The Deep Mind Parallel Realities Model: One Self, Five Roles
In a recent masterclass for supervisors, one participant said something I haven't stopped thinking about: "I never thought about how important it is to discuss my experience of the supervision directly, with my supervisor."
It sounds simple. It is also one of the hardest things to do in any professional relationship, and it sits at the heart of what I call the Deep Mind Parallel Realities Model.
Reflection is not the same as reflexivity
The Psychology Board of Australia's updated professional competencies came into effect on 1 December 2025. Competency 3 places greater emphasis on professional reflexivity, purposeful and deliberate practice, and self-care.
The way I explain the difference is this.
Reflection asks: what happened?
Reflexivity asks: what part did I play in it? What did my values, beliefs, history and position bring into the room, and what effect did that have on the other person?
Both matter. But reflexivity is the harder one, because it asks us to look at ourselves and not only at the event. It applies just as much in supervision as it does in the therapy room.
If I want to help a supervisee develop this capacity, I need to have developed it in myself first. That is often where the difficulty begins.
One self, five roles
The central idea of the model is that the Self exists in every role we occupy, at different times and in different spaces and places. I call this the Time/Space Continuum.
You are the therapist in the room. You may also be the client in your own therapy. You may be the supervisee bringing your work to someone else, and the supervisor listening to someone else's. And underneath all of those roles you are an individual, with an inner world, values, beliefs and an attachment history.
Same self. Five roles.
Your core beliefs, and your deeper unconscious thoughts, feelings and drives, don't switch off when you change chairs. They travel with you.
That is why the model places the therapy relationship and the supervisory relationship side by side. The therapist walks into supervision carrying their client, and carrying themselves. The supervisor brings a self into that room too.
The principle I keep returning to is simple: the relationship I have with myself sets the tone for every other relationship I am in.
When one room echoes another
Because the same self moves through every room, patterns can echo from one to the other. A dynamic that plays out between a therapist and a client can sometimes appear again between that therapist and their supervisor. This is known as parallel process.
The research on parallel process is encouraging but still debated, so I treat it as something to explore, not something to assume. An echo may be there, and it still needs to be explored rather than presumed.
Either way, a supervisor is holding more than one reality at a time: the client's, the supervisee's, their own, and the relationship between them.
What the supervisor needs to bring
For a supervisee to say the things that are hardest to say, such as a fear of being incompetent, a strong reaction to one particular client, or a feeling about the supervisor themselves, the supervisor needs to have done their own work first.
That means tolerating a supervisee's struggle without rushing in with answers. It means helping them separate what comes from their own history from what the client has stirred in them, which is the heart of working with countertransference. It means using self-disclosure purposefully, and giving difficult feedback clearly and with care.
A supervisor who has built this capacity can also begin to sense the feelings that are never said out loud, and stay with them without becoming reactive, defensive or dismissive.
The eight step pathway of self-reflection
I developed an eight step pathway as an adjunct to the model, and I use it in supervisor training to build both self-reflection and interpersonal relational skills.
Identify your own feelings, using "I" statements and feeling words.
Identify core beliefs by listening intuitively through the content.
Explore and probe with Socratic questioning.
Link the here and now to the past.
Differentiate the supervisee's own personal issues from feelings arising from the client's projections.
Normalise and validate the supervisee's need for their own therapy, to work with their personal triggers.
Contain the supervisee's projections, onto clients or onto you, without becoming reactive, defensive or dismissive.
Give direct, clear and necessary feedback, calmly and compassionately.
This pathway is my own proposed method. It supports reflective and reflexive practice, but its steps are not themselves Psychology Board competencies, and a supervisor still needs to attend to the full range of professional competencies, the supervisee's scope of practice and the clinical and cultural context.
Supervision can help build this capacity, but it is not the only place it grows. Personal therapy, experience and honest reflective practice all matter too.
My hope is that as more supervisor training makes room for this kind of work, there will be more consistency and depth across the profession, and that ongoing growth will feel normal rather than threatening, which could ease some of the anxiety so many interns carry.
Deep Mind Reflection
Which of your five roles do you give the least attention to, and what might that be costing the others?
If you would like to build this kind of reflective capacity alongside other psychologists, noticing what is yours, what is your client's and what lives between you, it is at the heart of the Mastery Journey.
Further reading
Tracey, T. J. G., Bludworth, J., & Glidden-Tracey, C. E. (2012). Are there parallel processes in psychotherapy supervision? An empirical examination. Psychotherapy, 49(3), 330-343.
Zetzer, H. A., et al. (2020). Parallel process in psychodynamic supervision: The supervisor's perspective. Psychotherapy, 57(2), 252-262.
