An Ode to Reflective Practice and Group Work

How I learned to love group supervision

I used to hate group supervision so much.

Very early in my career, I was part of a mandatory reflective supervision group. In one session, I watched another person in the group be shamed to the point where they were visibly upset. I remember looking around the room afterwards and seeing everybody’s faces change.

People shut down. Some looked frustrated, most said nothing. I said nothing.

Whatever sense of safety had existed in the room disappeared very quickly. Nobody stepped in to support the person who had been hurt, and the supervisor did not seem able to recognise what had happened in the group or help us to repair it.

Then, because this was workplace supervision, we all had to come back.

So we did.

And we adapted.

We learnt what was safe to say and what was not. We learnt when to speak and when to stay silent, how much of ourselves to show, which parts were acceptable and which weren’t. People began protecting themselves in different ways and, eventually, quite a few people left.

It taught me an enormous amount about group supervision, although not in the way anybody would have intended; it taught me what happens when a reflective group does not have enough safety to reflect.

Reflection requires more than putting people in a room

We talk alot about reflective practice in counselling and supervision. It is embedded in professional education, ethical practice and supervision frameworks, and for good reason. Reflection allows us to examine not only what happened in our work but what we contributed to it, what affected our judgement, what we may have missed and what we might do differently next time.

But reflection involves exposure.

To reflect properly, at some point I have to be able to say, “I am not sure.”

Or, “I think I handled that badly.”

Or, “This supervisee is really getting under my skin and I need to work out why.”

Or even, “I know what I am supposed to think about this, but that is not actually what I am thinking.”

That requires particular conditions.

Research on group supervision suggests that the supervisor’s management of the group contributes significantly to whether those conditions develop. In an Australian qualitative study of group supervision, participants particularly valued opportunities to learn from other practitioners, encounter multiple perspectives and experience a sense of professional community. The findings also emphasised the importance of the supervisor establishing clear expectations and managing group processes well enough for members to participate openly (Lawrence, 2019).

Those findings make intuitive sense to me because I have experienced the opposite. In that first group, after the rupture, there was no meaningful repair. We were still physically present, but much less was available for reflection because a portion of everybody’s attention was now directed towards self-protection.

That is quite different from not having anything to learn - I learnt a lot! I learnt to be careful, and how.

The games we play when it does not feel safe to be uncertain

Carolyn Cousins’ paper on supervisory games gave me another way of thinking about what happens in supervision when people feel exposed.

Drawing on Berne and Kadushin, Cousins (2010) describes supervisory games as recurring interactional patterns with an underlying function or payoff. She makes an important point that supervision contains inherent vulnerability because supervisees are exposing both their work and, inevitably, parts of themselves to scrutiny. Supervisors may also have responsibility for evaluating the adequacy of a supervisee’s work. It therefore makes sense that people sometimes try to reduce the risk involved in that exposure.

Cousins (2010) focuses particularly on the game Kadushin called “Treat Me Don’t Beat Me”, where attention can shift from examination of the supervisee’s work towards the supervisee’s personal difficulties. The supervisor can become drawn towards a more therapeutic or rescuing position while the original supervisory demand becomes less central.

Importantly, Cousins does not locate these dynamics entirely inside the supervisee. Kadushin’s conception of a supervisory game requires participation from both people. Supervisors have their own vulnerabilities. They may want to be helpful, want to be liked, feel uncertain about their authority or feel reluctant to confront something difficult (Cousins, 2010; Kadushin, 1968).

There are subtler games available to us too.

Mine, for a long time in groups, was performing competence.

I could participate and contribute. I could say thoughtful, cleve (hopefully!) things. But some part of me was still watching myself while I did it.

I was not consciously sitting there thinking, Whatever you do, Liana, do not reveal weakness. It was much more automatic than that. I had learnt that groups could become unsafe very quickly, so I arrived braced.

That inevitably limits reflection. If part of me is occupied with demonstrating that I know what I am doing, it is impossible to become genuinely curious about the possibility that I do not.

Learning to trust groups again

Fortunately, the first group was not the last group I experienced.

Over the years I was part of other supervision groups with much more skilled facilitators. Some felt safe enough and some were genuinely supportive and nurturing. Several were still mandatory workplace groups, which is worth mentioning because choice alone does not determine whether a group is useful.

Slowly, I became less defended.

At first, I think I tested the water.

I might disclose something slightly more uncertain than usual and see what happened. I would take a small interpersonal risk, discover that nobody used it against me, and then retreat again.

Then I would try it again.

This is one of the things I now think good group supervisors understand very well. Trust is not created because we call something a “safe space”, mention confidentiality then move on. People learn whether a group is trustworthy through what actually happens after somebody takes a risk.

What happens when somebody disagrees?

What happens when somebody gets something wrong?

