Ayesha

An alumni of the Moving Forward Family Services (MFFS) internship program, Ayesha is excited for the opportunity to offer supervision to her fellow colleagues at MFFS after over 5 years of clinical practice and returning from London, U.K. for doctoral studies.

Ayesha is an integrative therapist who draws on a number of counselling theories and practice to work uniquely with each individual to best support their needs. Within an integrative therapeutic approach she takes a humanistic attitude to each person or group she works with and creatively draws on the models of: Person-Centered Therapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Cognitive Analytic Therapy and Psychodynamic Therapy. Additionally, Ayesha works from a holistic, attachment-based and trauma-informed perspective which is also the basis of her current research project.

Ayesha believes that an empowered approach to helping others brings about the best outcome. Her commitment and consistency in working therapeutically with clients to help them understand their issues, explore what they can do to resolve them and move forward with long-lasting changes in their lives also informs her personal approach to supervision.

As a supervisor, Ayesha’s primary goal is to improve the quality of work her supervisees are undertaking with their clients. Counselling is a very demanding profession, practicing as a counsellor can drain inner resources, consume energies and raise questions needed to explore. Ayesha strives to provide a professionally supportive and appropriately challenging environment for supervisees to get the most out of the sessions for themselves and their clients. Quality supervision should provide a safe space for the therapist to step back and look at the therapeutic relationship between them and their client. For this to happen, there needs to be solid supervisory relationship where the therapist feels supported, safe and is able to take risks. Overall, supervision should be a stimulating, motivational process in which challenge and reflection are very much a part.

Supervision should also ensure a duty of care to the supervisee and their clients, ensuring the maintenance of ethical and legal practice, as well as the continued professional development of the supervisee. Ayesha’s aim as a supervisor is to promote the competence and creativity of her supervisees in a non-judgmental way, to enable the supervisee to grow and develop into the most effective therapist they can be, to enable them to work skilfully and ethically with their clients and importantly to develop their own therapeutic style.

Additionally, Ayesha believes in the importance of a reciprocal relationship in supervision where supervision functions as a supportive, instructive, contextual and transformative space for both supervisor and practitioner reflect upon. As such, she places great value in the opportunity to equally learn from her supervisees.

Ayesha also acknowledges an attendance to issues of diversity, equality and the wider social context of our work. Her multi-cultural understandings are shaped by endeavouring the immersive experience of culture through her many travels across the globe.

Working primarily remotely, Ayesha is currently also a part of the Cognitive Analytic Therapy team at a National Health Service in London, U.K. as well as providing services to various charities as a volunteer Trainee Counselling Psychologist.