7-Eyed Model

Background of The Model

• created in 1985 for supervising psychotherapists
• first published in 1985 to assist supervisors and supervisees have a great range of options
• further developed with Robin Shohet for other helping professions
• subsequently, the model was adopted together to be applied in the context of coaching, mentoring, team coaching and organizational consultancy

"The supervisor is there not only to offer support and reassurance, but also to contain the otherwise overwhelming affective responses the supervisee might have."

The 7-eyed Model of Supervision

Source: Supervision in the Helping Professions, Third Edition, by P. Hawkins & R. Shohet, 2006. London, UK: McGraw-Hill Education/Open University Press.

Concept of Model

• a process-oriented approach
• integrates the relational and systemic aspects of supervision

• addresses 7 distinct aspects of the supervision process

Systemic

• focuses on the interplay between each relationship and their context within the wider system

Relational

• focuses on the relationships between client, supervisee and supervisor

Details of the session:

Details

How the client came to be having sessions?

• Physical appearance
• Body language
• Breathing pattern
• Verbal and non-verbal behaviours (speak, look, gesture, etc.)
• Usage of language, metaphors, images and the story of their life as they narrate it

What they chose to share?

• Which area of their life they wanted to explore
• How the session’s content might relate to previous sessions
• The choices the client is making
• The connections between the various aspects of the client’s life

1. Attend to the opening moments of the session, even before you think the session has started

• to see how the clients first presented and revealed themselves before the conversation got fully underway

Techniques

2. Use video or audio recordings of sessions

• to reflect on the detailed dynamics of videoed or practice sessions

'Either-or-isms' statements:

Dualistic thinking

• I either have to confront his controlling behaviour or put up with it.
• I didn’t know whether to wait a bit longer, or interpret his silence as his aggression towards me.
• I don’t know whether to continue working with him.

The job of the supervisor is to avoid the trap of helping the supervisees evaluate between these two choices, and point out that they have reduced numerous possibilities to only two.

Basic rules of Brainstorming Approach:

Brainstorming Approach

• Say whatever comes into your head.
• Get the ideas out. Don’t evaluate or judge them.
• Use the other person’s ideas as springboards.
• Include the wildest options you can invent.

Once the supervisees have realized that they are operating under a restrictive assumption, the supervisor can help them generate new options for intervening.

Group supervision offers a great number of creative possibilities.

Example of questions:

Questions

• How did you meet?
• How and why did this client choose you?
• What did you first notice about the nature of your contact with this client?
• Tell me the story of the history of your relationship.

This can offer a lot of information that can assist in understanding the deeper, underlying processes which affect the outcome of the session.

Other techniques to encourage this distancing and detachment:

Techniques

• Find an image or metaphor to represent the relationship.
• Imagine what sort of relationship you would have if you and the client met in other circumstances

(eg. if you were both cast away on a desert island.)

• Become a fly on the wall in your last session and what do you notice about the relationship?

These help the supervisee to see the relationship as a whole rather than just their own perspective from within the relationship.

5 types of Counter-transference:

Counter-transference

1) Transference feelings of the supervisee stirred up by this particular client.

2) The feelings and thoughts of the supervisee that arise out of playing the role transferred on to them by the client.

3) The supervisee’s feelings, thoughts and actions used to counter the transference of the client.

4) Projected material of the clients that the supervisee has taken in somatically, psychically or mentally

5) Aim attachment counter-transference where we want the client to change for our sake, not theirs (Rowan, 1983)

It is essential for the supervisee to explore all forms of counter-transference in order to have greater space to respond to, rather than react to the client.

‘Checks for identity’ Technique adapted from ‘Co-counselling’

(Heron 1974)

Technique

Stage 1: The supervisee is encouraged to share their first spontaneous responses to the question- ‘Who does this person remind you of?’

Stage 2: The supervisee is asked to describe all the ways their client is similar this person

Stage 3: The supervisee is then asked what they want to say to the person that they discovered in stage 1, particularly what is unfinished in their relationship with that person

Stage 4: The supervisee is asked to describe all the ways their client is different from this person

Stage 5: The supervisee is then asked what they want to say to their client now.

If the previous stages have been completed satisfactorily then the supervisee will be able to address the client differently.

The Parallel Process

• The dynamics that are present in the supervisee-client relationship can be played out within the supervisory relationship.
• When this happens, the supervisee and supervisor learn together what it is like for the client to be in the relationship.
• It is as if the client is present.
• This way, another dimension is added to the supervisee’s learning, and effectiveness.

Parallel Process

The supervisor focusing on his or her own process

6A

Supervisors need to be clear about their feelings towards the supervisee

• What are my basic feelings towards this supervisee?
• ‘Do I generally feel threatened, challenged, critical, bored etc?

Supervisor must be able to attend to their own shifts in sensation, peripheral half thoughts and fantasies, while still attending to the content and process of the session

In this process, the unconscious material of the supervisee is being received by the unconscious receptor of the supervisor, and the supervisor is tentatively bringing this material into consciousness for the supervisee to explore

The supervisor–client relationship

Attention to fantasies the supervisor and client have about one another.

Client

• Supervisor and client may have fantasies/interest about each other.
• The thoughts and feelings that the supervisor has about the client can clearly be useful.

