Supervision and Reparation

When confronted with ruptures in therapeutic relationships, therapists occasionally develop feelings of guilt and remorse over their contributions to the therapeutic process and feel pressured to activate internal processes of reparation. Supervisors attend to their supervisees' reparation processes and help them to differentiate between imagined and actual damage to the patients' welfare and to the integrity of the therapeutic relationship. The supervisors participate in the supervisees' internal processes in a peripheral way while maintaining the integrity of the therapeutic process and the patients' safety and interests. This type of backing enables supervisees to grow as clinicians and cope successfully with daily clinical challenges by taking care of the relational ruptures in therapy through investigating the empathic failures and mutual enactments in the therapeutic space.