What to Expect in Supervision

Most supervision sessions will move between three areas: you, your practice, and your clients. At the beginning of each meeting, we'll identify what feels most important to cover and build the session around what you actually need that week. There isn't a rigid agenda or a requirement that we spend equal time on everything. Some weeks a difficult client situation may take up most of our time. Other weeks you may need help figuring out documentation, navigating a professional relationship, or making sense of something that came up for you personally in the therapy room.

Self-exploration is a regular part of our work together. We'll pay attention to how you're experiencing your clients and yourself as a clinician: the clients you feel especially connected to, the ones who frustrate or intimidate you, the moments when you feel stuck, and the situations that bring up strong reactions. We'll explore your developing professional identity alongside your personal identities and experiences, including how culture, bias, power, privilege, intersectionality, and your own history can influence what you notice, how you conceptualize a client, and how you show up in the relationship. The goal isn't to analyze you for the sake of analyzing you—it is to understand the parts of yourself that are inevitably entering the clinical space so you can use that awareness intentionally.

We'll also spend time on the practical work of becoming an independent clinician. That can include notes and documentation, billing, scheduling, caseload management, boundaries, communication with clients, ethical questions, managing the less glamorous administrative parts of practice, and generally figuring out how to make the work sustainable. These things are part of being a clinician, and supervision is absolutely an appropriate place to bring the questions that nobody seemed to cover in graduate school.

And, of course, we'll talk a lot about your clients. Bring the cases you're confused by, worried about, excited about, or simply want another set of eyes on. We'll work through case conceptualization, diagnosis, treatment planning, interventions, risk, therapeutic relationships, ruptures, multicultural and identity considerations, and those inevitable moments when you walk out of a session thinking, I have absolutely no idea what to do next. Rather than simply giving you an answer, we'll usually work through the case together—looking at what you're seeing, what you might be missing, what the client may be communicating, and what different approaches might offer.

The balance between these areas will change from session to session. Supervision should respond to where you are in your development and what the work is asking of you right now. My role is to provide a consistent space where you can get the clinical guidance, practical support, and honest self-reflection you need as you move toward practicing independently.