About This Resource
This website presents findings from my APP3 doctoral research project, which explores reflective supervision, containment theory, and leadership in the context of parental mental health social work. It examines how supervision can function as a space where practitioners are emotionally "held" so they can, in turn, hold the families they work with.
Through detailed process logs from real supervision sessions, I analyse the emotional dynamics, power relations, and reflexive practices that shape effective leadership. The project draws on Bion's containment theory, Social GRACES, and Black Feminist Thought to explore how identity, organisational culture, and systemic pressures influence supervision.
This resource is designed for: Social work practitioners, supervisors, managers, and researchers interested in reflective practice, emotional labour, and anti-oppressive leadership.
This research investigates how reflective supervision can support practitioners working with families experiencing parental mental health challenges. It examines the role of containment, identity, and reflexivity in leadership.
To explore how supervision can "hold" practitioners emotionally, enabling them to hold the families they work with.
Process logs were used to document and analyse real supervision sessions, focusing on emotional dynamics and reflexivity.
The Findings
"Containment is active, not passive. When practitioners feel 'held,' their capacity to think and assess risk is restored."
Theoretical Frameworks Explained
Click on the tabs below to explore the core theories underpinning reflective supervision.
Process Logs
Below are two detailed process logs from supervision sessions. Each log captures the emotional dynamics, reflective moments, and the work of containment.
AMIRA : OVERWHELM, HOLDING AND RELATIONAL CO-CREATION
The Case
Amira, a newly qualified practitioner, arrived overwhelmed and ashamed. She was managing multiple parental mental health cases involving suicide risk whilst facing organisational scrutiny of her performance. Her presentation was marked by shame, urgency and fear of judgement, fragile tone fused with self-blame. She made reference to a parent reminding her of her own mother : a transference signal (Klein, 1946). High safeguarding concerns were creating organisational pressure.
1My Response : Holding Position
I moved into a holding position: soft voice, maintaining eye contact, pacing her breathing, slowing the tempo of supervision, offering space to think rather than rushing to problem-solve, validating her emotional response.
2Immediate Impact
This supported her emotional regulation and restored some thinking capacity. She was able to move from fragmented anxiety to more structured reflection on the case.
Later Reflection : Critical Questions
- Was I containing her (Bion, 1962), or was I stepping into a maternalised position?
- Did my response risk collusion with organisational anxiety rather than supporting her independent thinking?
- Was I absorbing distress that should be held by the organisation?
- How did my own history : as child of parent with mental illness : shape my urge to protect her?
Theoretical Analysis
- Bion (1962): Containment as emotional digestion : the supervisor transforms projected anxieties so the practitioner can think. I functioned as a "container" for Amira's unprocessed affect.
- Winnicott (1960): The holding environment requires psychological safety. However, later reflection raised questions about whether I was holding her or rescuing her from organisational judgement.
- Transference/Countertransference (Klein, 1946): Amira's reference to her mother signalled transference : personal history shaped professional engagement. My countertransference appeared in my urge to protect and soothe, potentially mirroring my own familial patterns.
KANIZARO : DETACHMENT, DIGNIFIED SPACE AND RESTRAINT
The Case
Kanizaro, an experienced practitioner, presented with emotional restraint rather than overwhelm. She described uncertainty about a mother with psychosis and domestic abuse, race and interpretation in multi-agency contexts, and professional risk assessment decisions. Her tone was intellectualised, precise, emotionally flat : as if defending against something.
1My Response : Restraint, Not Holding
I sensed my instinct was not to hold or reassure, but to offer space for thinking without collapsing her defences: curiosity without pressure, reflective dialogue rather than emotional processing, identity mapping using GRRAAACCEEESSS framework, resisting the urge to probe or name emotion too early.
2Insight : Thinking Space as Containment
Containment here took the form of dignified engagement and thinking space, not emotional processing. Confidence emerged through dignity in non-intrusive presence, perspective-taking and ethical thinking, space to think without forced emotional disclosure.
Theoretical Analysis
- e. alexander (2023): Embodied supervision as survival strategy : practitioners navigate what is safe to reveal based on how they are racially, culturally, and professionally positioned. Kanizaro's detachment may have functioned as embodied survival strategy.
