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In this series of blog posts, Blue Cabin’s therapeutic supervisors, Matt Stalker and Louise Wicks, and associate artist Elena Miller discuss supervision in the context of creative practice.
All of Blue Cabin’s associate artists benefit from supervision with Matt and Louise, helping the artists to maintain their own wellbeing as practitioners working in therapeutic roles.
Here, Louise discusses how she and Matt have adapted their ways of working to help find common ground between artists and supervisors.
Both Matt and I have reflected on the experience of providing ‘supervision’ to a group of artists and whether it has taught us anything about our own individual style, skills and effectiveness as supervisors, when used in non-psychological therapy supervision.
Our supervision with Blue Cabin’s Associate Artists took the form of online, small group, monthly meetings. The sessions were set up in a style that we are both familiar with as cognitive behavioural therapists. Both of us adapted our style over the course of the supervision sessions and this led us to wonder whether what we were facilitating was supervision or not.
Both Matt and I recognised how familiar and wedded we are to the generic CBT model and how the supervisory sessions with the Blue Cabin artists are different to a typical supervision session. The artists aren’t psychological therapists so it’s understandable that it will be different. It feels uncomfortable to not completely adhere to a clear model that we’ve used for years. It’s as familiar as an old coat. However, doing something that’s uncomfortable or unfamiliar can lead to new knowledge and development.
The expected general structure of a therapy and/or supervision sessions is as follows:
The model expects therapists and supervisors to demonstrate the following skills:
During a therapy session it would be typical to review a problematic behaviour or a behaviour that potentially reinforces unhelpful and unwanted outcomes in a lot of detail and to subsequently set up experiments to ascertain how helpful or unhelpful they are.
Supervision provides a normative, formative and restorative function, not in equal measure in each session, but across a series of sessions we would expect to see each of these. The normative function is the quality control aspect, the restorative function is to assist with emotional processing and the formative function is to support a supervisee’s competence. The sessions are change focused.
Both supervisors are very familiar with measuring the effectiveness, skill and value of supervision skills based on how they would assess and score those skills using the Cognitive Therapy Scale – Revised (CTS-R). This scale encourages assessors and therapists to critically evaluate their skills. Both myself and Matt have used this scale for many years to develop our own skills and those of students we’ve taught.
The artists we’ve worked with are articulate, thoughtful, considerate and compassionate people, who have been very willing and grateful for the opportunity to have a space to reflect, however we speak a different professional language. Both supervisors have considered how to effectively communicate in a supervisory sense with artists who speak a different professional language. Therefore, we need to identify our common ground.
This is our model and not the supervisees’, therefore it’s not fully shared which is unusual, as the structure and rationale is all shared in CBT. Although we have shared this rationale, artists and supervisors are from different professional spectrums and are not sharing the model in a typical therapeutic sense.
A typical question we might ask in a therapy or supervisory setting is ‘what would you like to focus on today?’ This is a very specific question that makes sense to psychological therapy professionals but might be too specific for artists who perhaps have a broader view of the sessions they deliver. I personally haven’t asked them for their feedback on that question but perhaps I should.
We might also ask ‘what are you trying to understand better?’ Mostly, they’re not. Where do you go if someone isn’t trying to understand something better? Is that an issue? It’s possibly more of an issue for therapists/supervisors with a background in CBT and not the artists.
‘Supervision is the act of overseeing or watching over someone or something’, ‘the act of watching a person or activity and making certain that everything is done correctly, safely’ (Cambridge dictionary).
Supervision can often be perceived as a method of ‘checking up’ on people. As a supervisor, the presence of the supervisor scaffolds the practitioner to see themselves more clearly, to develop their own superior vision. Is it wanted or desired in this setting?
There’s an assumption that a supervisor has the requisite skills to help the supervisee improve their professional practice. As supervisors, Matt and I know nothing about art or setting up arts projects. We don’t understand the structure and to some degree, don’t understand what the expected outcome of the projects are.
One of us has had a few close shaves. Some artists have not understood why they were receiving supervision. Is it the title – ‘supervision’ – that causes the issue? In this role, we don’t have a professional supervisory capacity – we have no legitimate input into the artist’s work. So, we’re not supervisors of their work. Mostly, we had most input into the restorative processes of their work.
On this topic, Matt Stalker said: “I think the way we prevent rupture is to be very explicit about that function of supervision and disabuse people of any unhelpful notion they may have that the job of the supervisor is to be the expert and check up on them, particularly where there is a difference in the professional background of the supervisor and the supervisee.”
As therapists, we’re familiar with measuring outcomes by clearly defined changes in behaviour, moods and/or cognitions. Perhaps this is too structured for a therapeutic process where there isn’t a ‘problem’ as such involved.
We have both now moved away from trying to stick rigidly with a CBT model of supervision and adopted a more reflective practice model of supervision, preferring models such as Kolb’s learning cycle for example.
Kolb’s theory is a simple, straightforward model that describes how people learn through experience. Used as a tool for reflection it helps one to learn about one’s own ways of approaching or avoiding situations.
Alternatively, we might use a simplistic Gibbs’ Experience – Reflect – Plan model to guide the supervision sessions. It’s a straightforward method of understanding the component parts of an experience, the process and its outcomes.
Both Kolb’s and Gibbs models are structured, but they have a different reflective language that appears more suited to non-problematic mood related situations.
Peers and colleagues often have work-based discussions during working hours, we do this naturally with colleagues. However, when reflection occurs in an unguided way and is done without a neutral person in the group, we can experience a narrower view of possibilities, as we often have our own agenda.
Reflective journals are available which encourage guided reflection and are very useful, but they don’t have the personal touch. Reflective journals don’t hear you. Being heard and afforded the opportunity to speak is very valuable.
As supervisors we’ve asked ourselves the questions: Are we providing a reflective space rather than supervision? And is that ok? Is what we’re doing helpful? Perhaps, it’s the combination of the space and time to reflect that is beneficial, rather than a specific structured process alone?
Having the opportunity for reflective sessions isn’t the norm across many professions. Supervision might be seen by some as a ‘checking up on’ function, however it’s also an investment in people’s wellbeing.
To conclude, both supervisors have altered their style of supervision in this setting. Although it’s clear we’re supervising in a different way to how we normally would, we’ve been willing to flex and listen to feedback about the helpfulness of the sessions and go with the flow.
That might sound a bit ambiguous, however we’ve always based the sessions on a reflective model, remained Socratic in our use of questions and encouraged reflection. Importantly, we’ve shared knowledge about psychological models and principles where needed.
People who work in emotionally and physically challenging therapeutic settings are expected to always remain positive, professional and compassionate. Empathy and compassion don’t flow from a bottomless well. Anyone who works in a setting where there is repeated exposure to emotionally intense settings knows that it can come at an emotional and personal cost.
Supervision, or reflective sessions have the positive purpose of encouraging, supporting, developing and caring for people. Sadly, they are often a luxury rather than the norm and Blue Cabin’s offer of supervision to their artists is a clear commitment to their wellbeing.
An introduction to clinical supervision in creative practice: you can read Matt Stalker’s blog post here.
Louise has been a Cognitive and Behavioural Therapist (CBT) for over 20 years, the majority of it at the Newcastle Cognitive and Behavioural Therapy Centre. She has worked with all types of mental health disorders including complex and chronic difficulties. Find out more about Louise here.
