Applying the Therapeutic Function of Professional Supervision : Attending to the Emotional Impacts of Human Service Work

This book brings a fresh approach and conversation to the practice of professional supervision for human services by specifically articulating its often performed, but unnamed and under-explored therapeutic function. The discussion of the therapeutic function is timely given the rising complexities in our world, and the increasing awareness of emotional impacts of human service work. These impacts include stress, distress, emotional labour, indirect trauma, and direct trauma.

Posing a challenge and invitation to supervisors to comfortably inhabit the therapeutic function of supervision to increase emotional support to workers, it places safe practice and worker wellbeing at the heart of supervision to enable high quality service delivery for often the most vulnerable in society. While underpinned by theory, it is written to be practically applied and is developed from a -lived experience- perspective, offering a unique glimpse into actual practice.

By modelling one of the main aims of professional supervision, which is to facilitate and enable the integration of experience into learning and knowledge, it will be of interest to all practitioners across a broad range of human services, particularly both new and experienced supervisors.

Nicki Weld (PhD) is a senior lecturer in the University of Auckland Post Graduate Professional Supervision Programme, and a supervisor and educator in human services in Aotearoa, New Zealand. She is a registered social worker with research interests in supervision, courage, trauma, and child and family work.