- Burnham (2012) : GRRAAACCEEESSS: Attending to social identities (race, gender, professional status, history) shaped what could be spoken in supervision. This prevented misreading detachment as resistance or incompetence.
"Sometimes, reflective leadership means knowing when not to hold : or when to hold from a distance."
TWO FORMS OF CONTAINMENT
Looking across these two encounters reveals containment is not uniform. Different practitioners require different forms of containment depending on:
- Emotional state: overwhelm versus detachment
- Identity positioning: race, gender, professional status
- Organisational context: scrutiny, support, cultural safety
Amira's Encounter
- Holding through: soft voice, pacing, emotional regulation.
- Form of containment: emotional digestion and soothing (Bion, 1962; Winnicott, 1960).
- Risk of misreading: collusion, over-protection, maternalisation.
- What was being held: anxiety, shame, organisational pressure.
Kanizaro's Encounter
- Restraint through: thinking space, curiosity without pressure.
- Form of containment: dignified engagement without intrusion (alexander, 2023; Burnham, 2012).
- Risk of misreading: seeing detachment as resistance or defensiveness.
- What was being held: uncertainty, professional risk, racial dynamics.
Key Insight
"Confidence building looked entirely different : through reassurance and emotional safety for Amira, through thinking space and dignity for Kanizaro."
Social GRACES & Reflexivity
As a Black female leader, my own positionality shapes how I hold others. I must constantly navigate the tension between being a "strong container" and allowing myself vulnerability.
My Social GRACES
Hover over each card to explore how these aspects shape my leadership and practice
Gender & Race
Black Woman
My presence in supervision is never neutral. As a Black woman in leadership, I navigate expectations of being both emotionally attuned and procedurally rigorous. I'm sometimes read as threat, sometimes as protector, sometimes as surveillance.
Class
Working Class Background
My working-class roots shape how I understand systemic barriers and economic precarity. I recognise the material realities families face and resist middle-class assumptions about 'choice' and 'agency'.
Childhood Trauma
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
Growing up as a child of a parent with mental illness, I carry embodied knowledge of what it means to live with parental distress. This shapes my empathy but also requires vigilance against over-identification or rescue fantasies.
Ability
Dyslexia & Learning Differences
Diagnosed with dyslexia in my third year of my bachelor's degree, I navigate academic and professional spaces with invisible learning differences. This lived experience shapes my understanding of neurodiversity, the politics of diagnosis, and the importance of creating accessible, non-judgmental learning environments in supervision.
Geography
Urban London Context
Working in London shapes my understanding of urban poverty, migration, and cultural diversity. I recognise how geography influences access to services, community networks, and experiences of marginalisation.
Education
Doctoral Student
My educational privilege grants me access to theoretical frameworks and research spaces. I must use this privilege responsibly, ensuring academic knowledge serves practice rather than distancing me from lived experience.
"Reflective leadership is not neutral. It is relational, embodied, and political."
Showing Up as Different Versions
In supervision, we are never just one version of ourselves. We bring our past selves, our protected selves, our warrior selves, and our vulnerable selves into the room.
Recognising these different parts is key to reflective leadership. Which version of me is reacting? Which version is needed right now to provide containment?
"Reflective leadership is adaptive, not formulaic : it requires courage to tolerate discomfort and ambiguity."
STAR Tool: Key Highlights for Reflective Supervision
The STAR Tool supports high-quality supervision by assessing six core domains of reflexivity. It promotes thoughtful, emotionally attuned, and accountable practice. It can be used to observe, assess, and improve supervision practice across teams.
1. Voices of Those at the Centre
Supervision should amplify the perspectives of those accessing services. Practitioners are encouraged to treat people as experts in their own lives.
"Is the lived experience of families truly present in decision-making?"
2. Risk Talk and Authoritative Doubt
Supervision is a space for curiosity and uncertainty. Practitioners should feel able to express doubt and explore risk dynamically.
"Are supervisors encouraging curiosity instead of certainty?"
6. Anti-Racist and Anti-Oppressive Practice
Supervision should name and challenge racism and discrimination. It considers how identity and power affect work and the practitioner's experience.
"Does the supervision space allow discussion of power, difference, and systemic injustice?"
