Notes from My Last Supervision of the Year

Notes from My Last Supervision of the Year

Reflections from a trainee psychotherapist

Anyhow, the year is about to end, and I’ve just had my last supervision session. My supervisor, who knows about my website, has given me permission to refer to him vaguely. He’s eighty-four years old (a good innings by any standard), a Jungian therapist with decades of experience behind him. Supervision is always a drive up to Edmonton, to one of those old Victorian houses that still seem to remember another century. I walk up the curved staircase, past shelves where the Collected Works of Jung sit side by side with more unusual titles even a book on the Akashic Records (something I will talk about soon). It’s a mix of depth psychology and fringe curiosity that fits him somehow.

I still remember the first time I sat opposite him. There is something of my late father in the way he sits: steady, unhurried, letting silence do some of the work. At this last session he simply asked, “So, how has the year been?” And the first word that came to my mind was: intense.

Three Clients Who Travelled With Me This Year

Because of confidentiality, these are composites blended stories rather than individual biographies. But they represent the emotional landscapes I’ve been learning to walk through with clients.

1. The high-achiever living with quiet panic

One client presented as outwardly successful: good job, functioning life, no obvious “crisis.” But underneath sat a chronic fear of being exposed as a failure. Whatever went well “didn’t count.” Whatever went wrong was taken as proof.

My struggle here was pacing. Part of me wanted to rush in with reassurance, to “prove” their worthiness. Supervision helped me see that this was my own discomfort with their self-criticism. My supervisor kept bringing me back to Rogers’ idea of unconditional positive regard and accurate empathy: can you sit with their harsh inner voice without trying to silence it too soon? [1] Over time, the work became less about fixing their thoughts and more about creating a relationship where a different way of relating to themselves could be felt, not just argued with.

2. The carer who didn’t know what she wanted

Another client had spent most of life looking after others: parents, siblings, partners, children. When I asked simple questions like, “What do you want?” the room would go quiet. It wasn’t resistance; it was absence. There was no internal file for that question.

My difficulty here was tolerance of emptiness. Sessions sometimes felt “stuck,” and I worried I was failing. In supervision, drawing on Winnicott and attachment thinking, we explored the idea that this “not knowing” was actually the work. Sitting with her in that fog without demanding quick clarity was part of repairing a history where her needs never had space to form at all. [12][13] I had to learn to respect small shifts: one new boundary, one hour taken for herself in a week, as signs of something important.

3. The man who didn’t trust his own softness

A third client came with a history of being the “strong one” emotionally, practically, financially. Underneath was a grief that had never been fully allowed. When tears did come, they were followed by shame and self-attack: “I’m being pathetic.”

My struggle here was my own countertransference: a pull to admire his strength and avoid his vulnerability alongside him. Supervision, leaning on Jung’s idea of the shadow, invited me to notice how much both of us wanted to disown the “soft” parts. [2][3] When I could stay with his emotion without collapsing into pity or pushing him back into competence, something in the room relaxed. He began to experiment with the idea that strength might include crying, not exclude it.

What Supervision Gave Back to Me

Across these three clients, supervision became a ritual place where the raw material of the consulting room could be metabolised. My supervisor listens not only to what I say, but to the patterns between the stories: where I rush, where I freeze, where I rescue, where I judge. Sometimes he will simply ask, “Who are you trying to be for this client?” a question that lands somewhere between Jung and Rogers, touching both my persona and my actualising tendency. [1][2]

Reading Jung, I had an abstract idea of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Sitting in that Victorian room, describing my week, I started to feel how certain patterns keep repeating: the exile, the caretaker, the wounded hero, the unseen child. They are not just “my clients’ issues”; they are deep human themes moving through each of us in different costumes. [3][4][5] Supervision has helped me see these patterns without reducing people to them.

Holding a Life Outside the Room

One thing I am grateful for this year is that, alongside all of this intensity, my life outside the consulting room has remained a real source of stability. I still work nights as a concierge; I’m still in training in Tooting; and I also have a marriage that is not broken but very much alive and ongoing. My wife and I have five children, and the logistics alone can feel like a full-time job. But the relationship itself has been a steady container rather than another site of collapse.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy no long-term marriage is. It means that even on the nights I come home carrying the weight of other people’s stories, there is a shared understanding of why this work matters. In many ways, my family life keeps my feet on the ground. It stops the work from becoming too abstract. Attachment theory reads differently when you have children of your own; boundaries land differently when you’re tired and still have school runs and bills and late-night conversations to show up for. [12]

Supervision often touches this too: how to protect family time, how to notice when I’m bringing clinical material home in my body, how to let my own support system support me, instead of secretly trying to be the “strong one” everywhere.

What I’m Taking into Next Year

If I had to name my main learning from this year, it would be this: therapy is less about clever interpretations and more about the slow courage to stay present at the threshold where an old story is cracking but a new one hasn’t formed yet. I’m learning that my job is not to rush in with answers, but to sit with people in that uncomfortable in-between space long enough for something genuine to emerge. That takes more than technique; it takes stamina, faith and a willingness to feel a bit useless while something deeper rearranges itself.

The clients taught me that. Each of them, in their own way, brought me to the edge of what I could tolerate: their anxiety, their shame, their confusion, and my own. My supervisor, with his eighty-four years and shelves of Jung, gave me a language and a frame so that I didn’t drown in it. He helped me see that what looks like “stuck” from the outside can be a necessary pause in the soul’s movement. My family gave me a home to return to at the end of each shift, both clinical and concierge: a wife, children, and a house that is often chaotic but undeniably alive.

Around that central home, there is another ring of responsibility: three sisters and an elderly mother. On paper, it looks like a good life and in many ways it truly is. There is love, humour, WhatsApp messages flying all day, and a sense that I don’t carry any of this alone. But it is not without struggle. There are hospital appointments, financial pressures, late-night phone calls when someone is unwell or overwhelmed, old family patterns that still know exactly which buttons to press. Some days I move from holding a client’s story in the therapy room, to holding residents’ crises on the night shift, to holding family worries on the way home. The word “holding” sounds gentle; in reality, it can feel heavy.

This is where the learning deepens. I am slowly discovering that self-care for me is not a spa day; it is the quiet discipline of not abandoning myself while I try to be there for everyone else. It is letting myself be human in front of my family, my siblings, even my supervisor admitting when I am tired, naming when something has affected me, allowing myself to be supported as well as supportive. The more honest I become about my own limits, the less I need to perform competence in the therapy room, and the more available I become to the client’s actual experience.

I am still very much a trainee. I am still working nights, still juggling essays and supervision reports, still making mistakes and learning how to repair them. But this last supervision of the year left me with a quiet sense that something in me has shifted from surviving the work to slowly inhabiting it. I am beginning to understand that “a good life” does not mean a life without struggle; it means a life where the struggle is held within relationships, meaning and a direction of travel. Somewhere between my clients, my supervisor, my wife, my children, my three sisters and my elderly mother, I am learning what it is to be a therapist in the making without forgetting that I am also, simply, a person among other people, trying to grow. Merry Christmas and a Happy, Clappy New Year

References

[1] Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (London: Constable, 1961).
[2] C. G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Works, Vol. 7) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
[3] C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works, Vol. 9i) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).
[4] C. G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (London: Aldus Books, 1964).
[5] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949).
[6] Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
[7] Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London: Allen & Unwin, 1915).
[8] Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960).
[9] Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969).
[10] Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968).
[11] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963).
[12] John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment (London: Hogarth Press, 1969).
[13] Mary Ainsworth et al., Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1978).