IJSP Number 8, 2026

International Journal of Supervision in Psychotherapy, Number 8, 2026 Page | 46 1. INTRODUCTION Over recent decades, professional training in educational and psychosocial fields has undergone significant transformations, driven by the increasing complexity of practice contexts and the diversification of professional roles. The specialized literature increasingly emphasizes that the effectiveness and sustainability of professional practice can no longer be explained solely by the level of technical or procedural competencies; rather, they depend essentially on professionals’ capacity to regulate emotions, reflect on their own practice, and build a coherent professional identity [1, 2]. Within this context, processes of self-regulation and reflection are recognized as central mechanisms of professional development, directly contributing to burnout prevention, the maintenance of meaning in practice, and the consolidation of ethical positioning [3, 4]. Recent studies in education and helping professions confirm that the absence of structured frameworks for reflection and emotional regulation contributes to fragmentation of professional identity and heightened vulnerability to occupational stress [5, 6]. Supervision occupies a privileged place in the architecture of professional training, being considered one of the primary ways through which professional competence, ethical responsibility, and professional identity are supported and consolidated [7, 8]. Traditionally, supervision has been conceptualized as a mechanism for monitoring, evaluating, and guiding practice, with an emphasis on transmitting expertise and controlling the quality of interventions. These functions remain essential; however, recent research highlights an expansion of supervision beyond its evaluative dimension toward an explicitly formative and developmental function [9]. Contemporary models of supervision increasingly underscore the importance of the supervision relationship and the supervisor–supervisee alliance as key determinants of formative effectiveness [9, 10]. In this sense, supervision is conceptualized as a complex relational context in which reflection, self-regulation, and professional development are facilitated through a safe, predictable, and reflective framework. Nevertheless, most conceptualizations remain anchored in clinical settings or therapeutic training, and their transfer to educational and psychosocial domains is often implicit or insufficiently theorized. This gap becomes visible in the literature dedicated to the training of teachers, counselors, or school psychologists, where supervision is frequently addressed in a fragmented manner, as an administrative tool or as a form of informal mentoring, without a coherent conceptual framework that articulates its role in supporting self-regulation and professional identity [11]. In the absence of such a conceptualization, supervision’s potential to function as a complex educational device remains underutilized. In parallel, research in interpersonal neurobiology and developmental psychology emphasizes the profoundly relational character of self-regulation. Self-regulation is not conceptualized exclusively as an individual skill, but as an emergent process supported by repeated co-regulation experiences in meaningful relational contexts [12, 13]. This perspective offers a solid theoretical foundation for understanding supervision as a privileged space for co-regulation and guided reflection, where professional experiences can be integrated and transformed into identity resources. Integrative psychotherapy offers a relevant conceptual framework for articulating these processes through its emphasis on relationality, emotional regulation, and experience integration [14–16]. However, applying the integrative paradigm in non-clinical contexts