Attachment-Informed Leadership: Cultivating Secure Supervision
Part of our Book Study+ Series
📕 Purchase the book The Power of Attachment, by Diane Poole Heller,
🎓 Earn 16 NBCC/16 APT non-contact CE hours by completing this self-paced home study.
🤓 Participants purchase and read the entire book and complete self reflecting writing prompts in lieu of an exam
☀️ Additional supplemental material is included to help the book come alive
The Supervision Attachment Link
Attachment patterns do not disappear when we step into professional roles. They come with us into play therapy supervision, talk therapy supervision, mentorship, leadership, and evaluative relationships.
This book-based training centers on The Power of Attachment, by Diane Poole Heller, which clearly explains secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment styles through a trauma-informed, nervous system lens.
Participants will build a shared understanding of how attachment strategies form, how they show up under stress, and how earned secure attachment develops over time. From there, we will extend these concepts into supervision and therapeutic practice for both play therapy and talk therapy.
Supervision often functions as an attachment relationship, with the supervisor serving as a secure base. When frustration, urgency, or reactivity bubbles up, it may reflect not only the supervisor’s own attachment tendencies, but also the supervisee’s attachment style being activated in the relationship.
Over time, these patterns can ripple outward, influencing how supervisees experience safety, playfulness, and regulation with their own clients. This training invites a thoughtful, relational exploration of those patterns across generations of care.
This is for supervisors of play therapy and talk therapy alike.
How Can This Training Help YOU?
This training offers space to slow down, reflect, and understand supervision as a living relational system.
Through guided discussion of The Power of Attachment, reflective writing, and experiential, creative exercises, you will be invited to:
🌿 Deepen your understanding of secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment styles and how they operate in talk therapy and play therapy based supervision.
🌿 Explore your role as a supervisor or mentor as a secure base, supporting growth, curiosity, and playfulness while holding appropriate structure and boundaries.
🌿 Notice moments of frustration, urgency, or disconnection in supervision as potential attachment signals, rather than personal or professional failures.
🌿 Reflect on how a supervisee’s attachment style may influence not only the supervisory relationship,
but also their therapeutic relationships with play therapy and talk therapy clients.
This training is designed to feel both grounding and enlivening. It honors complexity while creating space for insight, compassion, and renewed relational clarity. Participants can be supervisors of talk therapy or play therapy. We will create space for both.
Are You a Supervisor of Talk Therapy or Play Therapy?
Participants may choose the path that best reflects their supervisory work.
Supervisors of play therapists will engage with reflective prompts that explore the dynamics of the playroom relationship, including the attachment patterns between child and play therapist, as well as the relationship between therapist and supervisor.
Supervisors of talk therapists will receive separate reflective prompts designed to explore attachment dynamics within adult therapy relationships and the supervisory process.
Feedback from past participants consistently highlights the reflective writing prompts as significantly more meaningful and clinically relevant than a traditional exam.
Learning Objectives
Participants will be able to:
🍎 Describe the core characteristics of secure, avoidant, ambivalent, and disorganized attachment and how these patterns may appear within the supervisory relationship for both play therapists and talk therapists.
🍎 Identify ways a supervisor’s attachment style may influence a supervisee’s emotional regulation, clinical confidence, and willingness to bring vulnerability into supervision and clinical discussion.
🍎 Analyze how relational patterns within supervision may influence the work that unfolds in both the play therapy room and the talk therapy room.
🍎 Recognize signs of attachment activation within supervision, including push–pull dynamics, fear of evaluation, rapid shifts in confidence, and relational distancing.
🍎 Apply attachment-informed supervisory strategies to help therapists process moments of dysregulation, rupture, and repair that arise in either the play therapy room or the talk therapy room.
🍎 Evaluate how supervisory presence and relational leadership may contribute to the development of psychological safety, reflective capacity, and secure therapeutic practice for both play therapists and talk therapists.
Who is This Course Designed For?
☀️ Supervisors (or soon to be) of talk therapy based therapists
☀️ Supervisors (or soon to be) of play therapists
☀️ Open to all state-licensed clinical supervisors seeking CE hours (please confirm with your state board whether NBCC credits are accepted)