Review of Vital Practice by Dr Val Wosket and Ruth Rowles

Vital Practice provides a welcome addition to the growing number of practical supervision texts that have been published over the last few years. It is written by a homeopath, Sheila Ryan, and is addressed primarily to homeopathic practitioners. Yet the book draws comprehensively on the theory and practice of counselling supervision and, as such, provides a refreshing cross-disciplinary text that is equally relevant to counsellors and psychotherapists.

Each chapter tells a lively story, developed from the author's own practice, illustrating and exploring pertinent issues about listening, discerning, understanding and revisioning. The book concludes with the provision of a ‘Vital Kit’ to help supervisors address aspects of the working relationship in different contexts.

The book has considerable strengths and also, we thought, some stylistic weaknesses. We found the text vibrant, creative and vivid. As counselling supervisors we found it stimulating to explore the supervisory process from a new angle where parallels between homeopathic and counselling ways or working are developed. For instance, Sheila Ryan's description of ‘fusing’ with the client or supervisee to ‘prove’ the nature of the issue linked closely for us with the feeling of empathy that importantly helps us to perceive something of the client's or supervisee's experience.

The book is likely to appeal to all therapists and their supervisors who hold the notion of healing relationships as central to their way of working. This notion is summed up by Sheila Ryan's assertion that ‘the quality of a healing relationship is characterized by getting alongside and by minimum intervention’ and that a homeopathic way of supervising therefore centres on the question ‘what is the minimum intervention that gets alongside the practitioner in supervision to restore them to autonomy and relatedness?’ This clearly parallels the way that the homeopath seeks a remedy that so matches the patient's condition that a minimum dose can trigger restoration of health.

The style of the book is a mixture of the discursive and the experiential. This is both refreshing and in places somewhat disconcerting — particularly where, on occasion, the author's way of writing lapses into the abrupt and disjointed. For instance in the introductory chapter we found it rather jarred to have a passage on story telling and active listening interrupted by an invitation to do a breathing and progressive relaxation exercise. It might have provided a smoother narrative if exercises like these had been confined to the ends of chapters.

Of course style is a personal preference and this book will appeal to readers who like to absorb their knowledge in bite-sized chunks and pithy aphorisms. Our own preference, and one that perhaps parallels our understanding and experience of supervision, is for a more reflective style of writing that leads to a gradual unfolding and deepening of the material. Thus phrases like ‘clinical supervision is the art of appreciative or compassionate inquiry’ intrigued us and left us wishing to hear more, only to be disappointed as the author immediately moved on to other topics without expanding further. On the whole we were left engaged and stimulated and also sometimes wanting a more rounded experience. In summary, the book convincingly signals the potential for creative cross-fertilization between supervisory practice in counselling and homeopathy and as such we would recommend it to supervisors of either (or both) disciplines.

Review by:

Dr Val Wosket:
Senior Lecturer (part time) at York St. John College,
BACP Accredited Supervisor

And

Ruth Rowles:
BACP accredited Counsellor,
Counselling Supervisor,
Homeopathic patient.

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