This session aims to explore the realities of supervision in complex professional environments where practitioners are often required to make decisions without certainty or a single correct solution. Practitioners can encounter situations shaped by competing priorities, ethical tensions, organisational expectations, and the diverse needs of clients. This session invites participants to reflect on how they navigate these complexities while supporting practitioners to think critically, act responsibly, and maintain professional integrity.
The training focuses on the role of supervision as a reflective and supportive space rather than simply a mechanism for oversight or compliance. Participants will consider how supervisors can ‘hold’ uncertainty—acknowledging that ambiguity is often unavoidable in practice—while helping supervisees remain thoughtful, ethically grounded, and confident in their decision-making. Attention will be given to the emotional and ethical pressures that can arise when professionals must balance risk, responsibility, and the well-being of others.
Through discussion and reflection, the session encourages participants to explore how their own values, assumptions, and experiences influence the ways in which they practice. Participants will examine strategies for facilitating reflective conversations that allow practitioners to slow down their thinking, consider multiple perspectives, and tolerate the discomfort that can accompany complex decisions. Rather than seeking definitive answers, the training emphasises the importance of curiosity, critical reflection, and collaborative exploration.
The session also highlights how supervisors can support practitioners when they feel exposed, uncertain, or under pressure to act quickly. By creating psychologically safe supervisory relationships, supervisors can enable practitioners to share dilemmas openly, learn from uncertainty, and develop resilience in the face of complexity.
About the Trainer
Imelda Hatton Yeo is a qualified and experienced mental health practitioner, specialist art psychotherapist and psychosexual and relationship therapist, registered with HCPC, BAAT and COSRT.
Imelda has worked clinically for the NHS in adult community teams, CAMHS, sexual health and psychosexual therapy services providing mental health risk assessments, case management and specific therapeutic interventions including individual, group and systemic interventions.
In private practice Imelda supports clients who present with a range of sex and relationship difficulties and works with clients from a variety of backgrounds and relationship styles utilising evidence-based approaches. Imelda has a PGCE in higher education and holds a FHEA as a senior lecturer for 11 years developing and delivering post graduate professional accredited psychological, psychotherapy and psychosexual and relationship therapy training programmes as well as continuing professional development workshops. Imelda is on the board of trustees for COSRT.
