Take Supervision Seriously
I have been banging on about this for many, many years supervision is one of the most important relationships a therapist can have. In psychotherapy and counselling, this is already well understood. Indeed they have supervision properly intertwined into their careers. Hypnotherapy, on the other hand is a bit different. For years, hypnotherapists were told that there was a need for supervision, but all too often they only played lip service to it. Indeed, it often just involved two or more pals having an informal chat.
In the early 2000’s my friend Fiona Biddle and I created a qualification for hypnotherapeutic supervision and proper protocols as to what is required for both being a supervision and what should be expected in clinical supervision sessions. Sadly, I feel that these standards and qualification has been diluted since we stopped running the organisation to whom we gifted the qualification. One of the key requirements we had was that a supervisor needed to have a counselling or psychotherapy qualification in addition to their hypnotherapy qualification.
This was because that clinical supervisors needed a different skill set compared to that of a hypnotherapy practitioners. If the profession is to grow into what it deserves to be, clinical supervision is a pillar of what the profession needs to build on. It is essential that both practitioners take the practise of supervision seriously, but also that those entrusted with this task are appropriately qualified to offer it.
