On demoralization, therapist identity development, and persuasion and healing in psychotherapy supervision.

Abstract

Although anxiety is an expected part of beginning therapists’ learning experience, supervisee demoralization has received far less attention comparatively. Yet demoralization can be a ready result of the training process. As students make the transition from classroom to clinic and become ever more embroiled in the potentially painful process of therapist identity development, they can start to increasingly question their fitness for therapeutic service. The supervision situation can easily and quickly become the prime outlet within which students’ struggles with demoralization get enacted. But in what ways might that be so? And what can supervisors do to help their supervisees when demoralization arises? In what follows, I (a) examine demoralization as an inherent part of the therapist identity formation experience; (b) consider how psychotherapy supervision is in some ways a remoralization process; and (c) identify some avenues by which supervisors can instill hope during the unfolding of the early phase of the supervision endeavor.

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