Reframing vicarious trauma in clinical supervision through the lens of aboriginal/indigenous focusing-oriented therapy
Reframing vicarious trauma in clinical supervision through the lens of aboriginal/indigenous focusing-oriented therapy
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Issue Date
2020-05
Authors
Rodrigo, Jinny
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Abstract
Clinical supervision is consistently mentioned in the documented literature on vicarious trauma as an essential part of addressing stress in trauma therapists. However, there has been little documented on how clinical supervision could be approached in practice, in order to serve this end. This study aims to address the gap in the literature by exploring what happens in Aboriginal/Indigenous Focusing-Oriented Therapy (A/IFOT) clinical supervision: informed by a modality specifically designed to address complex trauma. Three semi-structured interviews of A/IFOT clinical supervisors were collected and analyzed, employing Amadeo Giorgi's qualitative method: the descriptive phenomenological psychological approach. Three prominent and reoccurring themes emerge from the data, related to the process of A/IFOT clinical supervision, that are crucial to addressing vicarious trauma. These themes serve to reframe the phenomenon of the vicarious and constitute approaches that are somatic, land-based, and engage with the vicarious through an Indigenous ontological lens. These findings—among the first academic research to date, to describe A/IFOT clinical supervision for trauma therapists—have important implications for clinical supervision, the well-being of trauma therapists, and ultimately the well-being of their clients and all relations concerned.
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Keywords
clinical supervision , vicarious trauma , Aboriginal focusing-oriented therapy , indigenous focusing-oriented therapy , land-based , indigenous ontological lens
License
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States , openAccess