Professional Supervision and Training with Sarah Benamer

I offer one to one supervision for therapists and counsellors and professionals in related fields. I am an approved UKCP supervisor.

My specific areas of interest are in trauma, disrupted attachments, the body, chronic illness and pain. The interface of mind and body are shaped by our early relationships and environment, and this in turn determines our sense of belonging and attachment; how we feel in the world, in our bodies, in relation to others. I offer training and teaching around this subject area of attachment and the body in clinical practice.

As a supervisor and teacher I am theoretically informed by relational, attachment, developmental, trauma, psychoanalytic and feminist theory. This is interwoven with socio-cultural and real world perspectives from my time as a community worker and Masters degree in Applied Anthropology. I seek to work collaboratively with my supervisees, affording a secure professional base from which they can fulfill their potential and explore aspects of their work and related theory that have particular significance and meaning for them and their clients. I am passionate about inclusion, and working with difference and power dynamics in an empowering way.

AS A SUPERVISOR MY AIMS ARE:

  • To provide a space that is non hierarchical and collaborative. To hold the tension between offering a containing and responsive secure base and challenge and critique when necessary, sitting alongside supervisees and collaborating in finding the most appropriate course of action with a given client at a given moment in time. Drawing upon theory but never losing sight of humanity and the relationship in the room.
  • To enable supervisees to develop their way of working according to values, and ethics that are internalised and commensurate with their own history and felt experience as well as in keeping with the professions governing bodies.
  • To empower supervisees practically and emotionally to offer clients a boundaried and loving therapeutic relationship.
  • To explore supervisees’ capabilities and limitations both in regard of clients material and logistically what they are able to offer (financially, time-wise and so on) so that they do not become depleted through giving from an undernourished place within themselves.
  • To integrate theory and practice.
  • To safely explore difference, social inequality, and how and expand spaces between people that become constricted.
  • To facilitate ‘breaking the silence’ that can feel characteristic of work with profound trauma and abuse.
  • To provide a secure environment that allows supervisees to see the continuum between their own material and that of the client. This can be of particular importance in the relational process; for example in understanding how their attachment patterns in intimate relating may emerge in the inevitable enactments with clients.
  • To enable supervisees to work effectively and confidently with their own emotional and physical countertransference; through understanding their personal body narratives and becoming au fait with the feelings within their body they may be more equipped to recognise bodily counter-transference and what is being communicated non verbally by a client.
  • Where appropriate to use the relational experience of supervision to explore parallel process.

If you would like to talk through your supervision needs please call 020 86720515 to make an appointment.