Robin Shohet, an award-winning supervisor and renowned writer on supervision, believes that we are all love. We just need to dismantle our fear-based belief system to reach it. Liz Hall reports
Robin Shohet, an award-winning supervisor and renowned author on supervision, sees supervision as a spiritual practice that enquires into love and fear, seeking to dismantle core beliefs blocking love.
“My philosophy is quite simple: love is who we are, and love is covered by fear – which can take many forms, including blame and judgement. My job, I feel, is to help people realise how frightened they are so they can start to dismantle their belief systems based on fear, removing blocks to love.”
Shohet has won awards for his work in supervision, including the EMCC’s Global Supervision Award (2021) with Michelle Lucas, and Coaching at Work’s Award for Contributions to Coaching Supervision (2016).
He’s coached hundreds of coaches over the years and co-authored with Peter Hawkins four editions of the best-selling landmark text, Supervision in the Helping Professions (eg, Open University Press, 2012). The first edition appeared in 1989, popularising the Seven-Eyed model of supervision, following an article on the model four years earlier by Hawkins in Self and Society, in an issue on supervision guest edited by Shohet.
Shohet acknowledges that his belief that we are all love may “sound corny but it’s my belief”, he says. He shares a favourite quote from the spiritual text, A Course in Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace, 2007): “Teach only love, because that is what you are.”
This belief doesn’t mean Shohet shies away from being challenging in his work – far from it. He’s timid in some contexts but he’ll happily challenge individual coach clients, groups, supervision trainees, former psychiatric patients when he was working as a social worker. For him, challenging and disrupting what may be unhelpful is very much the point of the work.
Being challenging hasn’t always landed well – Shohet says he’s not a natural fit for the corporate world.
“I don’t go into business much. I don’t fit. I remember a long time ago going with someone into an organisation where there were going to be redundancies. I said [to the employees], ‘I take it as a given that you’re all frightened so let’s work out strategies to deal with your fear.
“And in the break, [the other person] said, ‘How can you tell everyone they’re frightened before you’ve even started?’ And I said, ‘They obviously are so why shouldn’t I tell them?’ What they did in the end is agree to a pay cut so nobody would be made redundant.
“So I’m not asked in at board level much because all I’m interested in working with is people’s fear and people aren’t ready to expose that. The higher people go, the more frightened people are likely to be. If they’re not, they’re likely to be out of touch with it.”
He often challenges coach clients about how they’re not being very challenging. “I might say, ‘you’ve already lost because you’ve already adapted to what you think [the client] wants.’ I think it’s bad practice to agree to a beauty parade [for example] because you’ve already shown [the potential client] that they’re in charge, and the whole point of having you is to break that.”
Although he feels there’s been a shift in the profession, he says, “Coaching [still can be overly focused] on goals, taking charge, strategies. I think it’s more the profession rather than individual coaches. Maybe coaches have to shoehorn themselves into coaching too much. Sometimes I see coaches working in the corporate world turning themselves inside out [for example].
“I think coaching can [sometimes] reinforce the [egoic] mind. And I’m interested in states beyond that.”
Beginnings
Shohet recalls working in the late 1970s as a residential social worker in a halfway house within the Richmond Fellowship, a therapeutic community in the UK for people coming out of psychiatric hospital. It was where he met Peter Hawkins.
Shohet had a knack for connecting to the residents.
“One of the best compliments was when I heard two residents talking about me, saying ‘he’s one of us’.
“I’d had a psychotic episode for two hours when I was 21 after eating some cannabis. This gave me a real sense of psychosis so the residents knew I knew about psychosis. I think having that experience I’d had when I was 21 meant I knew that everyone’s crazy. I don’t care what it looks like on the surface, I knew there wasn’t much difference between me and the residents,” he says.
“And it was like I was almost fearless. I wouldn’t hesitate to swear at the residents. Not maliciously but I wouldn’t take any nonsense. Because I was slightly out of the box, I’d go into the staff room and say, ‘I’m really pissed off with George’, for example, ‘when I go into the session, I’m going to wind him up and he’ll overdose and we can get rid of him’.
“The staff thought they’d inherited a monster! And after the session, they’d ask, ‘how was it?’ I’d say [casually], ‘fine!’ Because [my colleagues] didn’t realise I was just emoting, they took it literally and it took them ages to understand. In a way, being able to do that gave me more freedom. It was like I didn’t have to play [games]. My role gave me masses of flexibility. I didn’t have to carry the structure like [my colleagues] did.”
Does he mean this flexibility allowed him to be a maverick?
“Yes, exactly. I’m totally a maverick. It’s in every cell of my being to be a maverick. That may look funny as a quote! But it’s true,” he chuckles. He chuckles often.
“The 70s were an era of us looking at our own craziness. It was about therapeutic communities doing away with psychiatric hospitals, not to save money but because there are better ways of working. I feel very blessed to have been able to work like that. Nowadays, if I swore at a resident, there would be a complaint out against me. But I never felt people took it amiss. I didn’t feel I was abusing power. I’d say things like ‘tell your voices to f-off and get on with the washing up’,” he laughs.
