Being There – Part 2
This post is a continuation of Marco Mazzetti’s article ‘Being There’. If you’re just joining us, you might want to start at Part One.
A Practical Approach: Three Questions
In addition to my personal joy in receiving the 2012 EBMA, I am also happy that the award was devoted to the issue of supervision. Since reading Tudor’s (2002) article suggesting the development of a specific theory of transactional analysis supervision, I have become a passionate supporter of the idea. I am convinced, after observing so many colleagues during my own training as well as during Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst exams, that supervision in transactional analysis has its own characteristics, and I think the time has come to use our creativity to develop these ideas. Some promising work in this area has already started, as shown by several recent contributions to the transactional analysis literature (Boyd & Shadbolt, 2011; Chinnock, 2011a, 2011b; Cochrane & Newton, 2011; Hunt, 2011; Pierini, 2012; Sills & Mazzetti, 2009).
However, despite being a supporter of the development of the transactional analysis theory of supervision, I will not present theory here. Instead, I want to devote this acceptance article to some practical aspects of our work as supervisors that I have found useful and that can perhaps be helpful to other colleagues. These are related to the importance of elements that emerge in the relational fields between both practitioners and clients and supervisors and supervisees. Generally speaking, these refer to transference-countertransference dynamics and unconscious communications, both of which have been well described in the transactional analysis literature (see, for example, Cornell & Hargaden, 2005; Hargaden & Fenton, 2005; Hargaden & Sills, 2002; Moiso, 1985; Novellino, 1990, 2003). My aim here is to underscore some practical tactics for considering these processes so as to achieve an effective supervision or self-supervision.
My approach is summarized in three questions: What am I feeling during the session? Why do I feel what I am feeling? Why does the other person want (unconsciously) me to feel what I am feeling? These questions are easy to use not only to understand what is happening within the relationship (both in practice and supervision) but also to help trainees didactically to address relational dynamics that are often not easy to understand intuitively. In the following sections, I consider these questions, demonstrate how I use them, and consider their potential and the possible pitfalls at each step.
