The social brain is in its natural habitat when we’re talking with someone face-to-face in real time.
-Daniel Goleman (psychologist who defined “Emotional Intelligence”)

Chapter One, http://www.ccpa-p.caacc/blog/?p=3361 described my mid-life career transition from engineering to private practice. At the chapter’s end, I reached my goal of finding a supervisor willing to work using a collaborative supervision model, which we named a “post graduate internship”.

How does this work?

Since January, my Mondays are spent working with www.williamcooke.ca in Toronto’s Bloor West Village, a leafy, lovely commercial and residential neighborhood. The cozy office occupies the second floor of an older house with a hairdresser on the ground floor and a massage therapist down the hall. The frog statue on the staircase makes me smile.

I am an active participant with my supervisor, an experienced narrative therapist, and several clients. Narrative Therapists act like investigative reporters, helping the client externalize the problem, explore it’s influence, and look for times when the problem is less influential, called unique outcomes or exceptions. The therapist plays an important role, but the client is the expert. Narrative Therapy encourages using “outsider witnesses”, invited and participating listeners. My presence make it possible for my supervisor to offer this intervention, frequently described by clients as helpful and powerful.

I also see clients on my own. I might hold a first session with clients anxious to get started before a space frees in my supervisor’s schedule. There are times when my supervisor and the client agree a session with me would be helpful. We are able to work with couples in unique ways, including working one-on-one for part of a session.

What’s happening here?

At the center of this (literally, not just theoretically), is the client. Our weekly supervision sessions are based on the same client picture—not just carefully selected quotes, or audio/video excerpts. Our unique perspectives about that picture create a richness difficult to replicate in a supervision model where one of the parties will never meet the client. Knowing we will both be face-to-face with the client also creates a shared sense of urgency.

This kind of supervision is so common in the corporate world that I never stopped to consider how much courage it takes to “walk the talk” in front of each other and the client. Let’s be honest, it’s one thing to provide advice about working with someone you have never met, and quite another to work collaboratively, discuss what you heard, why you said what you said, and even the mistakes you made. But it also offers more to the client (for the right client at the right time), not to mention being both interesting and fun for the supervisor and supervisee.

Rhea Plosker is an Engineer and Counsellor. She is starting her adventures in private practice with www.williamcooke.ca and also works as a project consultant in health care and not-for-profit organizations. Rhea can be reached at [email protected] or at www.inspirationsolutions.com.

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. (Amelia Earhart)

I am in the process of building a counselling career after 25 years (more or less) as an engineer in the corporate world, including 10 years as an independent consultant. There are a number of reasons why I pursued a counselling career in mid-life but, at the core of it, what I love most about the business world is the emphasis on team work. This passion became a calling to explore new and deeper forms of human collaboration. I enjoyed my Master of Counselling program at Athabasca University, taught through collaborative online interactions rather than one-way lectures. My practicum at Providence Healthcare, a Toronto-based rehabilitation hospital, provided an inspiring multi-disciplinary collaborative environment, where social workers, physicians, nurses, occupational and physical therapists, dieticians, speech language therapists and one counselling student (me!) worked closely with patients and families.

Upon graduating, a combination of private practice and volunteering seemed the right fit for me. I had the idea of pursuing a professional development model common in the corporate world—an internship/junior position with an experienced supervisor. I would become a better counsellor by watching, doing, and receiving feedback. My supervisor’s practice would be enriched through collaborative work, and would benefit financially through seeing more clients, paid supervision, and cheap help. I am drawn to post-modern therapies and assumed that therapists must regularly collaborate with each other or how would reflecting teams and outsider witness practices be possible!?

I learned quickly that private practice therapists supervise and consult other therapists, but direct collaboration is less common. Potential supervisors offered to review audio/video of my sessions but wouldn’t let me see them work directly with clients.  One person gently told me that internships or junior staff made no sense for private practices, and many people simply didn’t return my calls and emails. I realized I had entered a different cultural landscape. Private practice was starting to seem like a very lonely way of making a living.

I asked Trish McCracken from the CCPA for advice, and she was generous with her ideas and time. She suggested exploring AAMFT supervisors. I followed her advice and found William Cooke (www.williamcooke.ca). William is a Narrative Therapist, and has had two previous successful experiences with collaborative supervision in his practice. Similar to me, William also had challenges gaining support for this approach, including being turned down as a supervisor by a social work program that didn’t support student placements in private practice.

I do know that other private practices are engaging in collaborative work but it seems to me that this way of working is still the exception rather than the rule. As I blog about my private practice adventures, I hope to hear from others about their collaborative experiences, both good and bad.
Rhea Plosker is an Engineer and Counsellor. She is starting her adventures in private practice with www.williamcooke.ca and also works as a project consultant in health care and not-for-profit organizations. Rhea can be reached at [email protected] or at www.inspirationsolutions.com.