Supervision & Training
Approach & Availability
Supervision for individuals and Groups
Psychotherapists and Counsellors
I offer clinical supervision to psychotherapists and counsellors. I have experience with supervising practitioners in G.P. Surgeries, Student Counselling Services and Private Practice. My style is to provide solid and creative support, so that the therapist can offer the same to their clients. I have trained in using Hellinger’s Systemic Constellations and may involve that approach as a way of increasing the effectiveness of supervision, where it is appropriate.
Non-Managerial Supervision
In addition, I have experience of non-managerial supervision with groups and individuals working in challenging environments, for example, Women’s Aid. I have facilitated organisations with a non-hierarchical structure, to help them work together more effectively.
Supervision for Coaches
Increasingly being seen as necessary for quality control and coach personal well-being and professional development.
I am particularly interested in supervision on supervision (consultation).
My Approach to Supervision (and Consultation)
How can practitioners be resourced to work effectively and ethically with their clients? I believe the supervisory relationship is a significant factor. I think it is important to create an environment where people feel safe to be themselves, in both their resourcefulness and their vulnerability. In my experience this is best achieved by deep understanding of the complexity of the situations in which practitioners work, and a willingness to know them as unique human beings.
My psychotherapy training is in Gestalt and I bring its underlying principles and practice to the supervision and consultation process. Gestalt is profoundly relational and embedded in context. It acknowledges the fundamental importance of the field in our experience of being and connecting. Each of us has an individual field that is unique to us, although there is commonality with those of other human and non-human beings. Our family background, life experience and current state make our take on the world and our way of relating to it unique, while having to share a planet, the need for air, water and nourishment etc. are universal. Gestalt values the meeting of two (or more) individuals in the unique context in which it takes place, and considers it be the fundamental context for learning, growth and change.
Setting up in Private Practice
For practitioners of any discipline setting up in private practice can require a whole new set of skills. In addition to a high level of competence in the service we offer, we also need to develop entrepreneurial and business skills so that we can run our new business in a successful, safe and legal way. Most of all, perhaps, we need to feel solid and confident that we are offering something that is of real value to our clients. I can help you to:
Publicise your practice effectively so that you can attract the clients you want.
Set up in a way that is safe and secure for both yourself and your clients.
Keep accounts and deal with the Inland Revenue
Surround yourself with support and find your way to success!
Training
Return of the Sunday Seminar
'Relationships with food'
Low cost CPD and networking events with Gerrie Hughes and Miriam Handren in central Cardiff
Date: 6th November 2022
Venue: Room for Psychotherapy @ W2 Cardiff
Time: 9.45 for 10.30am start. Ends 1pm
Cost: £30 in advance
Booking: Gerrie gerriehughes1@gmail.com 07779 198917
A ‘one-off’ session to explore relationships with food in the context of therapy following the publication of Gerrie’s book ‘Food and Mental Health: a guide for health practitioners’ published by Routledge in 2022.
Description of workshop
This is not a course about eating disorders or disordered eating. The suggestion is that we relate to food in a similar manner to the way we relate to life in general. After all, providing and choosing, preparing and eating food are a framework for the way we structure and experience our lives every day. What can this insight reveal about the therapeutic relationship? How can we hone our understanding and skills to work more effectively with our clients’ relationships with food?
Society has its own relationship with food too, the dynamics of which caught our attention during Covid and the topic continues to be discussed in a range of contexts from the epidemic of ‘lifestyle’ diseases that pre-occupies the NHS, ‘heat or eat’ discussions in the media about the cost of living crisis, and the weaponisation of grain in Ukraine. These issues are the context in which our meetings with clients take place and maybe we need to explore them for ourselves in the service of our clients.
Content (menu?)
· Nutrition and the brain
· The gut microbiome
· Research into the links between diet and common mental health conditions like depression, anxiety and dementia
· Regulation
· Eating as a metaphor in the therapeutic relationship
· A food-related theory of child development
· Implications for practice including understanding limits of competence
This workshop is an opportunity for us to nourish our-selves and each other physically, intellectually and emotionally, and to pique the appetite for further exploration.
See also article in ‘Therapy Today’ June 2022 Vol. 33 Issue 5 ‘What’s eating you?’ p.34