Hawkins was the warden at the Richmond Fellowship halfway house and his deputy, Joan Wilmot, was to become Shohet’s wife, and with whom he later wrote In Love with Supervision (2020). Shohet was the ‘number three’.
It was during 1976-9 that Shohet first encountered supervision. The halfway house was the senior staff training house for the 21-strong houses in the Fellowship, which was established by Elly Jansen to promote the re-integration of mental health patients into mainstream society.
Hawkins, Shohet and Wilmot devised a supervision policy for the organisation, overseen by Hawkins. As part of this, Shohet had 1.5 hours supervision a week. It blew him away.
“Supervision came to be considered a priority, and this was some of the best supervision I’ve ever had. Supervision in many ways saved me from burnout. Other houses without such a regular supervision policy had much higher staff turnover.”
Shohet’s experience informed his next steps. “I decided to go freelance to dedicate myself to helping staff not burn out, of which supervision is a part – not the only part. My career took off.”
In 1979, he co-founded the Centre for Supervision and Team Development with Wilmott, now his wife, and Hawkins. Some 45 years later, his time in the Richmond Fellowship still informs his work. “That’s how good it was…It was extraordinary. I’ve got no coaching or psychotherapy training, I’ve just got those three years.
“We had regular staff meetings, staff dynamic meetings, learning meetings, case histories. We were in meetings every single day and it was an absolute hothouse for learning.
“I think Peter Hawkins was a genius at that time, and I don’t use that word lightly.” When we met, for two weeks, Shohet had been writing daily about 100 things to be grateful for, and Hawkins was regularly on the list.
“Peter was running a 24-bedded psychiatric halfway house, 12 staff, introducing supervision to the whole organisation. He had one foot in the whole organisation, liaising with headquarters and one in the halfway house, and managing all this at 26 [years old],” says Shohet.
“The three of us had a symbiotic relationship. Peter and Joan worked in tandem brilliantly and I was a bridge between them and the rest of the staff. It all just worked really well and Peter had the vision to see how it would work.
“The 1970s were pioneering times. We had people like Ronnie Laing (a trail-blazing Scottish psychiatrist known for his alternative approach to treating mental illness), and Thomas Szacz’s idea of a therapeutic community (a Hungarian-American psychiatrist who opposed coercion into compulsory treatment and denied the existence of mental illness).
“We pioneered family therapy. We didn’t just see the individual – things that are now in vogue but were then pioneering. A lot of that was down to Peter.”
And what was down to Shohet? “That’s a good question.” He laughs and pauses, one of a number of pauses he takes to consider his responses.
“Well, this is going to sound a bit strange. But we were all brilliantly suited to our temperaments. Peter was visionary. Joan was a really loyal good number two Peter could rely on, both to hold him and challenge him. She also became the conduit by which the unconscious collective could be brought to the surface and given its voice. It was equal and Joan was a really good supervisor.
“I was brilliantly suited to be number three because I could link with the residents really well and be the liaison with Peter and Joan. I would weave in and out. It’s a bit like how I play football: I weave and dodge rather than playing the big defender who’d flatten people!
“We knew about parallel process, projective identification, all this stuff, we knew it. Of course, there’s the Seven-Eyed model and we’ve added to it and refined it but the basics, we knew. I’m not saying that in a conceited way.
“[For example], I knew about Mode 6 [the supervisor’s own self-reflections] already because I was using it in group supervision when I was training people from other houses.
“I think there was something absolutely magical about that time.”
The other ‘eyes’ or modes are: the coach/mentor/supervisor system, the coach/mentor/supervisor interventions, the relationship between the coach/mentor/supervisor and their client, the coach/mentor/supervisor’s own experience, the parallel process and the wider context.
A natural
Shohet’s edited works include Passionate Supervision and Supervision as Transformation, and he has contributed a chapter to the recently published Holding the Hope (Shohet, 2023).
“Anything that divides people cannot work. I see [some] people having an excuse to be aggressive under the cloak of self-righteousness, which is why I wrote the chapter.”
Despite the success of his own and co-authored books, Shohet doesn’t see himself as a natural writer. “I have to work quite hard at it.”
However, he does describe himself as a “natural supervisor”: “I don’t have to work hard at it…My temperament is one of being slightly detached, which is fantastic for a supervisor. “It doesn’t mean I’m not opinionated or difficult but there’s something ingrained in me – I [seemed to be] different. The capacity for objectivity was very deep in me at a young age.
“Certainly, I was a philosopher at five. The teacher said, ‘God made the world’ and I sat there thinking, ‘Who made God, you haven’t even thought of that question!’ I don’t know what kind of a freaky child I was! It wasn’t until I discovered football around seven or eight that I became a ‘normal boy’. I knew I was different. I wouldn’t play cowboys and Indians, I thought it was stupid, and I used to talk to the girls because I thought they were much more sensible.
“I remember these really strong knowings about people. I could spot an antisemitic teacher 100 miles away.”
There was a “background of astuteness” at home which supported Shohet to be insightful.
“My dad was into psychoanalysis and seeing as he was born in 1913, was quite far-thinking. So we used to talk about people and he’d be very insightful. I had my first psychology book at 14, from my dad’s bookshelf. And I was reading Melanie Klein [an Austrian-British psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis] at 15 or 16. I was just born to do this work. I’m very lucky.
