Clinical supervision in cognitive behavior therapy improves therapists’ competence: a single-case experimental pilot study

ABSTRACT

Clinical supervision is a cornerstone in psychotherapists’ training but there are few empirical evaluations on the effects of supervision on therapists’ competencies. The aim of this study was therefore to evaluate the effects of standardized supervision on rater-assessed competency in Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT). Six therapists with basic training in CBT were provided with protocol-based clinical supervision in CBT in a single-case experimental multiple baseline design. The supervision focused on specific CBT competencies and used experiential learning methods such as role-play. Each therapist recorded weekly treatment sessions during phases without and with supervision. The therapists’ CBT competence was assessed by third-party raters using the Revised Cognitive Therapy Scale (CTS-R). Statistical analyses showed that the therapists’ CTS-R scores increased significantly during the phase with supervision with a mean item increase of M = 0.71 (range = 0.50–1.0) on the supervision focus areas. This is one of the first empirical studies that can confirm that supervision affect CBT competencies. The results also suggest that supervision can be manualized and that supervisees have a positive perception of more active training methods. Further studies are needed to replicate the results and to find ways to improve the impact of supervision.     

Novel poetic protest: What Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist offers geographers writing to evoke rather than convey

This paper is a call to geographers, a call for evocative understandings of complicated places and times, for writing practices that foreground feelings, embrace experiential considerations, and privilege embodied relationships with text during periods of struggle, protest, and resistance. I anchor this call in a formalist reading Sunil Yapa's Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist. Drawing from poetic impulses, my formalist reading of the novel includes attention to the novels' grammatical structures and lineated assemblages: I extend my reading of the novel into a call for geographers to experiment and emote in our writing practices, whatever those practices might be. The paper also draws on poet Don Paterson's writing about textual work done by the lyrical and the lyric. Paterson suggests poetry offers opportunities to make writing an ingestible project, one with the potential of being physically manifest in a reader. In this paper, I suggest there is much potential for social change if geographers consider emotionally evocative writing and knowledge as opposed to information being conveyed in expected forms. Ultimately, and circling back to Yapa, I call to geographers to consider our writing as activist work, with the emotional potential of making a new and better world.     

“HEROISM ON AN EMPTY STOMACH”: Weil and Hillesum on Love and Happiness Amid the Holocaust1

I do four things in this essay: (1) briefly rehearse the biographies of Simone Weil and Etty Hillesum, (2) outline and compare some of the key themes in their lives and works, noting interesting (and also troubling) similarities between them, as well as salient differences, (3) use their examples as lenses through which to look at contemporary attitudes toward altruism vs. self‐interest, freedom vs. necessity, eating vs. fasting, and acting vs. writing, and (4) highlight both their strengths and their weaknesses as religious witnesses to the truth. An overarching issue throughout the essay is the relation between the soul and the body, but I am especially concerned with the relation between self‐sacrifice and self‐love—also known as agape and temporal happiness—when confronted by radical evil. When allowed to correct one another, Weil and Hillesum show us, I believe, how Christian agapism can refuse both hatred and false security, even in an era of terrorism and torture.     

Review Section

No abstract available for this article.     

Bridging cultural divides with the power of poetry: an educator’s reflection

ABSTRACT

In this article I discuss the ways in which writing poetry and reflecting on its meanings may be a valuable tool for promoting an educator’s reflexivity surrounding issues of reconciliation. As Canada embarks on the work of healing the difficulties its colonial past has caused its original inhabitants (i.e. Indigenous peoples), educators must explore ways in which they can contribute to a more socially just, democratic, and healthy society. By utilising the theoretical framework of Dialogical Self Theory (DST) to describe and explore identity and the writing of poetry as an exploration of self, it becomes possible for myself, as an educator, to unearth my own biases and begin to create safe spaces for identity exploration, learning, and healing.     

Valuing Vulnerability: New Definitions of Courage

SUMMARY

In a dominant, Western culture that celebrates strength in separation and holds unrealistic expectations for independent, autonomous functioning, vulnerability is seen as a handicap. This system creates the illusion of an invulnerable and separate self, and uses individualistic standards to measure a person's worth. Since these unrealistic expectations cannot be humanly attained, these controlling images become the source of shame and disconnection. RCT suggests that there is value in embracing vulnerability and in providing support, both at an individual and a societal level, for the inevitable vulnerability of all people. Rather than espousing the individual, mostly mythical, traits of a “lone hero,” RCT moves us toward new and important pathways to resilience and courage through connection. A version of this article was originally presented at the 2002 Learning from Women Conference, co-sponsored by Harvard Medical School and the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute.