Julie is an older-than-traditional "beginner therapist," recently graduating from her Master's program at 50. Julie is coming to counseling as her third career. She has a wealth of transferable skills and strengths from her previous work experience with non-profits and film-making regarding mental health.

The developmental aspect of my supervision model assesses these inherent strengths, competencies, and constraints. We collaborated on supervisory goal setting after engaging in assessments and discussions about her short-term and long-term career and personal goals. The following case study illustrates how Julie and I uncovered her primary cognitive orientation and wide range of competencies and constraints (growth edges), along with how creativity and art-making interventions can support the systemic cognitive-developmental supervision model.

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Julie's description of her goals suggested some linguistic clues regarding her cognitive orientation style. For example, Julie discussed how she had difficulty in her internship experience shifting from conceptualization of client needs to applying individualized interventions. This conversation suggested that Julie may primarily utilize a formal orientation and that an underdeveloped concrete orientation may constrain her. Through an informal assessment of Julie's conversation, in addition to applying a question matrix, I continued to assess Julie's ability to flexibly access all four cognitive-emotional information-processing styles. Since Julie's initial dialogue suggested a formal orientation, I asked reflective questions to assess her ability to access this style. This is an example of the style-matching intervention approach when the supervisor matches questions discussion with the supervisee's primary style.

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After continuing with this line of questioning by asking about client patterns, alternative ways of considering what was occurring in the sessions, and patterns she has noticed herself doing in sessions, I began using the style-shifting intervention to assess her ability to conceptualize herself and her clients from different orientations. I first introduced the concrete orientation through questions that encouraged her to tell the story of a client session using concrete details and a chronological perspective. Julie continued to revert to formal processing in her description, noting overarching themes of the client instead of a play-by-play recollection of the session. She could speak more concretely when focused on it long enough, though this style took much effort for her to work from. Further questioning revealed that she had relatively strong access to the dialectic processing style. She recognized the impact of the client's family cultural context, the social-cultural issues coming from the client's time serving in the military, and negative core beliefs about "failure." Over time, Julie’s ability to conceptualize the client’s history with their current presentation and needs became evident in the way she wrote treatment plans, though many interventions were added as time went on, and her focus on treatment became too broad to be able to meet any one goal thoroughly. Julie became overwhelmed with the multiple possibilities for treatment interventions when working from the dialectic style.

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Julie participated in the Preferential Shapes Test (an art-based assessment of personality developed by Angeles Arrien) used in this setting for building self-awareness and targeted goal setting. Julie discovered through this assessment her strengths were in the areas of relationships, commitment, and structure; her weaknesses were related to stalling change. Julie found a conflict between her personal vision for her future and her lack of desire for change in the present. Julie was able to connect how her personal strengths and growth edges were being reflected in the work she does with her clients, as she does well with loyalty and commitment to others, though struggles with accountability and taking action steps toward creating change.

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Julie agreed that her primary cognitive orientation was formal, her secondary style was dialectic, and the concrete and sensorimotor styles were the most underdeveloped. Julie noted goals for creating more structure in her sessions and being more open-minded to change in her life and counseling practice. The initial supervision plan was to implement creative writing related to the concepts of “change” and “structure,” with the end goal of developing a series of drawings illustrating her future as a therapist. I set goals to utilize style-matching of the formal orientation to build a stronger foundation in the supervisory relationship and to aid Julie in building a stronger foundation with that style. A consultation environment was utilized with attention to the emerging client and supervisee patterns. Julie offered recorded sessions to aid in the identification of themes and patterns.

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After a foundation in Julie's primary formal orientation had been established, coaching was facilitated to strengthen Julie's access to the concrete orientation. Semi-directive questioning and creative writing exercises focused on calling attention to cause-and-effect thinking and describing Julie's own actions in therapy and their effects on clients. This opened up many conversations about countertransference, family history of codependence and boundary issues with clients, and ethical obligations as a counselor. Julie observed how her actions in sessions led to a familiar feeling of ‘stuckness’ with her with clients, and observed how she could change her practice to move her own feelings of stuckness, which unlocked clients from their own stuck feelings. This focus additionally aided Julie's dialectic orientation in connecting context to intervention. As a result, Julie developed better tracking skills, ability to apply intentional interventions, and a more accurate conceptualization of how her relational patterns influence client progress and outcomes.