Safety

I believe that the goal of professional supervision is to provide a safe place for the service professional to talk through what is really happening or not happening within and about their practice/business.

I have seen too many examples of paying for professional direction and support where we don’t feel comfortable enough to not gild the lily, leave out pertinent details, or avoid the real issues. When we truly do feel safe and supported, creativity naturally arises with solutions to our issues and our clients’ issues. From our own safety, we can then create safety and support for others.

Safety in professional relationships has many aspects: creating a clean, safe physical space to work in; “having someone’s back”; truly allowing all subjects to be on the table without judgement; acknowledging that we make mistakes and don’t know everything; excellent ethics and boundaries; supporting the intuitive; recognizing the realities of power differentials; and being aware of and realistic about time and money. I will talk about the first two here.

The space that you do your professional work in needs to be energetically clean.

This means that it needs to be free of the energetic clutter of your life and other clients. Clearing your person and your space energetically on a regular basis is really important for your health as well as for safety (see the Healing Blogs). Regular office clearing and something quick between clients is usually enough. I have worked with acute trauma survivors whose PTSD picks up quickly on other trauma energy, potentially leaving my office yet another unsafe place. I would leave extra time before and after their sessions to clear my energy of any secondary PTSD and the space of any energies that were left from their session.

Since I have personally experienced and have worked with clients who have experienced Evil, I don’t treat it lightly. In our western culture today, we act as if it doesn’t exist. It does. Some call it negative energies, but I think it can be more than that. Safety must include the awareness of and the ability to deal with Evil and any negative energies. Some of what we do and say is not motivated by ourselves alone. I have found that keeping my space clean and my acknowledgement of Evil has been greatly appreciated by my supervisees and opened up conversations that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Part of safety is also that your client/supervisee really knows that someone has their back.

My clients know that within appropriate boundaries, I stand behind them, not just support them. For me this means, holding my supervisees impeccably to the standards they have set for themselves for their professional and personal lives. Usually it is in supporting and clarifying their own gut sense of what to do. Sometimes it is to dig deeper and go in a different direction. I want them to build trust in themselves so they can offer their clients the level of safety they deserve.

I found Scott Peck’s People of the Lie to be an excellent discussion of the banality of evil. I am sure that there must be more recent and excellent discussions on the subject of Evil. If you know of any, let me know.