What happens when a supervisee’s reaction to a client starts to feel personal and how should a supervisor respond? Good supervision inevitably touches the personal and nowhere is this more evident than in the countertransference that arises between supervisee and client, and between supervisor and supervisee.
This 90 minute webinar offers supervisors a clear, practical framework for recognising, understanding, and working with countertransference as it shows up in the supervisory relationship.
Drawing on established models of subjective, objective, positive, and negative countertransference, the webinar explores how personal material can be surfaced safely and productively, always in service of the client’s work, never for its own sake.
Participants will learn to spot the signs of countertransference in a supervisee’s language, behaviour, and emotional responses, understand the significance of parallel process, and develop the confidence to name what they notice, tentatively and skilfully, in the room. Central to this is the supervisor’s own use of self: their capacity for ongoing self-reflection, self-monitoring, and honest engagement with their own reactions.
By the end of the course, participants will leave with concrete supervisory moves they can use immediately — questions that open up felt experience rather than just case content, language for naming parallel process, and a clearer sense of when personal material belongs in supervision and when it calls for onward referral to personal therapy. Above all, the course reframes countertransference not as a problem to be managed but as valuable clinical data: examined and understood, it becomes protective of both practitioner and client, supporting safe, ethical, and effective practice.