The Mentoring Relationship: Co-creating Personal and Professional Growth

Abstract

The mentoring relationship is characterized by mutual co-occurring growth interacting with and within diverse sociocultural systems of influence. This interplay affords wide ranging opportunity for relational and intersubjective growth processes to emerge which through awareness, mentors psychotherapist development and augments formal therapist training programs. Insight into, and experience of, such processes is guided by hermeneutical meaning-making methods that guide experience-near interactions where two separate subjectivities simultaneously co-inhabit and co-create a unified field of experience and expression. Understanding relational/intersubjective dynamics helps to build a safe mentoring container generating co-creative growth for both mentor and mentee that cultivates empathy, balances self disclosure, facilitates transference/countertransference resolution, and fosters a skillful use-of-self in treatment processes. Several examples and a mentoring vignette highlight the unique intrapsychic, interpersonal, and sociocultural mentoring interplays that co-create personal and professional growth and contribute to psychotherapists’ development.