Supervision for Counsellors

What supervision is (and is not)

Supervision is a regular, confidential conversation about your client work with a therapist who has supervision training. You bring cases, questions and reactions from your practice, and you think them through together.

It is not therapy for your clients, and your clients do not attend. It is also not personal therapy for you, although it is normal for your own feelings about the work to come up and be talked about. If you are looking for counselling for yourself, our other service pages describe that.

Supervision is separate from your training course, your employer and any professional body, and each of them sets its own requirements. Please check what yours asks for before you begin.

Who it is for

Supervision at Safe Expanse is for counsellors, therapists, social workers and counselling trainees or interns in Singapore. You might be:

• A trainee or intern on placement who wants regular space to reflect on your cases
• A practitioner in an agency, school or hospital setting who would like a supervisor outside your organisation
• A counsellor or therapist in private practice who works largely on your own
• A social worker whose casework includes counselling and who wants somewhere to think it through

If you are not sure whether supervision with us suits your situation, message us with a little about your role and what you are looking for, and we will let you know.

Supervision hours for SAC and West Coast Institute

Depending on the supervisor, supervision hours can be endorsed for clinical member registration with the Singapore Association for Counselling (SAC), and for the West Coast Institute certification in Gestalt Therapy with Children and Adolescents.

Not every supervisor can endorse every requirement. When you get in touch, tell us which one you are working towards and we will let you know which supervisor can support it. SAC and West Coast Institute set their own requirements, so please also check their current rules directly.

What a supervision session looks like

A supervision session, whether one to one or in a group, is shaped by what you bring. Before or at the start of a session, you choose what you would like to focus on.

Common things supervisees bring include:

• A specific client situation you are finding hard to make sense of
• Ethical, boundary or safety questions that have come up in your work
• Your own reactions to a client, and what they might be telling you
• How you are thinking about a case using the approaches you were trained in
• Workload, fatigue and how you are looking after yourself at work

Client material is always anonymised. You describe your work without names or details that could identify the person, and no identifiable client information is shared in supervision.

In group supervision, cases are talked through with the supervisor and the other supervisees, and what is shared stays within the group.

Our therapists draw on a range of approaches in their own practice, including CBT, person-centred, solution-focused, gestalt, attachment-based, EMDR, Internal Family Systems, art therapy and Transactional Analysis. You do not need to share an approach with your supervisor; supervision works with how you practise.

Who supervises, online sessions and fees

Supervision at Safe Expanse is offered by Gladys Hu and Abigail Yang, who have both completed supervision training. Supervision is offered one to one and in a group. Both are held online only and neither is offered in person.

Session length and how often you meet are agreed with you when you start, based on what you need and the requirements you are working towards.

Fees vary by supervisor and by whether you choose one-to-one or group supervision. Message us and we will tell you the rate for the supervisor who suits you. Supervision is priced separately from our client sessions, which are listed on our fees page.