Supervision and Professional Development are COPE’s commitment to all our staff members
COPE is committed to ensuring the highest quality of care and support for our clients, and it all starts with the supervision and professional development of our staff. COPE provides supervision (individual and group), and every three months COPE hosts a presenter to deliver a workshop to our staff that focuses on a topic relevant to their work and explores issues from a psychoanalytic lens.
On Wednesday the 17th of July, COPE was fortunate to have a well-distinguished and experienced psychoanalyst Andre Zanardo. Andre is a Jungian psychoanalyst and registered with The Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts. Andre is in private practice and has extensive experience delivering seminars to a diverse group of health professionals. On Wednesday he provided the COPE team with a 2-hour workshop on ‘The Baby in the Room’.
Psychoanalytic theory is extensive and the use of jargon can be a barrier in understanding its concepts. From the outset, Andre established that our clients are not ‘babies’ and treating them this way is detrimental. The workshop aimed at offering a ‘different’ perspective that may enable staff to have a deeper understanding of our clients and how to work with them.
The workshop first commenced with helping understand a baby’s internal world and the psychological injuries they are susceptible to. The ‘Still Face Experiment’ was discussed and how this study demonstrates the profound impact of caregiver interaction on infant emotional development, where a sudden lack of responsiveness from the caregiver leads to distress and attempts by the infant to re-engage.
The second part was aimed at understanding negations, re-enactments, countertransference and how valuable the clinician’s own emotions can help us better understand our clients and what was going on for them emotionally. An important question Andre posed workers to reflect in their interactions in sessions is ‘what is going on’ internally for clients and for the worker which may help workers understand unresolved conflicts and patterns from a client’s early relationships, allowing both to explore and understand these dynamics more deeply.
The workshop was extremely practical and staff discussed their own experiences in sessions and emotions that came up which enabled them to identify the unmet early emotional needs of their clients, leading to responses in a more attuned and correcting way.
This workshop was a success in offering a diverse perspective other than ‘looking at the behaviour’ of individuals we support and how we can better understand the internal experiences of clients to facilitate lasting goal development. COPE is dedicated and committed to delivering the highest quality of care and support to its clients. By prioritising the supervision and professional development of its staff, COPE ensures that its team is well-equipped to meet the diverse needs of the individuals they serves. This continuous learning approach helps staff deepen their understanding of client experiences and enhances the effectiveness of their support and interventions.
COPE Centre of Psychological Enrichment
Visit us at 2 Lawrence Avenue, West Perth
📞 (08) 6556 6460
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