Bilingual Supervision

The Modern Therapist's Survival Guide with Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy

Bilingual Supervision

An interview with Adriana Rodriguez, LMFT, about how to support bilingual, bicultural therapists. Curt and Katie talk with Adriana about her experiences as a clinician as well as her perception of the systemic concerns that bilingual/bicultural therapists face. We also dig into common work challenges for these clinicians, the ethical and competency concerns monolingual supervisors face, and specific action steps for individuals and organizations to increase the quality of supervision and training for these clinicians.

It’s time to reimagine therapy and what it means to be a therapist. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy talk about how to approach the role of therapist in the modern age.

Interview with Adriana Rodriguez, LMFT (She/Her/Ella)

Adriana Rodriguez (She/Her/Ella) is a California Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, she obtained a BA in Sociology from Sacramento State and a MA in Counseling Psychology from the University of San Francisco. Adriana is a bilingual, queer, Salvadorian immigrant woman who is passionate about destigmatizing mental health. Adriana’s lens is intersectional, she is passionate about understanding how intergenerational trauma compounded with personal trauma impacts the mental health of first-generation adult children of immigrants and QTBIPOC. Adriana works with individuals and dyads in private practice in Sacramento, CA.

In this episode we talk about:

• Adriana’s story as a bilingual, bicultural therapist who immigrated from El Salvador
• Experiences of immigration, learning English, and trauma
• Criticism, bias, and navigating a different culture
• The impacts of uninformed supervision on bilingual or monolingual clients
• The requirement to build one’s own tools (i.e., translating documents)
• What is getting lost in translation – linguistic, cultural, etc.
• The importance of understanding context
• The power differential within the clinical supervision
• How do I level the playing field and share the power?
• Sharing knowledge (rather than seeing the supervisor as the only person who has knowledge in the relationship)
• Acknowledging and talking about differences
• Ethical concerns and supervisor responsibility
• The systemic challenges that bilingual clinicians can face in getting hired or promoted
• The need for greater diversity in leadership roles
• The idea of “first generation everything”
• The make up of the job for bilingual clinicians
• Survivor guilt – immigrating, learning English, education, and making it professionally
• The identification and desire to empower clients that remind you of yourself, your family members
• The exploitation of that desire by agencies who do not have sufficient bilingual clinicians
• How frequently bilingual clinicians have large caseloads and not sufficient compensation or matching or curating of caseloads
• The risk for burnout for these clinicians
• The complexity of translation
• The need for more research around the impacts of monolingual supervisors providing supervision on bilingual clinicians (as well as the impacts on monolingual or bilingual clients)
• The constant need for self-awareness and re-examining your bias
• Making sure to understand the differences between personality and culture
• Adjusting case conceptualization, looking at the triad of supervisor-clinician-client