IJSP Number 2, 2020

54 therapist, one must speak about the client and about the experience from therapy. It is only after that the effective supervision process can begin. This process will help the therapist understand the dynamic of one’s lived experience, so that s/he can further help the client (focused on the client’s process and not on the parallel one). From a different perspective, supervision also ensures a pedagogical aspect: teaching how to prepare the therapeutic framework, work methods and techniques, what, when and how to apply practical intervention strategies [3], [4]. According to Milne, supervision refers to a “formal disposition” of the supervisor therapist to co-create a supervisor-supervisee relationship. This relationship should have a specific objective: training and educating the supervisee, through a relationship and work centred process that organizes, sustains, develops and evaluates the supervisee’s professional pathway. In this regard, the main methods used by supervisors are normative (such as quality control), corrective (such as encouraging emotional processing), and formative (such as maintaining and facilitating the skills, capabilities and general efficiency of the supervisees). [5] From the integrative strategic psychotherapy perspective, supervision is seen as a common factor in psychotherapy. All psychotherapy schools use supervision as a means of professional instruction and improvement proceeding from the experimented psychotherapist and directed towards the novice one. Supervision is defined as a “formal, systematic and organised learning process, with a flexible curriculum depending on the participants’ needs and knowledge”; supervision takes place in a time-space framework that belongs to an institution, association or school. Supervision as a process of instruction and practical experience represents an “interdisciplinary field”, as it involves both pedagogy, as well as associated sciences, such as psychology, sociology and andragogy, etc. [4]. The therapeutic relationship, extended to that between supervisor-supervisee defines the means through which supervision produces insight. Watkins proposes a “Contextual Model of the Psychotherapy Supervision Relationship” (CSRM) that can explain how this specific insight and change generating relationship, becomes possible. According to the CSRM the supervisor-supervisee relationship has a mediation function with five variables: connection, conception, allegiance, alignment and action. Insight is made possible by the common aspect belonging to the specific actions of the therapist – supervisee relationship that is the feedback given by the supervisor and reflection stimulation [5]. Unlike the client, the therapist is involved in a double manner in the therapeutic process: one way is connected to the intervention procedures methods (the “know how”), while the other way implies what is called the “inner sense of the therapeutic evolution”. This “inner sense of therapeutic evolution” demands a diagnosis of the therapeutic co-relationship, an awareness of those aspects hinting to the appearance of a parallel process that is ultimately those very needs that render supervision a necessity. To give a specific example, when presenting in supervision a strong discomfort felt during the therapy with a client, we gained