing each other. At the centre is your client, whose unconscious material, relational patterns, and emotional history enter the therapy room and begin to shape what happens there. That material doesn’t stay in the room. You carry it with you into supervision, often in ways you’re not fully aware of. How you present a client, what you choose to bring, what you notice and what you miss, all of this is data, not just about the client, but about what’s happening between you.
Your supervisor receives that material and brings their own responses to it. Their countertransference to your client’s material, and to you as a supervisee, is part of the supervisory relationship whether it’s named or not. A relational supervisor pays attention to that, using their own responses as information rather than noise to be managed.And your supervisor, in turn, takes their supervisory work to their own supervision, their supervision of supervision, or SoS. That process exists to keep the whole web accountable, to ensure that the reflective capacity you rely on in your supervisor is itself being held and examined by someone else. Understanding this web matters because it shows you that supervision isn’t just about problem-solving a difficult client. It’s a live relational system, and you’re part of it.
Parallel Process: When the Room Speaks
One of the most clinically significant things that happens in supervision is parallel process, and it’s worth understanding clearly because once you can see it, you’ll notice it everywhere. Parallel process describes the way relational dynamics from the therapy room reproduce themselves in the supervisory relationship. Your client’s way of relating, their withdrawals, their tests of trust, their attempts to be managed rather than met, can show up in how you relate to your supervisor, often without anyone planning it. You might find yourself being unusually passive in supervision with a client who makes you feel helpless. You might over-explain or become defensive with a client whose material triggers your own shame. You might bring a client you’re not sure about with a vagueness that mirrors their own difficulty being known.
None of this is failure. It’s information, and it’s one of the primary mechanisms through which supervision does its deepest work. When a relational supervisor notices something in how you’re presenting material and names it carefully, they’re not criticising your practice. They’re offering you access to something you couldn’t see from inside it. The supervisee’s task is to stay curious about these moments rather than defended against them. That requires a supervisory relationship where it feels safe enough to not know, to be uncertain, to bring the work that’s going least well rather than the work that makes you look competent.
What You Bring to Supervision
Your own material is part of the supervisory process. Your vulnerabilities, your relational history, your particular blind spots and sensitivities, will show up in your clinical work and in supervision itself. That’s not a problem to be eliminated. It’s the texture of relational practice, and working with it rather than around it is what makes supervision genuinely developmental rather than merely managerial.
This means that what you choose to bring to supervision, and how you bring it, matters. Bringing only the cases you feel confident about gives your supervisor a partial picture. Bringing a case you’re struggling with, one where you feel stuck, confused, or activated, is usually where the most useful work happens. It also requires a degree of vulnerability that isn’t always easy, particularly if your supervisory relationship is newer or if you’ve had experiences of supervision that felt evaluative rather than containing. It’s worth naming directly with your supervisor if something feels difficult to bring. The supervisory relationship, like the therapeutic one, develops through the negotiation of rupture and repair, through moments where something uncomfortable is named and held rather than avoided.
What to Look For in a Supervisor
Not all supervision is equally useful, and finding the right fit matters for the same reasons that finding the right therapist does. A supervisor whose orientation aligns with yours will speak the same clinical language. Specialist experience in the areas you’re working in, trauma, dissociation, attachment, for example, makes a practical difference to the quality of the thinking you can access.
Beyond orientation and experience, pay attention to how you feel in the room. A good supervisory relationship should feel safe enough to bring the work you’re least sure about. You should leave sessions with a clearer sense of your client, a clearer sense of yourself in relation to your client, and usually some renewed capacity to return to the work.
My supervision is rooted in a relational psychodynamic framework, with specialist experience in trauma and dissociation. I work with trainees, newly qualified practitioners, and experienced clinicians seeking a relational approach. If you’re looking for supervision that takes the whole relational web seriously, I’d be glad to have an initial conversation. Get in touch at samanthamerry.co.uk/contacts.
Resources worth exploring:
- The Supervisory Relationship by Mary Creaner, a clear, practically grounded text on what makes supervision work, written with the supervisee in mind as much as the supervisor
- Supervision in the Helping Professions by Peter Hawkins and Robin Shohet, the most widely cited UK text on supervision models, including relational and systemic approaches
- Psychodynamic Supervision edited by Carol Falender and Edward Shafranske, for those wanting a deeper theoretical grounding in the psychodynamic dimensions of supervisory work
- Therapist Uncensored podcast, with episodes on parallel process, attachment in the supervisory relationship, and the neuroscience of relational attunement
- BACP’s supervision resources (bacp.co.uk), including ethical frameworks and guidance on choosing and getting the most from supervision at each career stage
Samantha Merry is a BACP Senior Accredited Psychotherapist and clinical supervisor in private practice in Bromley, South East London, and a doctoral researcher at the University of Chester.