Supervision Are Hypnotherapists Getting It Right
One of the most important aspects of clinical practice in my view is good clinical supervision. It is so important that my colleague and friend Fiona Biddle and myself created the first nationally accredited supervision qualification for hypnotherapists. It was our hope that this would give practitioners who wanted to become supervisors the best training in order to go from a clinician to a supervisor. Additionally, it was our hope that with the advent of properly qualified supervisors that practitioners would begin to understand both its importance as well as the importance of getting a qualified supervisor to assist them.
Sadly, the last part of this wish did not come to pass, and indeed there are still hypnotherapists in the profession offering supervision without any specific training in it and certainly without any recognised qualification in it. Also, it would appear that some “supervisors” simply use the idea that people come for supervision to show off their skills as hypnotist never really going into what the supervisee needs.
With a profession that is not statutorily controlled, the role of protecting the public falls to the professional bodies and from them to the supervisors they recognise. This is due to the fact that supervisors are the first line of defence against poor and unethical practice. Until the profession takes supervision seriously, it is at risk of becoming a repository of bad clinicians operating outside of good ethical conduct.
