Monica Korpershoek
Online Clinical Supervision for Psychologists and Clinicians
Thinking beneath the surface
My Approach to Clinical Supervision
My clinical supervision approach draws on psychodynamic and interpersonal thinking, contemporary understandings of trauma and the body, and many years of working with complexity in public and private settings. This page describes the ideas that shape how I think, and how they come into our work together.
Relational and psychodynamic thinking
Foundations
My approach is grounded in psychodynamic and interpersonal thinking. This means paying attention not only to symptoms, but to relationships : patterns of relating, attachment, developmental experience, and what unfolds between the client and clinician.
From this perspective, the therapeutic relationship is not just the setting for the work, it is often where the most important information about the client's inner world becomes visible, and where changes can happen.
Attending to what happens between people, not only within them
Working with complexity
When the relationship tells us something
A client might tell us one thing while communicating something quite different through the relationship. We may find ourselves feeling unusually frustrated, protective, hopeless, bored or uncertain.
Rather than seeing these responses simply as obstacles, we can treat them as valuable information about what is happening in therapy. Sometimes these dynamics also find their way into supervision itself, so that what happens between us can shed light on what is happening between you and your client.
Supervision offers a place to become curious about these experiences, and to use them in the work.
Trauma-informed perspectives
Trauma, Mind and Body
My understanding of trauma has evolved throughout my career. Alongside psychodynamic and relational thinking, I draw on contemporary understandings of the nervous system, and of how traumatic experience can be expressed through the body, through emotional regulation, and through patterns of connection and disconnection.
In supervision this might mean noticing how a client's state shifts in session, what happens in your own body as you sit with them, and how to pace the work so that it stays within what you can both manage.
Systems and organisations
The wider context of the work
Clinical work never happens in isolation. Families, teams, services and organisations all shape what is possible in the therapy room, and the pressures within them can be felt by clinicians in ways that are not always obvious.
My training in process consultation at the Tavistock Clinic, and many years in public mental health services, mean I also pay attention to this wider system when it is affecting you and your work.
Finding your own way of working
Developing your own clinical voice
For me, one of the most important aims of supervision is helping clinicians grow confident in their own thinking. My role is not to create clinicians who think as I do.
It is to provide a sufficiently thoughtful and challenging space in which you can develop your own clinical voice.