As a clinical supervisor, it can feel like you need to have all the answers. But what if you don't?

One of the themes that stands out most to me when working with new clinical supervisors is their desire to prove their knowledge. Those who are supervising for the first time often feel an intense pressure to demonstrate their utility to their supervisees, as if they need to justify their ability to contribute to the supervisee's training.
I had a very similar experience when I first began serving as a supervisor and instructor. My mind gave me so many thoughts about how important it was that I be perceived as an expert, that I show my trainees how useful I could be to them. I read articles for class as if preparing for battle - what if someone asked me a question about a minor detail from the reading and I didn't know how to respond? In supervision, I was scared to admit there were topics or ideas I wasn't familiar with. Acknowledging that I didn't know something seemed anathema to the goals of supervision; of course I needed to be viewed as an expert.
All of that changed toward the end of my first year as a licensed supervisor, when I met with an advanced trainee to discuss our mutual feedback around supervision over the year. This was a student who had entered our supervision with a lot of existing skills and whose talent and ideas I really respected. And contrary to all of my beliefs, she had a particular view of our supervision.
"I really appreciate that you don't pretend to know everything. And when you don't know something, instead of just learning about it and telling me, you show me how to find it out for myself."
It's hard to explain how surprised I was to hear this feedback. I had experienced a lot of shame when I didn't know something in our supervision, especially in front of an advanced trainee who I really respected. And I'd developed a go-to move of suggesting we both read relevant articles as a way to deflect my lack of knowledge. We'd sit in supervision and look up articles on Google Scholar or peruse various therapy books on my shelf. Then, we'd agree to read our selected article or chapter over the following week before discussing it together in our next supervision. I saw this process as a pretty significant flaw in my approach as a supervisor: I was supposed to know what I was doing, and here I was, demonstrating the gaps in my knowledge and using supervision as a space to find out new information alongside my supervisee. Didn't that undermine all of my credibility?
But the supervisee had the exact opposite perspective. She said that she found it much more honest when I admitted that I didn't know something and that she really benefited from using supervision to learn together. "I feel like you're teaching me how to learn something new instead of making me feel like I should already know it, and there are always going to be new things for me to learn throughout my career, so I'm really glad I have that skill now."
Again, this was the total opposite of the feedback I had been expecting. But in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense. When I think back on my own most powerful learning experiences, it's the mentors who guided me to think through a problem for myself who facilitated my deepest understanding. I remember a particular clinical situation during my graduate training in which a postdoc sat with me and walked me through a series of Socratic questions to consider how to most effectively engage in risk assessment. I recall the modeling I saw from licensed psychologists about how to manage dysregulated clients in group or respond effectively to challenging faculty politics. And what mattered to me above all throughout my own training was the sense that my supervisors and mentors cared about my well-being and were supportive of my growth.
Since that day with my supervisee, I've changed quite a bit about how I approach my role as a supervisor and trainer. I no longer orient my work to avoid looking stupid and think much more deeply about how to model not knowing as a valid and workable place from which to engage in self-reflection and growth. Of course, there are still moments when I feel stupid, particularly when someone asks me a question that I feel like I "should" know, but in those situations I try my hardest to sit with that shame rather than allowing it to push me toward behaviors that only reinforce the idea that not knowing something is inherently problematic.
Particularly for mental health professionals, I would argue that not knowing is actually critically important. If I enter therapy with a new client convinced I know everything about them, that I'm the expert on their diagnoses and treatment, that it's solely my responsibility to improve their quality of life, what have I done? Probably alienated them for a start. I've also disempowered them completely from contributing to their own treatment and ignored their own expertise on their life, identities, contexts, culture, background, and history, including what has worked for them in the past and what they suspect could work for them now. I've turned what could be a collaborative therapy experience into a hierarchy focused more on assuaging my ego than supporting their well-being. The expert approach does little to smash the patriarchy or help mental health care move beyond its historical entrenchment in a Western cultural context built around white supremacy.
