Supervision for LPC and LPCC's

Supervision is essential to ensure high standards of professional practice. Ongoing supervision helps practitioners to monitor and review the quality of their work as well as their client's progress.

Supervision is a form of professional self-regulation. It is essential for the right to autonomous practice in the helping professions. Without supervision counselors might have to be regulated or "licensed" to practice by other professions (e.g. by the medical profession).

Counseling supervision is especially important for trainees. Counseling skills can appear deceptively simple to learn with few technical details or technical language. Supervision has a special role in helping trainees move beyond basic forms of counseling skills to develop a more sophisticated and sensitive form of counseling expertise. Equally, counseling placements need careful management and structured support. The trainee experience should be encouraging and empowering rather than negatively demanding. Supervision provides a solid base to help trainees make sense of their learning experiences and to facilitate their professionalism.
 
Therapeutic process is common to all different forms of counseling and therapy. It concerns the therapist's capacity to be self-aware; of thoughts and feelings, of possibilities and limitations in psychological counseling, and of personal and professional boundaries. It takes place in the interchange between therapist and client and is manifested in the style, pacing and art of therapy. The clinical gaze thus turns inwards during process considerations. Brems (1999) offers a useful framework for understanding process in psychotherapy and counseling. He argues it is best thought of as three separate but intervening circular processes:
    1.    processing the relationship
    2.    processing treatment challenges
    3.    understanding phases of change