Creating a Space for Acknowledgment and Generativity in Reflective Group Supervision

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12214
• Author: David Paré
• Published date: 01 June 2016
• Date: 01 June 2016

Creating a Space for Acknowledgment and

Generativity in Reflective Group Supervision

DAVID PARE

´*

Small group supervision is a powerful venue for generative conversations because of the

multiplicity of perspectives available and the potential for an appreciative audience to a

practitioner’s work. At the same time, the well-intentioned reflections by a few practitioners

in a room can inadvertently duplicate normative discourses that circulate in the wider cul-

ture and the profession. This article explores the use of narrative practices for benefiting

from the advantages of group supervision while mindful of the vulnerability that comes

with sharing one’s work among colleagues. The reflective group supervision processes

described were modified from the work of Tom Andersen and Michael White to provide a

venue that encourages the creative multiplicity of group conversation while discouraging

unhelpful discourses which constrain generative conversation.

Keywords: Group Supervision; Reflecting Team; Reflecting Processes; Outsider

Witnessing; Narrative Therapy

Fam Proc 55:270–286, 2016

Family therapy has a long tradition of introducing creative innovations in group super-

vision. Over the years, family therapy has harnessed these opportunities in various

ways, introducing one-way mirrors and inventing myriad processes for engaging multiple

practitioners in a therapy session as participants and witnesses. Groups provide a micro-

cosm of the social world, with all of the drama and energy that comes with putting a num-

ber of actors together in the same room. Group supervision affords a context for both

modeling and affirming practice, and for generating the cornucopia of possibilities that

arise from the process of “multilogue” (Strong & Paré, 2004).

Despite these welcome attributes, however, groups are still a curiously under-used

vehicle for therapy supervision in many workplaces. Instead, practitioners operate in

silos, intervening behind closed doors, intermittently sharing truncated verbal accounts of

their practice with over-extended supervisors more intent on managing risk than develop-

ing practice (Pare

´, 2009). This is partly due to practical challenges: how to protect a shared

time slot for a range of therapists, how to ensure that clients

1

have continuous access to

services while a number of practitioners are concurrently unavailable. However, there are

arguably more substantial reasons that supervision so frequently happens in one-on-one

exchanges—reasons linked to deeply entrenched discourses that discourage the open shar-

ing of therapeutic practice. In this article I will describe hybrids of two distinct but related

strands of narrative reflecting processes adapted for group supervision. The practices are

*University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David Pare

´, University of Ottawa,

Ottawa, ON K1N6N5, Canada. E-mail: dpare@uottawa.ca.

1

Despite its shortcomings, I will use the word “client” here as shorthand to distinguish persons seeking

services from therapy practitioners.

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Family Process, Vol. 55, No. 2, 2016 ©2016 Family Process Institute

doi: 10.1111/famp.12214

designed to achieve two key ends—to capitalize on the creative multiplicity of group con-

versation while creating a context immune to those discouraging discourses.

DISCOURSES OF EVALUATION

Lives are infinitely complex, and so is therapy; it should not be surprising that we do

not always “get it right”. And yet, while that complexity could be reason to be gentle on

ourselves as practitioners, it more often is associated with merciless self-scrutiny and

evaluation. In an effort to develop a taxonomy of therapist difficulties, Davis et al. (1987)

gathered a list of 150 challenging moments from experienced therapists, grouping them

into categories, one of which was labeled “Incompetent” and described as follows:

The therapist questions or negatively evaluates his or her skills/performance/adequacy as a ther-

apist. The therapist’s expressed concern is not with the consequences of this deficiency for the

patient but with his or her own narcissistic injury. The therapist’s confidence in self is under-

mined. (p. 118)

Various terms have been used to describe the pervasive self-questioning described

here, including feelings of incompetence (Kottler, 2002; Th

eriault & Gazzola, 2008), pro-

fessional self doubt (Hellman, Morrison, & Abramowitz, 1986), and sense of low mastery

(Orlinsky et al., 1999). The specifics of the self-scrutiny captured by Davis et al. (1987)

shed light on therapists’ frequent aversion to open sharing of their work, and reflect the

influence of two enduring discourses with substantial footprints in the profession. The

first is the preoccupation with pathology (Strong, 2014) and the quest to explain chal-

lenges in terms of personal deficit, formally labeled—a trend at the wider social level

that Gergen (1994) depicted as a lean toward “progressive infirmity”. The second, closely

related and perhaps more surprising for its ubiquity in a contextually oriented field like

family therapy, is a discourse of individualism (Par

e, 2013). Despite the inclination to

understand persons’ lives in relation to greater systems and cultural context, despite an

understanding of what emerges from ongoing therapeutic conversations as co-con-

structed between clients and therapists, we are quick to tie therapeutic outcome to traits

of the autonomous individual practitioner. This inclination is reflected in ever-frequent

lists of competencies (c.f. American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, 2002;

American Counseling Association, 2015; American Psychological Association, 2011;

Arthur, Collins, Marshall, & McMahon, 2013) which, though motivated by the aim to

protect the quality of therapeutic exchanges, are more often focused on individual attri-

butes rather than relational processes. Under the influence of the notions that “it’s all up

to me”, that the clients’ struggles betray the therapist’s limitations, it is not surprising

that practitioners often prefer to keep accounts of their work close to their chests (Mark-

ham & Chiu, 2011).

As Marsten and Howard (2006) point out, “Supervision has a long-standing history of

disciplinary practices that permit or legitimize practices of observation, measurement,

and assessment” (p. 102). This wariness about sharing can promote a sort of impression

management by supervisees in the form of a cautious withholding of information (Ladany,

2004; Ladany, Hill, Corbett, & Nutt, 1996) fueled by feelings of self critique (Th

eriault &

Gazzola, 2008) and shame (Hahn, 2001) in relation to their practice. This self-scrutiny is

arguably an enduring feature of therapists’ professional lives, as demonstrated by Orlin-

sky and Rønnestad (2005), whose longitudinal survey of hundreds of working therapi sts

paints a compelling picture of practitioners perennially accompanied by self-doubt, grap-

pling with questions of their own competence.

Viewed in individualistic terms, the distress of these various therapists mig ht be under-

stood as the expression of individual personality traits, but a sensitivity to the role of

Fam. Proc., Vol. 55, June, 2016

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´

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