Clinical Supervision Experience and Professional Background
Training and Professional Development
My training and professional development work draws on more than twenty years of faculty experience teaching theories and techniques of psychotherapy, as well as training and supervising graduate and doctoral clinicians. Much of my work has involved considering how theory informs clinical thinking and how clinical thinking translates into purposeful and responsible action.
A central emphasis is the distinction between knowing a theory and thinking clinically with theory. Knowing a model does not necessarily tell us what matters in a particular clinical situation, how a problem may be organized, what needs to become different, or why one intervention makes more sense than another. I organize our consideration of these questions around three connected clinical tasks - assessment, goal formation, and intervention.
Assessment considers what is occurring, how a problem is organized, and what may be sustaining it. Goal formation identifies what needs to become different. Intervention considers what a clinician might responsibly do in relation to the identified goal. Together, these tasks provide a line of reasoning from what the clinician observes to what the clinician decides to do.
Clinical thinking also involves attention to process and context. Relational patterns, culture, identity, social location, and other differences may influence both the presenting concern and what occurs in the therapeutic relationship. Professional judgment runs through this work - noticing carefully, reasoning through uncertainty, making purposeful clinical decisions, evaluating their effects, and remaining accountable for those decisions.
The emphasis is not simply on knowing more theories or acquiring more techniques, but on how we think about clinical practice and arrive at the decisions we make.