Supervising Peer Specialists

Nobody told me when I started out as a peer specialist that I was going to need supervision more than I needed training. I thought I was ready. I had lived experience, I had survived things, and I walked in the hospital convinced that was enough. It wasn't. Arrogant and brash, I overstepped my role within days, got into a confrontation with a physician who was completely in the right, and had my badge pulled on campus while I stood there genuinely believing I was the wronged party.

My supervisor went to the administrator and advocated for me so that I could stay. She spent professional capital on someone who really hadn't earned another chance. And when it was over she walked me out to the parking lot and said something I wasn't expecting. She told me she could see what I was capable of becoming, and she meant it, and I knew she meant it. That gave me hope.

Peer support workers come into this field with real experience. Shrugging my shoulders. All of life is experience and all experience is real. What supervisors need to appreciate is that our particular experience also comes with blind spots, unresolved scars, and certainty about our own insight that can do serious damage without someone willing to be honest about what they're seeing.

A peer specialist who isn't being supervised well isn't just an employee who might underperform but a person whose unresolved pain is now in the room with someone else's unresolved pain, and nobody is watching the door. The risk isn't abstract. It's the worker who burns out in eighteen months because nobody helped them understand where their story ends and the person they're serving begins. It's the one who crosses a boundary they didn't even see coming because their scars were never properly dealt with in supervision. It's the one who leaves the field entirely because they made a mistake and their supervisor responded with a policy manual instead of a human being.

Good supervision in peer support is not about preventing every mistake. My supervisor wasn't so close to me that I didn't go in there and make a complete mess of things. What she had was something more than proximity which was the ability to look at a person who had just demonstrated genuinely poor judgment and still see something worth fighting for. She held me accountable, she was honest with me about what I'd done, and she didn't pretend it hadn't happened. But she didn't walk away either, and that choice, to stay and advocate for someone who hadn't earned it, is the reason I'm still in this work.

Supervisors in this field carry a responsibility to do no harm, and that responsibility doesn't stop at the people being served. It extends to the staff.

The peer specialist who came into this work already carrying scars, still figuring out who they are in this role, still learning the difference between their story and someone else's, that person is also under their care. 

My supervisor understood that. She could have walked away from me and called it a reasonable professional decision, and nobody would have blamed her. I wouldn't. Instead she stayed and advocated, and in doing so she honored the same ethic she was supposed to be modeling. Do no harm. Then do hope.

Ben