Outside Insight - External Supervision for Therapists

At West London Action for Children, the life experiences our clients bring to therapy are often complex, combining deep trauma, ongoing daily struggles, and significant risk. This emotional weight can be challenging for therapists to manage alone. While our team benefits from internal group supervision, it is also a professional requirement for therapists to access external clinical supervision, protected by its own confidentiality agreement. This ensures that clients’ identities remain anonymous while giving therapists the freedom to speak openly about their concerns and the emotions stirred up by their work.

Sometimes, a client’s story can touch something personal within a therapist, revealing feelings or experiences they hadn’t been consciously aware of. One of the critical roles of supervision is to help therapists recognise and manage these responses, ensuring they do not inadvertently project their own emotions onto their clients. For example, a client expressing deep hopelessness and suicidal thoughts might unconsciously trigger anxiety in their therapist, leaving them feeling inadequate or desperate to "fix" the situation. If unrecognised, this could unintentionally communicate to the client that their pain is too overwhelming to be held, deepening their sense of isolation.

Similarly, a therapist working with a teenager who expresses anger towards school and parents might find their own feelings—perhaps related to their own teenager—being activated. Without awareness, the therapist might react in ways that confuse or alienate the young client, risking damage to the therapeutic relationship.

In such cases, external supervision provides a vital space for therapists to explore these feelings safely and without judgment. Supervision helps them disentangle what belongs to the clinical work and what stems from their own personal experiences, ultimately protecting and strengthening the therapeutic relationship.

In this way, supervision acts as a form of therapy for therapists themselves. Just as clients leave therapy sessions feeling lighter and more understood, therapists too can leave supervision feeling supported, clearer, and better able to process the emotional weight of their work. Knowing they are no longer carrying these concerns alone, and having a better understanding of themselves, allows therapists to reenter their sessions open, grounded, and ready to be fully present for their clients.

Thanks to the generous support of our donors, West London Action for Children is able to fund high-quality, external supervision tailored to the individual caseloads and needs of each therapist—one of the many ways we ensure our clients receive the highest possible standard of psychotherapy.