Clinical Supervision for Colorado MFT and LPC Candidates
Clinicians often seek supervision because a case has become difficult, an ethical question is unclear, or they need dependable guidance while completing licensure requirements. Those immediate concerns matter and are addressed directly.
My supervision also helps clinicians strengthen how they formulate clinical situations, make purposeful decisions, and account for the reasoning behind their choices. The broader aim is to develop stronger clinical judgment, a more differentiated professional identity, and greater confidence grounded in increasing competence.
Format and Availability
- Individual supervision — 50-minute virtual meetings
- Group supervision — 90-minute virtual meetings
- Available to Colorado MFT and LPC candidates
- Currently accepting new supervisees
Supervision is available to MFTCs and LPCCs working toward Colorado licensure. Prospective supervisees should confirm that the proposed supervision arrangement meets the requirements applicable to their credential and employment setting.
Please contact me for current individual and group supervision fees.
Experience and Qualifications
I am a Colorado Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and AAMFT Approved Supervisor with more than twenty years of faculty experience teaching, training, and supervising graduate and doctoral clinicians.
My supervision experience includes master’s and doctoral marriage and family therapy programs at Regis University, Alliant International University, Bethel Seminary San Diego, and the University of the Rockies, as well as serving as Founding Director of Clinical Training for the Center for Humanistic and Interpersonal Psychotherapy.
Learn more about my professional experience.
Endorsements from former supervisees are available on my Psychology Today profile.
Developing How You Think and Practice
Clinical supervision should do more than help resolve a case. It should strengthen the clinician's capacity to formulate what is occurring, recognize competing possibilities, examine assumptions, make purposeful choices, and evaluate the effects of those choices.
I work with clinicians to move beyond simply knowing theories and techniques toward thinking with greater specificity about language, relationships, systems, values, context, and change. The aim is not to produce clinicians who think as I do. It is to help clinicians become increasingly able to recognize what they think, account for their clinical choices, and develop a professional stance that is genuinely their own.
This development includes:
- Thinking with greater sophistication — moving beyond basic formulations toward more systemic, contextual, and precise ways of understanding clinical situations.
- Developing professional authorship — recognizing your own clinical voice, judgment, distinctions, and contribution rather than relying primarily on borrowed authority.
- Building grounded confidence — developing confidence that rests on increasing competence, reflective judgment, and the ability to explain and stand behind sound clinical choices.
- Becoming more differentiated — distinguishing what you think from what you have been taught to think, what you value from what you feel expected to value, and what possibilities genuinely fit from those generated by pressure or comparison.
Challenge is part of this process, but so is pacing. Development does not require every possibility to become an immediate goal. Supervision provides a place to examine where you are, what you are ready to develop, and what direction increasingly belongs to you.
Structure Protects the Work
Supervision requires more than clinical case conversation. Supervision also requires a clear professional frame. Expectations around preparation, communication, documentation, attendance, evaluation, and follow-through are not merely administrative. They provide opportunities to examine how responsibility, authority, accuracy, boundaries, and professional judgment are actually practiced.
Clinicians also work within real pressures. Financial strain, administrative burden, emotional exhaustion, institutional demands, and caseload instability can influence clinical choices and professional development. Supervision provides a space to recognize those pressures without allowing them to determine clinical choices without sufficient examination.
My supervision is relational, but it is not informal. Clear expectations create enough structure for challenge, reflection, accountability, and development while allowing attention to the clinician's circumstances and pace.
Structure is therefore not an end in itself. It protects the conditions in which clinicians can think carefully, practice with integrity, and develop a professional life they can sustain.
What Supervision Looks Like
Supervision is tailored to the clinician's developmental level, but the work consistently asks for active thinking. Clinicians are encouraged to articulate their reasoning, examine assumptions, identify gaps in their formulations, and become increasingly precise about why they are choosing a particular direction.
Depending on the clinician and the work presented, supervision may include case consultation, structured feedback, documentation review, guided reflection, and attention to the clinician's use of language, framing, and professional judgment.
Common areas of development include:
- strengthening systemic and relational conceptualization
- becoming more precise in clinical language, formulation, and intervention rationale
- recognizing how values, assumptions, emotional reactions, and context influence clinical choices
- developing clearer and more defensible judgment in ethically complex situations
- strengthening talk-therapy process and the purposeful use of questions, responses, and framing
- navigating institutional and professional pressures without surrendering clinical judgment
- developing greater confidence when working with complex presentations or with clients whose needs challenge the clinician’s usual approach
- recognizing one's clinical distinctions and developing an increasingly self-authored professional identity
Selected Writing
These selected publications reflect my attention to clinical judgment, professional responsibility, cultural context, and the integration of theory with practice. Publisher records and downloadable full-text versions are provided below.
Managing Worldview Influences: Self-Awareness and Self-Supervision in a Cross-Cultural Therapeutic Relationship
H. Luis Vargas and Colwick M. Wilson
Journal of Family Psychotherapy, 22(2), 97–113 (2011)
Enhancing Therapist Courage and Clinical Acuity for Advancing Clinical Practice
H. Luis Vargas
Journal of Family Psychotherapy, 30(2), 141–152 (2019)
Coupling Existential–Humanistic and Systemic Paradigms
H. Luis Vargas and Lindsay L. Edwards
In L. Hoffman (Ed.), APA Handbook of Humanistic and Existential Psychology: Vol. 2. Clinical and Social Applications (pp. 71–87). American Psychological Association (2026)
Working Together
Supervisees are expected to bring clinical material they are prepared to examine, articulate their reasoning, and remain open to direct feedback, uncertainty, and reconsideration. My role is to provide a structured and accountable setting in which support and challenge can contribute to stronger judgment and increasing professional autonomy.
If this approach fits what you are seeking in supervision, I welcome a conversation about working together.