Music Therapy Clinician: Supporting reflective clinical practice Volume 1 | Page 16

As we began supervising each other, we realized we weren’t finding resolutions
to clinical needs and questions. For example, one of us would talk about a birth trauma,
and the other would share her reactions or her own clinical case (that involved trauma).
These sessions seemed to help us vent our concerns but we rarely identified solutions,
and we usually ended up with more questions than answers.

We decided it would be helpful to find a way to formalize the peer supervision
process. We wanted to be able to offer each other constructive solutions and find
answers to our honest (let’s face it- sometimes disturbing) questions. We decided to
adapt an existing peer supervision model (Tietze, 2003) and use various music therapy
supervision guidelines as well (Austin, 2001; Dileo, 2001; Frohne-Hagemann, 2001;
Rafieyan, 2009; Shulman-Fagen, 2001). We also incorporated creative art explorations
(things like art making, song re-creation, musical improvisation, lyric analysis,
songwriting, and journaling) between supervision sessions so we could continue to
reflect on what we were experiencing.

Holy cow! How many paths are in this Maze?

One of the first things we discovered was, although we approached each session
with specific cases, we often discussed multiple issues within each case example. We
realized there were six overarching categories that kept resurfacing. Clinical cases like
the one below explored several categories simultaneously and provided rich material for
reflection.

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