Author(s): Patrick J. Morrissette

Supervision

Traditional systems of supervision provide counselors and other helping professionals with the support and feedback necessary for effective treatment and continued professional growth. Yet with cuts in our health care system and increasing needs in remote areas, the contact and personnel requirements of traditional supervision are not always feasible. In these cases, the self supervision process can provide the practitioner with a valuable, yet cost-free, tool for professional growth and quality assurance in treatment. Indeed, this deliberate process of reflection on intrapersonal, interpersonal, and clinical issues that influence one's work is of tremendous value to practitioners with and without the benefit of traditional supervision. Self-Supervision: A Primer for Counselors and Human Service Professionals Systhesizes past and current literature on the theory and practice of self-supervision, drawing on contributions froma wide variety of disciplines. Beginning with a historical overview and discussion of the counselor-client relationship, boundary transgressions, the counselor's family-of-origin and unresolved issues, and disclosure styles, Patrick J. Morrissette provides the reader with a foundation for understanding the issues that must be examined when evaluating one's own work. He then outlines the reflective process and describes actual practice, guiding principles, and strategies for self-supervision. Finally presented are proactive measures for counselor self-care. "Know thyself," Socrates said when he advised his students pursue a path of self-education and self-discovery: the path, he said, to virtue. Indeed, no matter waht one's profession, self knowledge is an invaluable resource, but the means to its development not always intuitive. Self-Supervision provides counselors and human service professionals with a plan for the pursuit of self-knowledge, a working model for the independent direction of their own professional growth.