Trauma-Informed Supervision: Core Components and Unique Dynamics in Varied Practice Contexts

Survivors of trauma are disproportionately represented in agencies providing a broad range of behavioral, social, and mental health services. Practitioners in these settings must understand and be able to respond to survivors of trauma in ways that are empowering, normalize and validate their experiences and reactions, and minimize the risk of retraumatization. Practitioners also will be indirectly traumatized as a result of their work with trauma survivors.

Practitioners’ ability to help clients with histories of trauma depends upon clinical supervision that is trauma-informed. The trauma-informed supervisor has the dual responsibility of enhancing supervisees’ skills as trauma-informed practitioners and helping them manage the impact their work has on them.

Nevertheless, many clinical supervisors only have limited knowledge and training in trauma and may not recognize either the needs of those whom they supervise or the clients their supervisees serve. This book compiles important recommendations from trauma-informed practitioners, supervisors, and researchers who share their professional reflections and personal stories based on their hands-on experiences across mental health and medical contexts.

This book was originally published as a special issue of The Clinical Supervisor.

Carolyn Knight is a professor of Social Work at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, United States. She is a social worker with 30 years of experience, mostly pro bono, working individually and in groups with adult survivors of childhood trauma, particularly sexual abuse. She is the author of Introduction to Working with Adult Survivors of Childhood Trauma: Strategies and Skills (2008) and Group Therapy for Adult Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (1996), co-editor of Group Work with Populations at Risk (with Geoffrey Grief, 4th ed., 2016), and co-author of a textbook on social work practice The life model of social work practice, 4th ed. Her recent presentations have focused on how to adopt a trauma-informed lens in clinical supervision and practice.

L. DiAnne Borders is the Burlington Industries Excellence Professor in the Counseling program at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, United States. She teaches clinical supervision and supervises doctoral students’ clinical supervision internships. Her current research focuses on supervision education and pedagogy as well as traumainformed supervision. She is the author of several books and numerous empirical and conceptual articles on clinical supervision, and serves as editor of The Clinical Supervisor.