📅 Thought for today:

‘Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.’

— William Shakespeare

#thoughtfortoday #supervision #grief #sorrow #friends #feelings #endings

Supervision is a skill and process that enables people who work with other people to reflect on and explore their working relationships.

It is a word that most supervisors, including me, dislike because it is assumed to mean “boss” or “overseer”.

Yesterday I had a session with my supervisor. We always have a lot to discuss because I have three professions that benefit from supervision – therapist, coach & supervisor.

Yes, a supervisor has a supervisor.

As I have written before, my work with clients starts with an end in mind.

Preparing for and managing those endings is not always possible, and when there is not an orderly ending, so it feels in some ways like a death.

As one of my tutors was fond of saying, “all change involves, loss and all loss involves grief”.

As it happens, I had four client endings in the space of a week (this was a few weeks ago). They ranged from the sudden departure (client left the company) to the full ordered and managed, just like the textbooks said it should be (which doesn’t happen very often).

It has taken a few weeks to get used to this, and new clients are starting to come on board.

When you have worked with a client for 20 or 30 sessions, a strong therapeutic alliance develops, with a similar feeling to a friendship with different boundaries.

Imagine “losing” four friends in a week and you can get a sense of what client endings can feel like.

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