Creating a “Nest” of Emotional Safety: Reflective Supervision in a Child–parent Psychotherapy Case

Abstract

Reflective supervision is considered a key practice component for any infant mental health provider to work effectively with young children and their families. This article will provide a brief history and discussion of reflective supervision followed by a case study demonstrating the importance of reflective supervision in the context of child-parent psychotherapy (CPP; A.F. Lieberman, C. Ghosh Ippen, & P. Van Horn, ; A.F. Lieberman & P. Van Horn, , 2008). Given that CPP leverages the caregiver-child relationship as the mechanism for change in young children who have been impacted by stressors and traumas, primary objectives of CPP include assisting caregivers as they understand the meaning of their child's distress and improving the caregiver-child relationship to make it a safe and supportive space in which the child can heal. As this case will demonstrate, when a clinician is emotionally triggered by a family's negative intergenerational patterns of relating, reflective supervision supports a parallel process in which the psychotherapist feels understood and contained by the supervisor so that she or he is able to support the caregiver's efforts to understand and contain the child.

Stress and coping among early childhood intervention professionals receiving reflective supervision: A qualitative analysis

“…In this way, we viewed word count as a proxy for participants’ willingness to share their experiences with stress and coping pre‐ and post‐RS/C. Second, we examined the content of participants’ responses by considering the exploration of thoughts, feelings, and emotions; such exploration is consistent with the aims of RS (Many et al., ; Parlakian, ).…”

“…Given the relatively sparse literature focused on the professional experiences of early childhood intervention (ECI) professionals, the present study focuses exclusively on this population in an effort to better understand the day‐to‐day stress and coping experiences of professionals serving children at risk for developmental delays and disabilities. In light of evidence suggesting that reflective supervision/consultation (RS/C) is a demonstrated best practice for supporting integration of a variety of experiences, feelings, and thoughts related to work (Many, Kronenberg, & Dickson, ; Parlakian, ), we focus on exploring ECI professionals’ perceptions of work‐related stress and coping both before and after receiving RS/C.…”

Infant mental health home visiting therapists’ reflective supervision self‐efficacy in community practice settings

“…As Slade () describes, the infant's capacity for reflective functioning is only developed in the context of experiencing the parent's reflective functioning in the context of the parent–infant relationship. In a parallel to that relationship dynamic, reflective supervision involves the use of reflective functioning by the supervisor in the context of the supervisory relationship to support the therapist's use of reflective functioning with the parent so that the parent can then utilize reflective functioning with the baby (Heffron, Reynolds, & Talbot, ; Harrison, , Many, Kronenberg, & Dickson, ; Pawl & St. John, ; Schafer, ).…”

Reflective Supervision for Social Work Field Instructors: Lessons Learned from Infant Mental Health

“…The goal of the reflective supervision experience is to "allow[s] providers the opportunity to experience the same type of support that they intend to provide to families, while they are learning to problem-solve about the challenges they have encountered in their work with young children and their families" (Watson et al 2014, p. 4). The parallel is clear; the supervisor does unto the supervisee so that the supervisee will do unto the parent who will then do unto the infant (Harrison 2016;Many et al 2016;Pawl and St. John 1998;Schafer 2007). The efforts to conduct research on the implementation of reflective supervision in the early childhood field are steadily growing with concentrated attention to the identification of the core components of reflective supervision (Tomlin et al 2014;Watson et al 2016) and the creation of tools designed to measure reflective supervision experience Finello et al 2016;Frosch et al 2018;Gallen et al 2016;Heller and Ash 2016;Tomlin and Heller 2016;Watson et al 2016).…”