What happens when shame enters the room?

What happens when a person becomes defensive or withdraws?

What does the facilitator do when there is tension between members?

And, perhaps most importantly, what happens after a rupture?

Good facilitation does not mean preventing every uncomfortable moment. Groups are made of human beings, so that would be an ambitious project. It means having enough awareness of group process to notice when something has happened and enough skill to work with it.

Lawrence’s (2019) findings are useful here. Participants emphasised the importance of how the group was facilitated and the opportunity to encounter different perspectives in an environment where participation and learning were possible.

Groups do not produce space for reflection automatically; however, well-facilitated groups can.

Something changes when we become experienced practitioners

There is another reason I think supervision groups become interesting later in our careers.

Most experienced practitioners are considerably more comfortable in our own skin than we were when we began. We have seen enough clients to know that not knowing what to do for five minutes is not necessarily a catastrophe. We have made mistakes and survived them. We have had interventions that worked beautifully and interventions that fell flat.

We have developed judgement!

Hopefully, we have also become slightly less impressed by our own certainty.

However experience does not remove doubt.Experienced supervisors still encounter difficulties associated with supervisee competence, ethical issues, relational problems and their own emotional reactions within supervision. Qualitative research with experienced supervisors suggests that managing these difficulties involves reflecting on one’s own reactions, acknowledging mistakes, monitoring the supervisory relationship and seeking supervision oneself (Grant et al., 2012).

We still have supervisees who worry us. We still finish conversations wondering whether we were too direct, not direct enough, overly protective, insufficiently challenging or simply wrong.

We have supervisees we like enormously and occasionally ones we find difficult to work with.

We get pulled into dynamics, miss things …

Sometimes we notice that immediately and sometimes somebody else has to help us see it.

This is where a group of experienced peers can become so valuable.

The particular pleasure of supervision-on-supervision

When I eventually began attending supervision-on-supervision groups, it was different in one important respect: I chose to go!

By then I also felt far more confident in myself as both a practitioner and a supervisor. I was not entering the group needing to prove that I deserved to be there.

And I have had some beautiful experiences in those groups.

There is something quite specific about being with other supervisors who understand the peculiarities of the role. You do not need to explain why a seemingly small interaction with a supervisee has stayed with you for three days. Somebody else understands why you are thinking about whether you challenged too much or too little, whether you became caught in parallel process, or why a supervisee’s request for reassurance has left you wondering what you inadvertently reinforced.

The qualitative literature on supervision-of-supervision is relatively small, but what exists is relevant here. De Stefano et al. (2014) explored supervisors-in-training participating in group-format supervision-of-supervision. Participants described the group as a valuable context for professional development. They learnt vicariously from one another, encountered different approaches to supervisory problems, received support and discovered that their own uncertainties were often shared by peers. Importantly, the learning did not come only from the person supervising the group - the group itself became a source of learning.

The participants in that study were supervisors in training rather than experienced supervisors, so the findings should not simply be generalised to every supervision-on-supervision group. But the process they describe is recognisable.

You bring one situation, then several minds start looking at it. Someone sees something you had not considered, someone else has had almost the same experience. Then someone understands the situation completely differently. Somebody asks a question that initially seems weird, off-the-wall, and subsequently turns out to be excellent.

You leave with more possibilities than you arrived with.

That is one of the great pleasures of peer learning!

The emotional relief is part of the learning

I think we sometimes undersell the restorative function of supervision, maybe because “professional development” sounds more serious? But the relief is so important.

Supervision has long been understood as having not only formative and normative functions but also restorative or supportive ones. Reviews of the supervision literature suggest that supervision can contribute to practitioner development and wellbeing, although the strength and quality of the evidence varies considerably across outcomes and professional contexts (Bradley & Becker, 2021; Wheeler & Richards, 2007).

There is also emerging qualitative evidence about supervisors themselves. In a mixed-methods study of clinical supervisors involved in peer-group clinical supervision, Doody et al. (2024) found that the restorative dimension of supervision was particularly important. Participants described the value of receiving supervision themselves, having access to peer support and being able to reflect on the demands of their supervisory role (this study involved nursing and midwifery rather than counselling, however the underlying experience is familiar).

There is relief in discovering that another experienced supervisor has also had the thought you have been embarrassed about, in being able to say, “I think I got pulled into this,” and having somebody respond with curiosity rather than judgement. There is relief in speaking your uncertainty without the fear that you are providing someone with evidence that you lack competence.

And when that relief reduces the need to defend ourselves, more thinking becomes possible.

That, to me, is where the supportive and developmental functions of supervision stop looking like separate things.

Feeling less alone allows us to think more clearly. Isn’t this what we help our client’s do too?

When I can feel myself starting to play a game

These days, one of the useful things I notice in supervision-on-supervision is when the impulse to perform competence appears I can usually feel it.

