Learning a profession, finding one’s own way.

Supervision concerns both clinical work and the therapist conducting it. It may focus on a moment in a session that seems stuck, or on personal difficulties the therapist encounters in the relationship with the patient. The dialogue allows these aspects to be observed in clinical choices and other possibilities for intervention to be explored. The training also addresses professional ethics and the relationship between theory and practice.

A life story is encountered as it is told. Some episodes gain prominence while others remain in the background; a pause or a change of rhythm also says something about the present in which the story is being narrated. The listener takes part and is affected, while retaining the distinction between their own experience and that of the person speaking. Telling one’s story brings the past into relationship with the moment from which it is being viewed. Events intertwine with the images through which a person recognises their life, and may acquire a different meaning in the telling.

The relational Enneagram explores character through the ways a person moves in relationships. The vectors of moving towards, against and away from others are considered in relation to character functions and the forms that love takes.

The work also explores the reification of love: the way love becomes identified with something specific, such as obedience or physical presence, and the consequences of this identification in relationships.

Over time, a couple develops a rhythm of its own. Sometimes distances and alliances harden within conflicts that come to seem inevitable. The work follows what happens as the partners speak, observing who reaches for the other, who withdraws and how each response changes the next.

The phenomenological and existential perspective keeps desire and responsibility for choices in view; the systemic perspective observes the sequences and family histories that take part in the relationship. The body and space also enter the work, while decisions about the future remain with the couple.

Gestalt brings attention to present experience and to what emerges at the contact boundary, including through the body. Systems thinking follows recurring patterns in relationships and the stories that organise a system. Placed alongside one another, the two perspectives reveal movements that would remain in the background from either position alone.

The work moves from theory to clinical situations and back to theory. A symptom is encountered as the person’s experience and, at the same time, as a response that serves a function in their relationships. Dialogue between the two approaches leads to different questions about the same situation.

A small gesture or the breath sometimes opens more paths than a general explanation. The same can happen through slowing a movement or recounting an episode precisely. These are experiences that are simple to practise, designed to follow the passage between feeling, thinking and doing. Simplicity offers a point of entry; complexity remains in the relationships that shape what happens.

The work moves forwards from the dream. An image can be inhabited or become a voice; a scene continues beyond the point at which the dreamer woke. Meaning arises from what the person recognises while transforming the material they have brought. Metaphors and paradoxes keep open what an explanation would make linear too soon. In the group, the scene takes shape as dialogue or theatre; at the end, the dream returns to life and to the question of what to do with it.

It is possible to say “everything is fine” with a voice and posture that tell a different story. The distance between two people also takes part in communication. The timing of a response or the way someone remains silent can say as much as words. The exercises allow these differences to be felt before they are named.

The work follows these gaps between words and relationship. Incongruities and double binds become readable in the tone, distance or rhythm of the encounter. Attention turns to how to speak about what is happening in the relationship, including one’s own way of taking part in it.

Weltanschauung is the worldview through which each person gives meaning to experience and recognises what feels possible. It is expressed in thought and in the body, and guides the way people meet others.

The work includes the collective voices that run through a person. They may take the form of a “one must”, a family expectation or an image of success. Recognising them helps distinguish what has been received from what, in the present, a person wants to choose and carry forwards.

Knowing what one wants and making a decision do not always happen at the same pace. Wanting sometimes appears as a direction that is still fragile, felt in the body before it finds words. The workshop follows the relationship between feeling, thinking and doing, and observes what happens when one of these passages is interrupted.

Guided imagery or movement can give shape both to a choice and to what stands in its way. The group takes part in the work. The obstacle is listened to for the function it serves. Sometimes a possible step emerges from this; at other times, it becomes clear that the direction does not matter enough to be pursued.

Control seeks to reduce uncertainty and make the world more predictable. In relationships, every intervention changes the situation and is itself changed by the response it encounters. A therapist who already knows where the patient should arrive also becomes part of the problem they wish to solve.

Letting go of control leaves the responsibility to choose intact. One intervenes and observes what happens. The next step also arises from that response. Uncertainty remains the place in which a possibility can still appear.

Anger may explode outwards or turn against oneself. When it remains compressed, it often makes the body and thought rigid. It changes space and relationships, interrupts what is happening and defends a boundary. Recovering its force restores vitality.

The work moves through the force of anger to encounter what it protects. The challenge is to hold strength and vulnerability together: to be able to assert oneself while remaining open to being reached by another person.

Every group contains movements towards belonging, difference and distance. They are distributed among the participants, change with the situation and give the group a particular signature. Harmony shifts between belonging and fusion; conflict brings clarity or fragments; distance offers breathing space or becomes disengagement.

The map takes shape in space as the group works. What is excluded often returns indirectly; recognising it makes other movements possible. Facilitation follows the forces present and adjusts its own position.

The boundary between “me” and “us” moves. In the group, each person senses how close to come and what happens when another’s experience reaches them. The body signals where one is exposed and where the need to withdraw arises.

The work distinguishes what belongs to one’s own history from what circulates in the group. The two experiences remain related: one responds to what emerges while keeping the possibility of saying “I” as part of a “we”.

The ancestors are symbolic figures from periods that shaped ideas of beauty and freedom, as well as different ways of rebelling and creating. A visualisation leads each person towards a gift or a message; dramatisation then brings it into the group to see what effect it has. The inheritance is received in the present: each person can recognise themselves in what comes from far away and transform it, or choose to leave it. The passage concerns how one decides to carry it forwards in one’s own life.