Supervision: A Space to Grow in Freedom
By Barb Quinn, RSCJ
“Herein lies the “good news of supervision.” As earnest and as dedicated as we are, it sometimes takes an “outsider” to help us see and hear what we overlook or misinterpret. ”
I remember my first experience of supervision as a spiritual director when I was "a baby nun," as I am wont to say. I was meeting with a young person who was quite challenging for me. It was the classic case of someone "pushing all my buttons!" I sought out an older, wiser spiritual director who was quite knowledgeable and experienced in both directing and supervising others. Time after time, as I would pour out my frustration, he would simply ask, "Does that remind you of something in your own life?" Well, I finally caught on. Of course, our responses and, yes, our internal reactions, often spring from our own raw and unprocessed experiences and feelings that have the power to blind us and deafen us to hearing and responding to another in freedom.
Herein lies the "good news of supervision." As earnest and as dedicated as we are, it sometimes takes an "outsider" to help us see and hear what we overlook or misinterpret. I have come to appreciate two key tools that a supervisor might employ or that spiritual directors themselves can draw on for preparation for supervision.
First, I learned an invaluable tool from a friend who, with her husband, trained lay persons for preaching. As each person took a turn preaching she would frame the supervision by inviting them to imagine a large movie screen behind them. And then she would ask, “Who is on the screen as you preach? Do the people see YOU or do they see GOD and God's work?" Not unlike spiritual direction, is the director pointing the directee to the director's own wisdom and experience or ultimately to God's action in the person's life?
That said, directors do need to draw on their own experiences of life with God. The director is called to embody God's love, forgiveness, acceptance, and gratitude for the growth of life and love in the directee. In fact, directors need to use their own internal responses as guides to listening and to truly "hearing" the person. What supervision does, however, is to shine a light on the quality of freedom in the director's ability to listen and really hear.
A second tool for supervision, then, comes from the work of the late David Augsburger, Menonite pastor, theologian, and counselor. He recognized three modes of listening operative in a person, modes that a supervisor attends to. The first mode of listening in the director is sympathy, the ability to feel for what a directee is undergoing even if the director does not really understand. A director recognizes that this is what allows a directee to feel supported, to feel heard. The second mode of listening is empathy, the ability of a director to "step into the shoes" of the directee because the director identifies with the experience of the person. A supervisor cautions the director, however, that while the director may have had similar experiences, the experience of the directee is unique to the person. While these two levels of listening are good and necessary, the director needs to be cautious about believing that s/he truly understands the directee. Afterall, it is their experience, not the director's. The third mode then is what Augsburger calls interpathy, that is, the ability to let the directee "paint the picture" of their own experience with all the layers of meaning and feeling. The director needs to be rooted in freedom to let the directee make sense of their own experience even while the director helps a person probe it, listening for God's action in the conversation as the director listens deeply.
Supervision provides a space to grow in the ability to receive another's story/experience in a spirit of freedom, enabling the directee to search for and deepen their own experience of God in the company of the faithful companion of the director.
Barbara Quinn, RSCJ, is a member of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, an international community of women. From 2011 to 2024, she served as the Associate Director of Spiritual Formation at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. She previously served as the founding director of the University of San Diego's Center for Christian Spirituality and is a President Emeritus of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality. She earned a BA in Psychology from Rosemont College in Pennsylvania, a Master of Divinity from Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, and a Doctor of Ministry from the Catholic Theological Institute in Chicago.