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Making the Combination of Support and Social Control Work in Supervision

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Relational Processes in Counselling and Psychotherapy Supervision

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Abstract

The focus of this chapter is supervising professionals who have double mandates when combining help and social control. The Norwegian Child Protection Service (CPS) operates with a two-part mandate as described, but the issue is transferable to several professions and businesses. The double mandate can be ethically and professionally challenging: After some time where professionals are helping the family, the conclusion can be not good enough parenting, and the children are moved to an institution or in foster care. This often is experienced by the families as betrayals. Information that professionals helping families accomplishes can be held against the parents and used as information for the court, where they decide if children should live in foster care or institutions for a long time, or adoption of the child. Central themes in supervision of professionals at CPS are handling resistance by being transparent, support the development of intrinsic motivation (may be developed by the use of externalizing the problem and Motivational Interviewing), and creating strong and often long-lasting working alliances. Supervisors often are the “hands” that holds the professionals when they feel being on the top of the circle and feels mastery, as well as comforting when they feel like being on the bottom of the circle. In the same way, professionals should be the hands for parents, and parents should be supported to be the hands for their children.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Statistics of Norway (2019) report that 18.2% of the Norwegian population are immigrants or born in Norway with immigrant parents.

  2. 2.

    There is an exception to the rule when the professionals suspect that the child is exposed to family violence, sexual or physical abuse, to avoid misuse of evidence.

  3. 3.

    In dictionaries, episteme is defined as intellectually certain knowledge/the body of ideas that determine the knowledge that is intellectually certain at any particular time. The word epistemic is originating from the Greek epistēmē understanding, knowledge, from feminine of epistēmōn understanding, knowing, from epistanai to understand, know, from epi-+ histanai to set, place.

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  1. Department of Education and Lifelong Learning, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Øyvind Kvello

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  1. Department of Education and Lifelong Learning, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Ottar Ness

  2. Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA

    Sheila McNamee

  3. Department of Education and Lifelong Learning, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Øyvind Kvello

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Kvello, Ø. (2021). Making the Combination of Support and Social Control Work in Supervision. In: Ness, O., McNamee, S., Kvello, Ø. (eds) Relational Processes in Counselling and Psychotherapy Supervision . Palgrave Texts in Counselling and Psychotherapy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71010-1_5

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