Beyond Supervision: Reflective Practice for Couples Therapists

The benefits of reflective practice groups for couples therapists

Supervision is essential but it doesn't always reach everything. As a couples therapist there can be a residue that stays somewhere in the background - not a single difficult session you can bring to your supervisor, but something that builds over months and years of holding multiple perspectives, sitting with unresolved conflict, and carrying feelings that may belong to the relationship rather than to you.

When the client is not a person but a relationship, the practitioner's internal experience becomes more complex in ways that standard reflective structures were not designed to hold. And the question of what does hold it - what sustains couples therapists who want to keep developing, not just managing - is one that Brad McLean has spent a long time thinking about.

What accumulates

In the early stages of couples work, it is the intensity that gets your attention - the speed of escalation, the pull towards one partner, the disorientation of holding two truths at once. Most practitioners adapt through experience - they develop steadiness, learn to track process over content, find ways to stay present when the room is charged.

But the longer you do this work, the more you may notice what sits underneath that initial intensity. It is the weight of holding multiple subjectivities, session after session. Couples work gets into you in ways that are difficult to articulate in a monthly supervision slot, partly because the material is not always about a specific clinical decision. It is about what the work is doing to you as a practitioner.

The Role of Reflective Practice Groups

Supervision gives you formulation, perspective, and clinical accountability, and it is irreplaceable. But there is a difference between discussing a case and being witnessed in the experience of carrying it. In supervision, you report what happened and receive another mind on the problem. What is harder to reach is the felt sense of being in the room with a couple - the roles you were drawn into, the feelings that arrived uninvited, the shifts in your posture and attention that told you something was happening before you had words for it.

This is the territory that benefits from a different kind of space - one where you are not presenting a formulated case but speaking about what has stayed with you, and where a group of peers who share your clinical territory can think with you about what might be happening.

Brad McLean

Couples work creates its own particular demands on the practitioner - and it benefits from reflective spaces that are shaped around those demands. Two reflective practice groups for couples therapists by Brad McLean, via Northside offer that: a Balint Group and a Reading Group.

The Balint group: being held in the work

Balint group work was designed for exploring the relationship and unconscious residue. The method does not ask you to prepare, bring notes, or present a polished account. You speak about a clinical situation that has remained in your mind - informally, spontaneously - and then step back while the group, guided by the leader, works with the material. The presenter rests and listens. It is a profoundly different experience from case discussion, and it reaches layers that case discussion often cannot.

The monthly Balint group is specifically for practitioners working with couples and relationship-diverse constellations, and the specificity matters. When everyone in the group understands the particular pressures of this work - the triangulation, the competing loyalties, the way a couple's unconscious processes can recruit the therapist's internal world - the group's thinking deepens quickly. There is a shared frame of reference that does not need establishing each time, and a particular relief in being with colleagues who recognise what you are describing without needing it explained.

The reading group: thinking alongside others

The other dimension practitioners are hungry for is the chance to read and think together. Most of us read individually - encountering ideas in isolation, form impressions, move on. A paper that could fundamentally reshape how we understand a couple in our practice gets absorbed into the background of what we know without ever being tested in conversation.

The Couples+ Reading Group is designed to explore Transactional Analysis papers on relationship therapy alongside texts from the wider couples and psychoanalytic literature. The emphasis is not on mastering a body of knowledge but on contextual clinical application - what fits, what does not, and how particular concepts alter the way we understand what is happening between us and our clients. In conversation with others, you discover perspectives you could not have reached alone.

Two spaces, one question

Both groups address the same underlying question: what does it take to keep developing as a couples therapist, rather than simply accumulating hours? Training gives you frameworks. Supervision gives you reflection and accountability. But there is a third element - the experience of being held and challenged by peers who share the same clinical territory - that is harder to find and easier to undervalue.

Both groups run online, monthly, on Wednesday mornings.

The Balint group meets monthly online (90 minutes, limited to 8–10 participants) and runs on an eight-session contract at £440.

The Reading Group also meets monthly (90 minutes for 8 sessions, £440).

Initially, times will be 10.30am UK time (BST) changing to 9.30am GMT from October to March. Both have the option to continue beyond the initial eight sessions.

More details of both groups can be found on the Groups page - together with an option to download the group flyer.