Care for Caregivers – What is it, and what are the benefits?

One of the key services besides psychotherapy and psychological assessment that we provide at JSA psychotherapy is clinical supervision.

What are Clinical Supervisions?

Clinical supervisions are monthly sessions in which practitioners themselves receive professional support, through an opportunity to discuss their caseload, address their emotions and reflect upon the challenges they are facing. Those of you who are familiar with the practice of psychotherapy and counselling may already be aware of clinical supervision as a mandatory requirement for anyone practicing under a registered regulatory body. 

In addition to providing clinical supervision for counsellors and psychotherapists, we also provide this service to caregivers in other roles who are not covered by regulatory mandates but nonetheless benefit significantly from this support, which we refer to as Care for Caregivers. These caregivers include the ones employed by our sister company, residential care provider Life Change Care Limited. 

In this way, Care for Caregivers forms the supervisory element of the TIER system, Life Change Care’s provisional framework that is used across the entire organisation. This incorporates the welfare and recovery of the children and families in their care, as well as – in this case – the wellbeing and development of the staff providing that care. We will be discussing the Care for Caregivers programme further and its possibilities further in an upcoming series of articles.  

This article will cover an introductory summary into how we devised this element of our care delivery, and what outcomes it is designed to achieve. It is worth mentioning that JSA Psychotherapy have been providing Care for Caregiver supervision to Life Change Care’s homes for several years at the time of writing. As such, we have included a number of testimonials from carers who have received it to express their own experiences of how it has supported them in their roles. 

What is Care for Caregivers?

Care for Caregivers is a means of delivering periodic and consistent support for the caregivers’ emotional regulation and continued professional development through the process of reflective supervision. It is extremely well documented that clinical supervision is an inherently necessary form of support for other caring professions. Life Change Care was established as a sister company to JSA Psychotherapy given the perspective that we have gained of this with our mental health background. The purpose of developing this framework of care for residential care has been to demonstrate its importance, necessity and utility. 

It is agreed that any practicing counsellor or psychotherapist needs this service every month in order to offload the stress that has accumulated while working with traumatised and vulnerable people with mental health issues and complex trauma. This is especially true when supporting them to process any distressing or traumatic events that may have occurred for them in providing this care, or that they have taken on as secondary trauma from supporting others to process their own. 

The ability to provide grounded, affirming and supportive care for those needing help with these issues has to begin with a caregiver who is already themselves grounded with a stable foundation of emotional support. This is just as true for anyone working with vulnerable children and families in residential care as it is for those who are working with them as therapists. This is at least partly because a well supported carer is better able to recognise and manage their own levels of emotional regulation, and thus, recognise and manage other people’s feelings too. When we become dysregulated, we are unable to think clearly and instinctively fall back on our internal working models for how to behave in the stressful situation we are experiencing. 

For children and young people who need support with symptoms of complex trauma, their internal working model is the source of their behavioural issues. This is because when they feel overwhelmed, they are falling back on survival skills that they have learned and internalised during adverse childhood experiences. skills that are harmful or inappropriate for adult life and relationships.  In addition to the support they need to meet their developmental milestones. Complex trauma recovery work is required to help them overcome, reframe and internalise new, less harmful core beliefs and coping skills.  

Foundational to the TIER system, is the notion that the internal working model of the adult caregivers must also be considered when structuring this care plan. Many of the staff working to provide this trauma-informed care may be entirely new to the role, or may have extensive experience already, but from working in different care homes, with different behavioural management systems that are not trauma informed.  

Obviously, workplace training in a trauma-informed framework is necessary, but upskilling in any new information requires repeated practical experiences and frequent opportunities to reflect upon that learning, in order to fully integrate it into the long-term memory and internal working model.  Ideally, with the grounding and regulation support provided through caring for carers supervision, there will be far fewer occasions where the carers will find themselves overwhelmed and emotionally dysregulated in the home. However, it’s unavoidable that there will always be circumstances that push the caregivers to rely up on their instinctive reactions to a crisis, without having the opportunity to think things through first.

The function of Care for Caregivers with reflective supervision is that when they do so, those instincts are informed by an internal working model which has a fully integrated understanding of trauma-informed practices for behaviour management and de-escalation.  This is how we support the provisions we work with to ensure that their care is truly holistic in maintaining a trauma-informed approach.

What are the Benefits of Care for Caregivers?

In turn, the children and families receive the same benefits of this support. As touched on above, when the staff are supported this way, they are able to take what they have learned from their reflective process, and experience of actively working to integrate better practice into their internal working models, to then provide this same support through the therapeutic process of overcoming developmental trauma’s lingering effects. 

There is no single outcome that the children’s homes we work with seek to achieve for the families and children in residence there that doesn’t directly benefit from and indeed require this underpinning to achieve properly. For example, it has shown particular utility within Life Change Care’s parent and child provision specifically, where these shared reflection techniques have been critical for caregivers to demonstrate and impart the parenting skills to vulnerable young families.  

Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for further updates on this blog over the coming weeks and months, where we will be discussing this topic in greater depth! If you have any further questions about the services that we provide, or would like to inquire about sourcing them for your own care team, please get in touch on 01282686345 or at office@jsapsychotherapy.com.