Supervision Ethics: Counseling the Supervisee

Abstract

Certain, but not all, models of supervision, whetherformarriage and family therapy orfor individually based counseling, have counseling the supervisee as a legitimate component of supervision. There are differing views on the boundary issues associated with allowing the supervision session to begin with a focus on the skills of the counselor and then to become therapeutically focused on the supervisee. This issue suggests thatsupervision training should consider the limits of counseling within the supervision process. Yet, many supervisors rely on skills from their therapy training as models for the supervision process. In this column, an example of a supervisee's personal difficulties arises within supervision, which cause significant changes for both supervisor and supervisee.