Art-based supervision for early professional art therapists

Early professional art therapists experience unique challenges related to professional identity development. Due to the small size of the art therapy profession, many art therapists experience isolation and role ambiguity as the lone representatives of the art therapy field within the workplace. Following graduation, early professional art therapists encounter competitive job markets, potential misconceptions about art therapy by employers or colleagues, financial stressors, and potential for experiences of vicarious trauma and burnout. Supervision is essential for promoting ethical and effective therapeutic practice and serves as a valuable resource to navigate the challenges experienced during this critical transitional time for post-graduate early professional art therapists. Art-based supervision (ABS) fosters direct engagement in artistic processes, the "tools of the trade" in the art therapy profession, to promote supervisee reflexivity, opportunities for coping and processing of vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue, self-disclosure, and processing of countertransference. To date, few studies have examined the lived experiences and perspectives of early professional art therapists within ABS. To expand the understanding of early professional art therapists' lived experiences of ABS this multimethod study, including constructivist grounded theory and art-based research, was conducted to develop a theory of art-based supervision grounded in the experiences of early professional art therapy supervisees and art therapy supervisors. Two research questions guided the development of a theoretical framework of ABS for early professional art therapists: 1) What are the processes and conditions of ABS as experienced by early professional art therapy supervisees and supervisors? and 2) What are the perceived benefits and challenges of ABS as described by early professional art therapy supervisees and supervisors? Twenty participants including early professional art therapists (n=10) and art therapy supervisors participated in this study. All participants were cisgender women; primarily white (n = 19) with one participant identifying with more than one racial identity (n = 1). At the time of the study, participants were living across the United States and internationally (Australia, Canada, Spain, and Israel). Concurrent data collection and analysis methods were used for this study including initial, focused, and theoretical coding phases; art-based research methods as a data source and method of analysis; memoing; and constant comparative methods. Five core categories were developed from the data to form a theoretical framework of ABS for early professional art therapists. Through the Listening with Art ABR method developed for this study, artwork was created to aesthetically represent and synthesize the relationships between the core categories of the theoretical framework. The findings of this study highlight unique qualities of ABS during the early professional phase of development for art therapists, including the developmental trajectories of early professionals and art therapy supervisors, the dynamics of supervisory relationships, the navigation of boundaries and self-disclosure, the settings and conditions of ABS, and ABS processes. The findings of the theoretical framework contribute to an understanding of ABS during the early professional phase of development for art therapists, with implications for the field of art therapy and art-based supervision within other allied mental health professions.

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