So, how can we lean into a stance of not knowing as supervisors and therapists? I believe it begins with a commitment to intellectual and cultural humility. Recognizing that we can never know everything but that an inherent value in the mental health professions is consistent movement toward additional knowledge allows us to balance this important dialectic in our work.
If you want to create space in supervision in which humility is valued, consider starting by integrating a commitment to humility in your supervision contract and during your first meetings with your supervisee. Directly state this value within your work and highlight your intention to model ways of approaching situations in which you are less sure or don't have complete knowledge. Invite the supervisee to do the same by showing up to supervision willing to talk about areas in which they are less confident or feel underprepared. Assure the supervisee that one aspect of supervision will be learning and growing together.
It begins with a commitment to intellectual and cultural humility.
Then, practice what you preach. If you aren't sure about something, rather than trying to skip past it or offer a vague suggestion, state directly that you aren't sure or don't know. I can't tell you how powerful it can feel, in terms of modeling for supervisees and engaging in opposite action to shame for myself, to simply say, "I don't really know anything about that" in response to a question from a trainee. I think part of why it feels so powerful is because it feels rare, especially in the context that all of us inhabit as mental health professionals, to choose not to lean into the fancy letters after our names and act like our degrees are shields against our insecurities. Despite all of the urges we might have to cover up places of doubt, I would argue that we are doing our trainees a service by modeling that it's okay, even as a licensed professional, to be unsure. What matters is what we do in response to discovering a gap in our knowledge.
One great option for responding to such a situation is to seek consultation together. I suspect supervisors do this independently more than trainees realize, but inviting the trainee to be part of the consultation process not only models an effective response to not knowing but gives the trainees skills around how to engage in this process themselves. If you plan to call or email a colleague to ask about a clinical conundrum, involve the trainee in that process by asking them to draft the email or calling your colleague during supervision while the trainee is sitting beside you. Invite the supervisee to be the one to explain the situation and to ask some initial questions. Then, fill in the gaps with any additional questions or comments as the supervisor. Again, I find it helpful here to really lean into modeling not knowing ("we're calling because we have a situation that I really don't know anything about, but we're hoping that you can help us figure out some helpful ways to proceed") with the hope that the more I show my trainees that it's okay for me to not know something (but to take steps to find it out), the more okay it will feel for them to address gaps in their own knowledge, rather than hiding behind a veil of expertise. Show trainees how to engage with colleagues respectfully during consultation, how to thoughtfully consider their guidance and integrate it with what you know about the client, how to make an informed decision about next steps in the case, and how to document the consultation.
Another helpful option when you, the trainee, or both of you exhibit a knowledge gap is to turn to the literature. As I alluded to above, this started out as a defensive maneuver for me, but has become something that I now find really helpful in supervision if approached from a place of intellectual humility. Some options here:
Sit together in supervision and search relevant journals or Google Scholar for recent research on the topic. Skim through an article together during supervision or assign it as reading for both of you to complete prior to the next supervision meeting.
Ask the trainee to find 1-3 relevant articles as supervision homework and send them to you via email. Work together to decide which one you will read prior to the next supervision meeting. If several of the articles look helpful, plan to read one each week until you've covered them all.
Look through books owned by you, the trainee, or in your training setting to see if there are any useful chapters. As above, collaboratively select a chapter to read independently outside of supervision and then come together in the next supervision meeting to discuss. If several chapters look relevant, read one each week.
Encourage the trainee to post to a professional listserv looking for relevant resources, articles, or other information. Trainees are often anxious about putting themselves out there in this way, but it can be a great opportunity for them to get more involved in the professional community while also learning how to effectively address gaps in knowledge.
Consider reaching out to others in your training setting for relevant articles, chapters, or other resources, especially if this can be a chance to engage with the expertise of another trainee. For example, if a trainee or professional in your setting is known to have a particular interest in eating disorders, and you and your supervisee are not sure how to approach a client engaging in food restriction, ask your supervisee to reach out to get this person's suggestions for what to read. Perhaps you can even invite them to join you in supervision to discuss the reading together. Approaching another trainee as an expert in their relevant area can be a chance to bolster both your supervisee's sense of efficacy in finding out information and the other trainee's sense of their ability to contribute professional knowledge.
