Live supervision is an ideal context for illustrating a key feature of enactment: like a bar of soap in the bath, it is elusive. It shape-shifts between multiple self-states, different people, various levels of experience and awareness (somatic, emotional, mental). The harder I grasp and try to pin it down, the more likely it is to slip from my grip. But in the group context, it is then likely to slip into somebody else, and specifically into somebody else's bodymind process. By attending both to the relational and the bodymind field in the group context, there may be a way in this session to demonstrate the following principle: 'The more levels of parallel process can be held in awareness in the here and now, the more likely it is that transformative containment of enactment can occur'. Michael will illustrate how he extends the notion of parallel process to both interpersonal (transference-countertransference) processes as well as intra-psychic (body-mind) processes.

One important task of supervision is to engage with the unconscious processes between client and therapist. As supervisor I aim to help the therapist to first access their countertransference experience as fully as possible, and then to make sense of that experience within their own therapeutic framework and style. The rich, unconscious, 'right-brain' layers of client-therapist interaction does not have to remain outside awareness: we can find traces of it in the body-mind processes - the sensations, spontaneous movements and images occurring in the moment-to-moment interaction between therapist and patient; between therapist and supervisor. In my supervision work I focus on such sensations arising in the therapist's and in my own body-mind. In this live supervision, I will work with our images, impulses and physical charge in order to invite and process the unconscious communication, which carries the the therapeutic potential for meaningful connection and change.

Working with an embodied perspective takes us beyond narrative or interpretative ways of working and helps us attune to the embodied material and processes underlying many of the issues client/therapists are working on. Paying mindful attention in supervision to embodied counter transference and non-verbal communication can lead to deeper insights or metaphorical meaning and can help the therapist to re-attune to the client's experience.

There are many important aspects of supervision, including practice management, teaching, and monitoring safety to practice; but what I will be focusing on here is the potential for supervision to bring out parallel process enactments, in particular through the practitioner's and supervisor's bodily process. I will be offering up my own here and now, moment-by-moment experience, and encouraging the supervisee to do the same, in the hope and expectation that this will illuminate the therapeutic issues. This has nothing to do with whether or not there is any explicit somatic element in the therapy; in fact, the more embodiment is sidelined in the therapeutic work, the more powerfully it is likely to express itself in supervision!

In this set of 3 brief interviews, Jane Ryan invites Michael Soth, Margaret Landale and Nick Totton to talk about why they believe that an embodied approach to psychotherapy is the deepest way to reach and work with our clients or patients.