Sharon is available to provide ongoing clinical supervision or short-term clinical consultation to therapists who want to strengthen and consolidate existing skills, develop new skills, or obtain a fresh perspective on a difficult case.
The following tenets inform Sharon's approach to supervision and consultation:
- Psychotherapy is an enormously challenging and complex undertaking, in both intellectual and emotional terms. Therefore, supervision and consultation (along with professional reading and coursework or conference attendance) are important throughout a therapist's career, not just at the beginning.
- Although every therapeutic school has something potentially valuable to offer, therapists should be aware of their own strengths and limitations and choose methods that are a good fit for them. For example, a very outgoing, charismatic therapist will be more comfortable with structural or strategic family therapy, while a more cerebral therapist might be drawn to Bowenian family therapy or object relations couple therapy.
- While there is probably a limit to the number of approaches a therapist can master well enough to practice effectively, it's helpful to master several, so that one can tailor one's approach to meet the needs of a variety of clients. Ideally, these approaches will be compatible in terms of their underlying theories of therapeutic action.
- No matter how much personal therapy a therapist has had, countertransference and enactment are ubiquitous in therapeutic work. Sometimes they are problematic, resulting in therapeutic impasse, empathic failures, and a stifling of therapeutic creativity, while, at other times, they are rich sources of information about a client's unconscious and important keys to therapeutic leverage. For even the most well-trained and experienced clinician, a 'third' perspective is often invaluable in being able to sort out the complex unconscious dynamics that can emerge in therapy.
- Therapists who work with many traumatized clients can experience vicarious trauma, which, if not attended to, can diminish a clinician's effectiveness and take a toll on his or her physical and psychological health. EMDR can be an effective tool for helping therapists reprocess the traumatic stimuli they are exposed to in the course of doing clinical work.