Once you've gathered additional information from the literature, take time to read and reflect on it independently. For the purposes of modeling not knowing, it's important that both you and the trainee read whatever article or chapter you identify - this should not be something that only the supervisee reads and reports back on. As the supervisor, you need to show how you benefit from engaging with the literature as well. Then, create space to discuss what you've read together in supervision. This can be a chance to model for your supervisee how to process information from the literature and apply it to the particular clinical situation you are facing. Ask the trainee what stood out to them from the reading - what felt relevant to their client? What was less relevant? Based on this article, chapter, or other resource, how might they think about next steps with their client? As the supervisor, your role here is to help the trainee engage effectively with the literature such that they are taking away salient points and setting aside information that is not relevant to the issue at hand. Sometimes, this means discussing the ways in which the selected resource isn't that helpful given the particulars of the current clinical situation - and that's okay. The point is to show the trainee how to find relevant information and then how to apply it, not that you always pick the perfect, most helpful article to read.
All of these processes can be useful with any clinical conundrum, but I would argue that there is particular utility in demonstrating humility, modeling not knowing, and demonstrating effective steps for finding out relevant information when the topic at hand relates to identities or culture in some way. Cultural humility is an important supervisory stance, and modeling that it's okay not to know something about someone else's background, values, identities, or cultural practices (but not okay to push forward in ignorance once we've discovered a gap in our knowledge) can be especially powerful for trainees.
In the mental health professions, trainees are often taught the importance of respecting diversity, but it can be more difficult to teach them what to do when they come upon a situation in which they feel out of their depth. White American culture often suggests that the most appropriate response is to politely look away when confronted with gaps in our knowledge, which means that white supervisors and white trainees (along with anyone steeped in this cultural milieu regardless of their particular identities) can find it more comfortable to 'benignly' ignore areas of uncertainty rather than approaching them directly. Thus, it is especially important for supervisors to model for trainees how to show up and address our areas of confusion, lack of knowledge, misinformation, and biases effectively. In my opinion, following the same steps outlined above can be a helpful place to start:
Observe a gap in your own and/or the supervisee's knowledge.
State aloud that you don't know something, normalizing that it's okay not to know.
Highlight the importance of finding out, demonstrating that while it's okay not to know initially, it's each of our responsibilities to find out relevant information or correct misinformation/bias once we realize that we are treading in unfamiliar territory.
Model ways of finding out missing information or correcting misinformation/bias and involve the supervisee closely in those efforts. Read articles or chapters on identities or cultural contexts with which you are less familiar. Consult with colleagues who have worked with clients holding relevant identities or who have lived experience with these identities or contexts. Consider engaging with cultural products such as podcasts, TV shows, books, or movies that depict the identities or contexts you are seeking to know more about in order to expand your awareness.
Invite the supervisee to reflect on their experiences around learning this information, and share your own reflections. Consider how to apply this newfound knowledge to the particular client or clinical situation you are addressing in supervision.
Rinse and repeat when you (inevitably) encounter new knowledge gaps.
Modeling not knowing and how to respond effectively can feel particularly fraught in the domain of culture and diversity because there are painful social consequences around appearing ignorant. Thus, we likely all feel some incentive to appear as if we are in the know, especially as mental health professionals. My hope in writing about this here is to elucidate the difference between ignorance and gaps in knowledge. Ignorance is choosing not to know. Gaps in knowledge are places where we do not currently know but can decide to correct those gaps by humbly acknowledging that we have more to learn and dedicating effort to acquiring more information. Addressing gaps in knowledge is critical to effective clinical work, and as supervisors, we get to model that process for our supervisees.
Please don't be afraid of what you don't know as a supervisor. Observe the fear, shame, or other painful emotions that come up around the experience of not knowing and use those emotions as tools to drive effective responses for both you and your supervisees.
Personally, I still don't love the experience of realizing I don't know something in the middle of a supervision session. My mind continues to give me lots of thoughts about how I 'should' know it all. But I don't - none of us do - and my hope is that engaging with that reality can help all of us become more effective in our clinical work and beyond it.
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