The Helping Relationship: Healing and Change in Community Context

IX. The Helping Relationship in CPE Supervision

177 The word ezer (“helper”) in its various forms is widely used in the Hebrew Bible—120 times, to be exact. If we examine the passages where ezer is used, we find that a helper keeps one from being alone and can be a partner (Genesis 2:18), the powerless have particular need of a helper (Job 29:12), God is appealed to as a helper (Psalm 30:10), and God delivers those who have no helper (Psalm 72:12). Also, if God opposes you, you won’t prevail, even with help (Jeremiah 47:1–7), people are foolish to put faith in helpers who oppose God (Isaiah 31:1), and the help of people may be in vain (Psalm 108:12). So what does this have to say about the helping relationship as it relates to clinical pastoral education (CPE) supervision ? One thing that it suggests is the importance of attending to power in helping relationships, power that can be used for good or ill. Supervisory helping relationships are intended to provide guidance and support for supervisees learning to do therapy, chaplaincy, and ministry; they are also relationships of unequal power and thus contain the potential for abuse. This unequal power also suggests the likelihood of anxiety in the supervisee, who is almost certainly aware, on some level, of the inequality of power. IX The Helping Relationship in CPE Supervision Marsha Cutting 178 The Helping Relationship Some of the theological assumptions about helping relationships that undergird this chapter are the following: • We are most human when we are in relationships. • Relationships can take us beyond ourselves, let us do more and better than we could alone—or bind us and make it impossible for us to do our best work. They can create a holy space between two or more people or, when they go awry, create if not a demonic space at least one in which the unredeemed parts of our humanity are most prominent . • Yet the power of relationships is such that, even in the distorted relationships, growth for the supervisee often still takes place, though sometimes apparently in spite of the relationship rather than because of it. Literature Review Numerous authors have offered personal and theoretical reflections on CPE, and at least two have published anecdotal reports about negative CPE supervisory experiences (Cutting, 2007). However, with a couple of notable exceptions (e.g., Fitchett & Johnson, 2001; VandeCreek & Glockner, 1993), the empirical study of CPE supervision , and of the factors that differentiate effective from ineffective CPE supervision, has been neglected. The empirical work that has been done tends to focus on CPE as a whole or on CPE outcomes rather than on the process of supervision per se, and the articles on supervision tend not to be empirical research. Psychologists, however, have begun to study the supervision that is a component of nearly all mental health training, and one important focus of that work has been the supervisory relationship . It has been argued that “a strong supervisory relationship serves as the foundation for positive experiences, because a relationship characterized by empathy, a sense of affirmation, and a Cutting 179 nonjudgmental attitude allows a supervisee to tolerate the anxiety engendered by the challenge to his or her skills” (Cutting, 2007, p. 122). Authors such as Worthen and McNeill (1996) have found that supervisees who said that their supervision was positive reported that their supervisors were empathic, non-defensive, validating, non-judgmental, and willing to examine their assumptions . These supervisors help their trainees to feel accepted, and they normalize the challenges that trainees experience, thus helping trainees to remain open to supervisory input and lessening the need for defensiveness. The supervisory relationship in negative experiences has also been examined, as reflected in a literature review by Ellis, Swagler, and Beck (2000), who reported that between a third and a half of supervisees “are likely to encounter truly harmful supervision” (p. 2). Their review found that 7% to 10% of supervisees give up working in mental health because of such experiences. They defined bad supervision as those instances “when the supervisor is unable or unwilling to meet [the supervisee’s] training needs as an emerging professional counselor or psychologist” (p. 2), in contrast to harmful supervision, those instances that result in “psychological , physical or emotional trauma, or harm to the supervisee or to the supervisee’s clients” (Cutting, 2007, p. 124). Nelson and Friedlander (2001) studied conflictual supervision...