Being a familiar and even obligatory practice among psychologists, supervision is just beginning to be mastered in the professional communities of mantics. “Bialiauski Group” is among the first to popularize the necessity and benefits of Tarot supervision. In October 2021, we published another book dedicated to just this issue. The following excerpt from this book will help to better understand what exactly is meant when talking about Tarot supervision.
“Supervision is exactly the kind of practice that the Tarot community could have borrowed from psychologists without any hesitation. This is a very valuable opportunity for both beginners and experienced professionals to receive professional support for their practice.
The supervisand or practitioner who is requesting supervision turns to his senior colleague or supervisor with some difficulty due to a particular case at work or due to some crisis in the practice in general.
Supervision is that “postgraduate” format of professional assistance, when beginner specialists have already completed their studies, but are still at the very beginning of their professional path, and they have just to build their own practice. Of course, many difficulties await them, which simply could not be fully taken into account in the curriculum of their schools. This is not so much about theory, although supervision can also be useful in this matter, but about the practical difficulties of interacting with a “live” client.
Typically, the supervisand brings his/her supervisor “some of the complexity” that he/she has encountered in work. Difficulties can be different, which in turn determines the format of supervision:
- Didactic supervision aims to restore some theoretical gaps in the work. The supervisand may not know some cards deeply enough, he/she may lack a palette of values, or may need some specific spread. Such supervision is more focused on theory than practice, but it is useful to any Tarot reader, since no one can know everything. Such communication with a more experienced supervisor can give a new perspective to already known theoretical issues, or fill in the learning gaps that remain after the end of the main course. This kind of supervision is especially useful for beginning practitioners.
- Supportive supervision focuses on peer support, which again is beneficial to both novice and experienced colleagues. For beginners, their practice is fraught with a lot of doubts, as their professional identity is being formed in parallel. The support of an experienced senior colleague is essential here. An experienced colleague, on the other hand, faces a slightly different kind of problem. Self-confident, with a lot of practice, he/she may suffer from a serious problem of emotional burnout. It is really difficult to be alone with it, and such a colleague needs support no less than a beginner.
- Process supervision shifts the emphasis from theory to practice and deals with the process of work itself. Here we are talking not so much about what this or that card means, but about what difficulties may arise at the time of the consultation itself or after it. The Tarot reader can remain after the next client in an extremely disassembled state, having received a toxic sediment that he/she cannot digest in any way. It would seem that everything was correct from the point of view of reading the symbols of the cards, but nevertheless it was this particular client who managed to do something that severely “knocked down” the supervisand, and he/she needs the help of a senior colleague. In such a supervision format, psychology is of great importance. The supervisor helps to notice the psychological subtleties that the supervisand overlooked. This could happen due to a lack of personal psychological knowledge, or due to the fact that it is difficult to keep in mind both the level of symbolism of the cards and the accompanying psychological background of the consultation.
Psychotherapists are well aware of the fact that clients bring all their “inner mythology” into contact with them, and working with them is wandering around clients’ worlds, in which everything is rarely colorful and cloudless, otherwise clients would not come to us. Tarot is no exception: the client brings not only a problem, but often the poisonous background in which this problem originated. The Tarot reader has no choice but to immerse oneself in this background. Often, as a result, we find ourselves in a state very similar to 9 of Swords (Rider-Waite deck), when it is difficult to determine what is in front of our eyes – reality or a nightmare. After the consultation, the practitioner also remains in a state where it is unclear whether he/she has already returned to one’s natural emotional comfort zone, or he/she is still in the emotional cloud of the client’s reality. At such times, an experienced supervisor is simply irreplaceable.
Very often, the same unconscious processes unfold between the supervisand and the supervisor that took place between the Tarot reader and the client being analyzed at the time of the consultation. That is why it is important for the supervisor not only knowledge of the Tarot system, but also psychotherapeutic training and experience. The client’s psyche was not able to cope with its own problem on its own, so the client came to the Tarot reader to “rent his/her psyche”. A supervisor is needed when, “two psychics”, the client’s and the Tarot reader’s, were not enough to digest the problem. To prevent this vicious circle from continuing, the supervisor must indeed have a wealth of experience in client and therapeutic positions of psychotherapy. He/she must have the knowledge and skills of how the supervision works for the process to be truly useful.
We hardly met colleagues in the Tarot environment who would provide such a service, partly because the format of supervision has not yet taken root in the Tarot. At the same time, there is a very small number of fellow psychologists who are able to provide high-quality process supervision in the Tarot. We hope that this book will awaken interest in this format of work, and supervision will take root in the Tarot community as well as it is appreciated in the psychotherapeutic environment. Supervision in psychology is taken as long as they work. The point here is not at all in their own competence, but in the safety measures and environmental friendliness of their work.”
We offer our clients a format of individual or group supervision. An individual format is suitable for parsing and working out one difficult case when regularity is not required. A supervision group is an excellent format of work if supervision is needed on a regular basis, as well as support for one’s own practice, as well as support from a professional circle of colleagues and exchange of experience.
We recruit or update our supervisory teams annually in October and February. If you still have questions, you can contact us to clarify those points that you do not understand. We always agree to a preliminary clarifying free conversation to answer any remaining questions.