SUPERVISION & TRAINING

Supervision

Supervision exists, officially, to keep practice safe. That is necessary and not sufficient. The best supervision also keeps the clinician alive to their work — curious, growing, still connected to why they came into this field at all.

How I supervise

I came into this field through lived experience first and professional formation second. Both matter equally to how I supervise — alongside the somatic, the playful, the political, and the deeply personal. These aren't separate ingredients. In practice they appear together.

Supervision with me holds the clinical material closely: the body in the room, the parts activated, what the countertransference is actually doing. And it holds the clinician too — who they are, what they're carrying, where they are in a career that has its own arc and meaning. Genograms, somatic attention, and parts-based approaches are standard parts of my supervision. I bring intersectionality into the room seriously and playfully, because both registers are necessary.

At some point in supervision I usually ask: is the work you are doing now work that the version of you who first wanted to do this would feel proud of at retirement? Not the ideal clinician of someone else's imagining. The one you actually set out to become. Everything else tends to organise around that question.

Who I supervise

The people I supervise span a wide range: trainees and heads of services, activists and radical lawyers, people with lived experience navigating professional systems, professionals navigating their own, and people who are both at once. The common thread is not credential or orientation but a willingness to think honestly — about the work, the system, and themselves.

I work with people in psychodynamic, trauma-informed, and neuroaffirmative frameworks. Supervision is available individually and in small groups, online and in person.

To enquire about supervision, please email jay@jaywatts.co.uk

Training

Training philosophy

The training I offer doesn't aim to settle things. It aims to open them — to leave people with better questions than they arrived with, more curious about their own practice, more alive to what the work is actually asking of them.

Most clinical training teaches either the political or the clinical — the structural critique of welfare systems and diagnostic harm, or the somatic, relational, embodied work of sitting with someone in acute distress. These are treated as separate disciplines for separate audiences. I don't think they are separable. And I don't teach them as though they are.

The training starts from the body — from what is actually happening in the room, in the nervous system, in the relationship — and works outward from there to the system that shaped it. It takes seriously that the person in front of you is carrying not just their own history but the weight of diagnostic cultures, welfare structures, and institutional failures that have told them, often repeatedly, that their suffering does not quite count. Understanding that — feeling it, not just knowing it — changes how you sit with someone.

Lived experience runs through everything I teach, with at least the same authority as two and a half decades of clinical practice. Neither is the footnote to the other. Playfulness and political rigour are not opposites in this work. They arrive together.

Current teaching

I teach on five doctoral and clinical training programmes, including psychoanalytic and psychodynamic courses, and deliver keynotes internationally. I am part of the national acute admissions improvement rollout, teaching embodied trauma-informed care to inpatient ward staff across the country. Training is available as half and full day workshops, keynotes and conference presentations, postgraduate teaching, and bespoke packages for NHS teams and services. Online and recorded modules are available for some topics.

Training territories

Complex trauma & technique

embodied trauma-informed care — relational psychodynamic psychotherapy — IFS for extreme emotional states — family & couples work for psychosis

Neuroaffirmation & lived experience neuroaffirmative therapy — CPTSD & neurodivergence — PDA & deadness — lived experience workforce training

Deconstructing deserving & undeserving victims

deconstructing BPD — epistemic injustice & diagnosis — changing toxic systems — healing iatrogenic harm in therapy

The neoliberal, welfare & the psychopolitical self

neoliberalism & mental health — welfare reform & mental health — psychocompulsion & clinical psychology — PIP letters for mental health professionals

Whose symptom is it anyway?

cross-cutting questions about attribution, ownership, and harm across complex PTSD, co-regulation, iatrogenic injury, polarisation, and suicidality

All training is available as bespoke packages tailored to your team, service, or programme. If this connects with the work you are trying to do, I would be glad to hear from you.

To discuss training and teaching, please email jay@jaywatts.co.uk