I have a favourite ‘teacher’ from my counselling training days. I say teacher as I feel he would have felt uncomfortable with the term ‘lecturer’. He talked a lot about dismantling uneven power dynamics.
He taught two of my favourite papers, Narrative Therapy and Existentialism. He was also supposed to teach the supervision course I did. Sadly, he died a couple of months before it started.
Despite not physically being here, his teachings, phrases and wisdom are still very alive inside my head.
One such phrase is:
“We may know what we do, but do we know what what we do does?”
A phrase I think fits perfectly with supervision.
It is a place to not only build your knowledge of what you do, but a place to explore your understanding of what it does. How did that particular modality or intervention land with that person? Why did they respond in a way I wasn’t expecting? Why did I respond in a way I wasn’t expecting?
A place to understand the impact you make on the work.
That includes probably the thing I love most about supervision (and counselling): a place to understand yourself, your strengths and the unique attributes that only you can bring to the work.
And then there is the other side: the impact the work has on you.
You are not a blank slate. We all come with our own experiences, patterns, assumptions and ways of making sense of the world. Sometimes those experiences include trauma, triggers or things we are still working through. And whether we have the language for it or not, those things can shape how we respond to the work.
And working with people means we are exposed to the trauma that others carry, especially in roles where it is your job to help them through it. Not only can this trigger our own stuff, but it can at times get very heavy.
And then there is the impact of working with broken systems, structural inequalities, frequent unconscious and conscious bias, and problems so large that we feel we are banging our heads against a wall.
That stuff impacts us too.
So…
“You may know what you do, but do you know what what you do does?”
And…
Do you have a place where you can talk about it?
For Bruce Robinson, who taught me the power of re-membering.