There is a shift from wondering about something to wanting to explain it. I can feel myself constructing a story that makes the most sense or justifies my behaviour.

That is often the interesting moment. I try to notice what is underneath it. Usually, for me, there is some combination of fear and shame. If the group is trustworthy enough, I can stay there for a little longer instead of escaping into “expertise”.

And then I can learn something!

This is what makes the literature on supervisory games useful for supervisors themselves. We can certainly use these ideas to recognise patterns in supervisees, but it becomes much more interesting when we ask what games we play and what those games protect us from (Cousins, 2010; Kadushin, 1968).

Do I rescue because I find another person’s distress hard to tolerate?

Do I become overly educational when I feel uncertain?

Do I soften necessary feedback because I want the supervisee to like me?

Do I rush towards solutions because sitting together in uncertainty makes me anxious?

Do I become very competent when I feel ashamed?

Those are excellent questions for supervision-on-supervision because they move us away from analysing the supervisee as though we are standing outside the relationship when we are very much a part of it.

Reflective practice is not the absence of mistakes

My first harmful supervision group taught me something important about this, although it took me years to understand exactly what.

The problem was not that something went wrong in the group because things will go wrong in groups.

People misunderstand one another, facilitators misjudge interventions. Someone says something that lands badly. Shame can appear.

The more consequential problem was that we could not work with what had happened - there rupture without repair.

The better groups I experienced later did something different. They did not convince me that nothing uncomfortable would ever happen. They taught me, gradually and through experience, that discomfort could be noticed, talked about and survived and that allowed me to risk more of myself.

And the supervision-on-supervision groups I have subsequently chosen to attend have taken that further again. When I have been able to show up more fully, including with doubt, mistakes, irritation, uncertainty and the occasional piece of supervisory behaviour I am not especially proud of, those risks have been rewarded many times over, with learning.

Someone helps me see something I could not see from inside my own position or challenges my formulation. Somebody understands exactly why I got pulled somewhere and offers another way of responding.Sometimes I leave with an answer.

Often I leave with a better question.

An ode to reflective practice and group work

Perhaps this is why I have become so fond of supervision-on-supervision groups (after once despising group supervision).

At its best, reflective practice is not about demonstrating insight. Instead, it allows us to become curious about our work while we are still inside the messiness of doing it.

Experience gives us knowledge, but it also gives us habits. It gives us preferred explanations, familiar interventions and increasingly convincing reasons for why we did what we did.

Other experienced practitioners interrupt that.

They bring different histories, theoretical orientations, instincts and blind spots. They recognise things we miss and we recognise things for them. Their difficult supervisory moments normalise ours without making them meaningless.

And sometimes there is simply the considerable pleasure of sitting with people who understand the work.

I did learn from that first supervision group.

I learnt what shame can do to a reflective group. I learnt how quickly people become guarded when a facilitator cannot repair a rupture. I learnt some very effective ways of appearing engaged while revealing nothing useful.

The groups that followed taught me something else; that trust could grow again.

And supervision-on-supervision eventually taught me what about the growth and learning that becomes possible once I stopped needing quite so much protection.

We have a supervision-on-supervision group starting October 28th. Click here for more info.

References

Bradley, W. J., & Becker, K. D. (2021). Clinical supervision of mental health services: A systematic review of supervision characteristics and practices associated with formative and restorative outcomes. The Clinical Supervisor, 40(1), 88–111. https://doi.org/10.1080/07325223.2021.1904312

Cousins, C. (2010). ‘Treat me don’t beat me’ . . . Exploring supervisory games and their effect on poor performance management. Practice, 22(5), 281–292. https://doi.org/10.1080/09503153.2010.514044

De Stefano, J., Gazzola, N., Audet, C., & Thériault, A. (2014). Supervisors-in-training: The experience of group-format supervision-of-supervision. Canadian Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy, 48(4), 409–424. https://cjc-rcc.ucalgary.ca/index.php/rcc/article/view/61004

Doody, O., Markey, K., Turner, J., O’Donnell, C., et al. (2024). Clinical supervisor’s experiences of peer group clinical supervision during COVID-19: A mixed methods study. BMC Nursing, 23, 612. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-024-02283-3

Grant, J., Schofield, M. J., & Crawford, S. (2012). Managing difficulties in supervision: Supervisors’ perspectives. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 59(4), 528–541. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030000

Kadushin, A. (1968). Games people play in supervision. Social Work, 13(3), 23–32.

Lawrence, P. (2019). What happens in group supervision? Exploring current practice in Australia. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 17(2), 138–157.

Wheeler, S., & Richards, K. (2007). The impact of clinical supervision on counsellors and therapists, their practice and their clients: A systematic review of the literature. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 7(1), 54–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733140601185274