IJSP Number 5, 2023

24 imperative that the supervisor has a sense of the client’s vulnerabilities. The ultimate purpose of supervision is to improve both the client’s and supervisee’s well-being. Therefore, the consistent task of the supervisor involves attending to the interpersonal processes between the supervisee and the client. Consequently, the supervision connection "mediates" the supervisor’s relationship with the supervisee’s client. We believe that an important task of the supervisor involves being attentive to the countertransference in the supervisory relationship [9]. We often ask ourselves if we are creating a hierarchical relationship with our supervisee or if we are establishing a discussion grounded in mutuality between two professionals. We monitor ourselves to determine if our relational needs are dominating the supervision. We strive to be attentive to the mature, here and now, needs of the supervisee while also helping the supervisee identify their client’s unsatisfied relational needs. We watch the subtle interactions that may occur between us and our supervisee and any possible parallel that may occur between the supervisee and their client. 3. RELATIONAL NEEDS Inherent in this first level of the supervision pyramid is our helping the supervisee identify relational needs, both within themselves, and with their clients. The concept of relational needs emerged from a research project at the Institute for Integrative Psychotherapy in New York City [10, 11]. Eight vital relational needs, each crucial at all stages of development, were identified: 1. Security-in-relationship is the visceral experience of having our physical and emotional vulnerabilities protected by the other person. It involves the experience that our variety of needs and feelings are human and natural. Security-in- relationship is a sense of simultaneously being vulnerable and in harmony with another. Therapeutic attunement involves the empathetic awareness of our client’s need for security within the relationship plus a reciprocal response to that need. 2. Validation, affirmation, and significance within a relationship is the need to have the other person validate the significance and function of our intrapsychic processes of affect, fantasy, and constructing of meaning and to validate that our emotions are a significant intrapsychic and interpersonal communication. It includes the need to have all of our relational needs affirmed and accepted as natural. The therapist’s affective attunement with the client’s feelings validates the client’s affect and provides affirmation and normalization of the client’s relational needs. 3. Acceptance by a stable, dependable, and protective other person is the need to look up to and rely on parents, elders, teachers, and mentors. The relational need for acceptance by a consistent, reliable, and dependable other person is the search for protection and guidance that may manifest as an idealization of the other. In psychotherapy such idealization is also the search for protection from harsh self- criticism. It can also be the search for protection from one’s own escalation of affect or exaggeration of fantasies. 4. Confirmation of personal experience is the need to have experience confirmed. It is manifested through the desire to be in the presence of someone who