6B

Supervisor

Supervisee

• However, when the feelings of the supervisor differ from the experience of the supervisee, it can be that some aspect of the client/supervisee relationship is being denied and experienced by the supervisor

‘Any pairing ousts the third party, and may at an unconscious level, even revive the first rivalrous oedipal threesome.’

(Mattinson, quoted in Dearnley 1985)

Focusing on the context of the client

7A

• Tell me about the client’s background/their work/their culture, etc?
• What resources do they have that they are not utilizing or could utilize more?
• What is the client carrying for their family or team or organization?
• Why have they come for help now? Why you?
• When and where else have they had these difficulties?

Focusing on supervisee’s interventions in the context of their profession and organization

7B

• How does your handling of this situation fit with the expectations of your professional body?
• Focus should not be just on compliance, but also helping the supervisee question how they may be over-constraining their practice

"If the supervisor gets trapped into seeing themselves as the channel of the current wisdom of the profession to the supervisee, then the danger is that the profession stops learning"

Focusing on the context of the supervisee–client relationship

7C

• How did the client come to see the supervisee?
• Did they choose to come themselves, or were they sent or recommended to come by somebody else?
• If so what is the power relationship with that person or organization?
• How do they see this helping relationship and how does this relate to their experience of other helping relationships?
• How are such relationships viewed in their culture?

Focusing on the wider world of the supervisee

7D

• Supervisee's stage of professional development
• Supervisee's personality and personal history
• Supervisee's role and history in the organization in which they work

Focus not only on the aspects of the supervisee that are triggered by the work with the particular client, but also their overall development and their general patterns of working

Focusing on the context of the supervisory relationship

7E

• Previous experience of both parties in both giving and receiving supervision
• Race, gender and cultural differences between both parties
• Different theoretical orientations
• How both parties hold power and authority and respond to the power and authority of other

Key element: the nature of the supervisory contract

(training, managerial, tutorial, etc.)

Focusing on the context context of the supervisor

7F

• Supervisor needs to be able to reflect on their own context and how it enters the supervisory relationship
• High awareness of one’s own racial, cultural and gender biases and prejudices, strengths and weaknesses of one’s own personality style, learning style and patterns of reactivity

Begin with Mode 1:

• discovering what happened in the session

At the end of the exploration of a particular client the supervisor might then focus back on Mode 2:

• to explore what new interventions the supervisee might utilize at their next session with this client

Common

Pattern

Leading on to Modes 3 and 4:

• discovering what happened in the relationship and how this affected the supervisee
• if and when this triggers unconscious communication to switch the focus to Modes 5 and 6

At any of these stages one might move from the specific mode to the appropriate sub-mode of 7:

• to reflect on that which is colouring the situation in the wider field

How can this be achieved?

The supervisor needs to listen more to the unconscious levels of both the supervisee and of the reported clients

• Emphasize focusing on the paralleling, transference and counter-transference processes being played out within the supervision relationship

For some supervisors it may be more appropriate to focus more often on specific modes

• Supervisors who are behavioural clinical psychologists may favour Modes 1 and 2
• Psychodynamic supervisors may favour Modes 3 and 4

Choice influencing factors

The developmental stage of the supervisee is only one factor which will cause the experienced supervisor to shift the dominant mode of focus.

Other factors that should influence the choice of focus are:

• the nature of the work of the supervisee
• the style of the supervisee’s work, their personality and learning style
• the degree of openness and trust that has been established in the supervision relationship
• the amount of personal development and exploration the supervisee has undertaken for themselves
• the cultural background of the supervisee

The model is hierarchic

Supervisor

Supervisee

Client

Critique 1

• "In Hawkins and Shohet’s model, the fact that, of the three related circles signifying people, the supervisor is at the top, signifies a certain hierarchy and authority given to the person of the supervisor" (Tudor & Worrall, 2004)
• The hierarchy in the process model does not imply that higher is more important, more powerful or wiser.
• It does imply that in supervision the supervisor has responsibility for attending to themselves and both the supervisee and the client, and that supervisees have responsibility for attending to themselves and their clients.
• However, the responsibility does not flow in the same way in the opposite direction (Bateson, 1973).

The model is claiming to be integrative but is biased to one specific orientation

Critique 2

• The model fundamentally draws on understanding from systemic, psychodynamic, inter-subjective, cognitive, behavioural and humanistic approaches to understanding relationships
• The systemic understanding of how change in the supervisory matrix impacts the client–supervisee relational matrix, which in turn impacts the client system is fundamental to the model
• Draws on the psychoanalytic understanding of transference and counter-transference
• When the model was first developed, the range of its usefulness was unknown, but the creators were committed to taking it into different professional groupings to test out the limits of its ability to work with people from different orientations.

Mode 7 is of a different order and needs to be contained in the other six modes

Critique 3

• The move from any of the other six modes to Mode 7 is a move from focusing on what is figural to focusing on the contextual field in which the phenomena is happening
• There are almost as many levels of context as there are modes of focus on the figural phenomena, and thus have developed the variety of sub-modes in Mode 7
• It is important not to subsume Mode 7 into the other six modes in order to be able to regularly move our attention from what is naturally in the field of our vision, to the wider domain in which we are operating.