Exploring Group Clinical Supervision: Enhancing Professional Awareness and Unity in a Single-Group Case Study

Background: Clinical supervision serves as a collaborative reflection mechanism, enabling clinicians to enhance their cognitive and emotional awareness of their practice. It establishes a “safe environment” wherein professionals may freely express their deepest thoughts, feelings, doubts, and emotions, receiving support and guidance to redirect their treatment approaches. Methods: Our exploratory research is specifically centered on group supervision, involving a team of professionals (i.e., psychologists and pedagogists), with the primary objective of facilitating the disclosure of emotional difficulties and concerns in order to develop new meanings. It aims to describe the group supervision process, comprehensively understanding its structural and dynamic facets, while concurrently identifying clinical concepts and actions for future research. The study included the videotaping and verbatim transcription of five two-hour supervision sessions featuring a supervisor and nine professionals. Through a qualitative approach and a computer-assisted word-driven tool (TLAB), a linguistic analysis was conducted on participants’ discourse during the group supervision sessions. Results: Our findings revealed that the main objective of the supervision process is the enhancement of professionals’ awareness, and analysis of group dynamics showed the pivotal role of the supervisor as a facilitator of group exchanges and meaning making. Additionally, we highlighted a sense of unity within the group, denoted by a collective “we-ness” and cohesion recognizable in mutual proximity to the experiences, feelings, and difficulties shared and discussed during the sessions. Conclusion: This study has broadened the comprehension of the group processes that define a group supervision by focusing on the relational and emotional dynamics as well as the transformational mechanisms that group supervision implies.