Adapted from Bostock & Grant (2024). STAR Tool for Reflective Supervision.
Ready to apply this?
Download the full STAR Tool template to guide your next supervision session.
How It Links to Research
This APP3 project informs my doctoral research exploring how parental anxiety is transmitted to children and how practitioners experience and respond to this transmission in practice.
This APP3 inquiry is not a discrete exercise: it forms a methodological and conceptual foundation for my doctoral research into the intergenerational transmission of anxiety in families affected by parental mental health difficulties.
Supervision as Critical Intervention Layer
Anxiety does not move only from parent to child; it travels through systems, from organisation into practitioner, into the practitioner and parent relationship, and ultimately into the child's emotional environment. Supervision can either intensify that transmission or interrupt it through containment, thinking, and relational attunement. My doctorate will treat supervision not as background context, but as a core site of inquiry.
Practitioners' Lived and Embodied Experience
My research must study parental mental health through practitioners' lived experience, not only through parents or children alone. Practitioners are the primary relational bridge between families and systems; their capacity to think, feel, and act is shaped by how they are held organisationally and supervisorily.
Structure and Support Systems as Central
Parental anxiety is not purely psychological or relational: it is produced, amplified, or mitigated by organisational arrangements including caseload pressures, managerial accountability, inspection regimes, and the availability (or absence) of reflective space. These are not simply context; they are mechanisms shaping family experience.
Methodological Reflexivity
As a Black woman in senior management and as an adult child of a parent with serious mental illness, I do not enter research sites neutrally. What I notice, what I feel in my body, what I choose to hold or challenge, and how I am read by practitioners and organisations will shape the data I generate and the interpretations I make.
Core Doctoral Premise
Interrupting intergenerational anxiety requires work at every relational layer: organisation, supervision, practitioner, parent, and child. My research will therefore be multi-layered, psychosocial, and politically attentive, rather than individualising distress.
In this sense, APP3 has not just informed my doctorate: it has actively shaped its questions, its methodology, and my stance as a researcher.
References
Alexander, E. (2023) Embodied Supervision: A Black Feminist Reflexive Approach to Leadership. Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust. [Unpublished lecture/slides].
Beddoe, L. (2010) 'Surveillance or reflection: Professional supervision in "the risk society"', British Journal of Social Work, 40(4), pp. 1279–1296. Available at: Oxford Academic
Bion, W. R. (1962) Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.
Bostock, L. and Grant, L. (2024) Reducing unnecessary social worker workload through improving the quality of supervision: The STAR Tool. Department for Education. Available at: assets.publishing.service.gov.uk
Burnham, J. (2012) 'Developments in the Social GRRAAACCEEESSS: Visible-invisible and voiced-unvoiced', in Krause, I.-B. (ed.) Culture and Reflexivity in Systemic Psychotherapy. London: Karnac.
Collins, P. H. (2000) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd edn. New York: Routledge.
Cooper, A. and Lees, A. (2015) 'Spotlit: Defences against anxiety in contemporary human service organisations', in Armstrong, D. and Rustin, M. (eds.) Social Defences against Anxiety. London: Karnac, pp. 163–182.
Ferguson, H. (2011) Child Protection Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ferguson, H. (2017) 'How children become invisible in child protection work', British Journal of Social Work, 47(4), pp. 1007–1023. Available at: Oxford Academic
Klein, M. (1946) 'Notes on some schizoid mechanisms', International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 27, pp. 99–110.
Klein, M. (1952) 'Some theoretical conclusions regarding the emotional life of the infant', in Klein, M. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. London: Hogarth Press.
Lorde, A. (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press.
Ruch, G. (2007) 'Thoughtful practice: Child care social work and the role of case discussion', Child & Family Social Work, 12(4), pp. 370–379. Available at: Wiley Online Library
Wastell, D., White, S., Broadhurst, K., et al. (2010) 'Children's services in the iron cage of performance management: street-level bureaucracy and the spectre of Švejkism', International Journal of Social Welfare, 19(3), pp. 310–320. Available at: Wiley Online Library
Winnicott, D. W. (1960) 'The theory of the parent-infant relationship', International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41, pp. 585–595.