“I think I supervise my family. With my parents [when I was young], I was thinking, ‘how am I going to stop them arguing?’ So I was trying different strategies to bring my parents together, which is what I most wanted. [For example], I would pretend to be very ill which would stop the row immediately! It was like I wasn’t a child but a mini family therapist with that degree of detachment.
“A so-called friend of mine, who was very angry with me, said, ‘if it moves, Robin will supervise it!’ He was being pretty scathing but I roared with laughter, thinking, ‘well, it’s true’.”
He shares another football story, recalling attending a match with a colleague who was getting very excited and was shouting insults about the referee. “And I said, taking the piss out of myself, ‘I do wish they’d own their projective material.’
“I like the idea of sitting with somebody. I like it better than therapy, because it feels like we’re collaborating with somebody in support of another person. I’m one step removed. But I particularly love group supervision. I’m a natural group leader – because you’re slightly separate. I find it much harder to be a group member than a leader.”
In his work with groups, he says:
“I use the energy of the group creatively so the group does a lot of the work. For example, someone will present a case and the group will share their reactions. And I won’t say anything, I’ll just facilitate the
group and hold the structure.
I’ll build up amazing group cohesion, which I think is my wish to create happy families.
“I have this deep belief that people are deeply intuitive and what I do is create an atmosphere where their intuition can flourish so that people feel that the voice inside them that they’ve squashed has got freedom to be expressed.
“It’s a very awesome sight to see a group working at that level. Another way to describe the work is that it’s like a sitting constellation, really trusting what’s inside people.
“[Practising supervision] has been completely effortless, and I think that’s why people feel safe with me because I’m just doing who I am. I’m not doing acquired techniques, which I think is important because you can see people acquiring techniques and underneath they don’t feel safe. And I wonder whether maybe the coaching world isn’t very secure in itself.
“Maybe it’s the combination of being the new kid on the block but also charging lots of money. Also, the potential complications of three-way contracts. I think there can be a lot of stickiness in coaching that therapy can avoid. And in therapy you can see the same person for four years and it’s not a big deal. In coaching, you might have six sessions only so you might have to perform more in coaching.”
He stresses these are just his opinions. Although he supervises coaches, he’s clear he’s not a coach. “I don’t even know if I’m a therapist any more. I just feel like a supervisor!”
Other influences
Shohet has been very influenced by Byron Katie’s The Work, and is inspired by author and philosopher, Charles Eisenstein: “We have similar ways of looking at things.”
And he of course works closely with A Course in Miracles. He shares how he’d just been reading lesson 68: “Love holds no grievances.”
“[The teachings say] to hold a grievance is to forget who you are. It ties in with my work on forgiveness.
“I got into forgiveness work in the 90s, when I was going to write a book on revenge. I ended up in a vengeful process with my co-worker and wouldn’t speak to him. He reached out saying he wanted to be my friend and I was touched by that. I realised he’d changed, and I suddenly had the insight that I was angry with a ghost! If someone has changed, how can I be angry with them?”
Shohet went from being angry one minute to wanting to run a forgiveness conference with this person. In 1999, he ran the first of two at the spiritual community, the Findhorn Foundation, Scotland. Some 300 people attended from 42 countries: “It was magnificent.”
The second was held in 2013. He’s now playing around with the idea of running three-day forgiveness retreats.
I ask him why he loves A Course in Miracles so much:
“There are so many answers I could give. I’ll just tell a story. My son fell down the stairwell and we took him to Accident & Emergency. He was very upset. The doctor wanted to give him painkillers. And I heard, almost like a voice, lesson 5, which is, “you’re never upset for the reason you think”. I went completely calm, and I said, ‘no, he’s fine, I don’t want him to have painkillers’. The doctor said, ‘that’s completely irresponsible’. We agreed a compromise. I took the painkillers home. I would have given them to him; it wasn’t a protest. But he didn’t need them. I had such clarity.
“I’ve had five or six glimpses – this was one of them – of going from feeling agitated to completely calm. Everyone gets these – walking in the countryside, or whatever. I tend to get mine through crises. It’s like my ego-strong mind can’t cope and it’s forced into submission.
“[That lesson] is such a powerful one. Because the reason we’re upset isn’t our wives, our husbands, etc, it’s because we believe we’re separated from God. That’s the only reason we’re ever upset.”
References and further information
- P Hawkins and R Shohet, Supervision in the Helping Professions (4th ed), Open University Press, 2012
- Byron Katie’s The Work: www.thework.com
- Foundation for Inner Peace (ed.), A Course in Miracles: Combined Volume. Foundation for Inner Peace, 2007
- R Shohet, ‘How green is your mind?’, in L Aspey, C Jackson and D Parker (eds), Holding the Hope: reviving psychological and spiritual agency in the face of climate change, PCCS Books, 2023
- R Shohet and J Shohet, In Love with Supervision: Creating transformative conversations, PCCS Books, 2020
- For more on Shohet’s work, including training in the Seven-Eyed model, visit: www.cstdlondon.co.uk