A Fictional Day at the Office of a Clinical Supervisor
“Well it’s about this client, Todd, that I’ve been working with for the past two months. When he first started seeing me he was so eager to change and would welcome any possible suggestion I might have. But now, I have to drag the words out of him. It’s like he’s lost in some sort of fog and I can’t get him out.”
Why Does Clinical Supervision Give Me Anxiety?
In fact, anxiety is the most recognized emotion for both supervisors and supervisees (Kuo et al., 2016). One of the many theories for why anxiety is so prevalent in clinical supervision is the many roles that a supervisee might take on a daily basis. They could be a student, a parent, a partner, a therapist and a supervisee all in one day. These dual roles of the student and trainee at the same time can lead to role conflict. The roles of student and the role of therapist are quite different, yet we expect supervisees to effortlessly sway back and forth between the two roles. The two roles are behaviourally-distinctive from one another (Holloway, 1995) so having to switch between the two can be anxiety-provoking.