IJSP Number 5, 2023

22 relationship. Essential in this approach to psychotherapy are the concepts of inquiry, attunement, and involvement: Inquiry refers to the psychotherapist’s asking about their client’s phenomenological experience — their thoughts, memories, affect, fantasy, and body sensations. It proceeds with exploring the client’s personal history, identifying how the client has adapted and the choices they have made in their life; An essential element is the psychotherapist’s attunement to each client’s affect, rhythm, and style of cognition as well as the client’s level of development and various relational needs serve as the basis on which a healing relationship is established; Involvement establishes an interpersonal foundation; it is based on the psychotherapist’s attunement and proceeds with the psychotherapist providing acknowledgement, validation, normalization, and presence. The Supervision Pyramid formulated by Loredana Vîşcu and Edward Watkins [3] provides a supervision tool that attends to the supervisee, the client, and the supervisor. It is divided into four levels: First, Identifying the problem through assisting the supervisee in defining the nature, style, and goals of the supervision; Second, Exploring and elaborating on what is learned, the relational process of the supervision, and clarifying the supervision issues; Third, Experimentation and consolidation with the goal of conceptualizing the supervisee’s new knowledge and determining how the insights acquired during supervision could be implemented; Fourth, Solving the problem with the goal of the supervisee’s increased capacity to identify solutions and to embrace professional challenges. All levels of the supervisory pyramid are built on a dialogue between supervisor and supervisee that includes the attributes of engagement, giving, and flexibility. The purpose of our research was to provide a model of supervision that integrates the essential features of a relationally-focused psychotherapy with each level of the supervisory pyramid [4]. 2. OUR PROFESSIONAL DIALOGUE In his study of the book A Guide to Clinical Supervision: The Supervision Pyramid [3], Richard Erskine raised four significant questions that have stimulated Loredana Vîşcu and Edward Watkins to review their ideas and to elaborate on their previous model of supervision [3, 5, 6, 7]. Question one: “When using the Supervision Pyramid how do you uncover the professional requirements of the supervisee as well as the relationship needs of both the supervisee and the client?”. We, Loredana Viscu and Edward Watkins, respond by saying that we initially ask the supervisee to describe what they need in the supervision. In this initial level of the Supervision Pyramid the goal is to help our supervisee identify and clarify the problems brought up by the supervisee. We have discovered that the declarative comments of some supervisees are not necessarily what is actually required in the supervision. After asking the supervisee to describe their therapy situation and inquiring about their phenomenological experience, the supervisee often realizes that their difficulty with their client is different from their initial formulation.