Taking care of caregivers
Working in the field of perinatal health, and in particular alongside women, couples and families who have experienced perinatal bereavement, means daily exposure to complex stories, laden with grief and vulnerability, but also with resources and, when well identified, tremendous opportunities for resilience.
To do this work, it is critically important to have the right skills, but training alone is often not enough: it is necessary to learn how to inhabit the helping relationship, preventing emotional burden from bringing with it relational difficulties, rigidity, automatisms or other defensive modes.
In the CiaoLapo team, continuous updating, supervision and teamwork have always been part of the work of professionals, facilitators and even volunteers: reflecting on one’s own way of being in relationship with bereaved parents is not optional, but part of the responsibility associated with caring. Our facilitators of the self-help groups have a monthly interview meeting every month, as do the early support workers, who also have a monthly supervision meeting on complex cases.
Continuing education on perinatal bereavement, subsequent pregnancies, and parenting
In supporting perinatal bereavement and subsequent pregnancies, getting up to speed means above all:
- call into question much of the information about bereavement and pregnancy that is still taught in academic and nonacademic courses and that is part of an archaic, out-of-date and often out-of-focus view of perinatality and perinatal grief;
- Integrate new evidence with our senior therapists’ 20 years of experience in the field;
- Recognize and avoid simplifications and automatisms, which are still widespread in the perinatal area;
- Maintain a lively, critical, and flexible outlook on one’s own work, limitations, and resources
In highly emotional contexts, such as those we go through daily in CiaoLapo, the main risk we find in professionals is not “not knowing enough,” but knowing superficially: theory and protocols are important to know, but they should never be applied in a rigid and schematic way, without taking into account the complexity and importance of the relationship.
Our trainings include face-to-face didactic and theory modules, interactive modules, and numerous hours of group work on complex cases.Knowledge, coupled with the ability to look at complexity in an integrated way, are two indispensable tools for accompanying the bereaved through the perinatal pathways.
Intervision and supervision as spaces of thought and protection
Intervision and supervision moments are spaces for shared thinking, where we take the time to all look together at the work we are doing with a person, a couple, and a family, from enough distance to make it clearer, safer, more sustainable.
For those working with trauma, grief and perinatal care, intervision and supervision are also forms of protection:
- for families, who are spared unwittingly invasive or out-of-focus interventions;
- For operators, who can share emotional overload, contain professional loneliness, protect themselves from the risk of burn-out
- The helping relationship, which can thus remain within ethical and respectful boundaries
Some jobs, especially those where relationships come into play, are not done alone: sharing with colleagues is a valuable resource that has positive repercussions in daily professional life.
The importance of intervisits in multidisciplinary teams
Work in perinatal health is, by its very nature, multidisciplinary. Psychologists, psychotherapists, counselors, midwives, physicians and other figures from the educational or social area ,often find themselves working around the same families, bringing different looks, skills and languages.
Team interviews represent a key space for bringing these knowledges into dialogue, avoiding fragmentation and building a shared vision of caregiving. It is not just about operational coordination, but a real work of integration: integrating points of view, assumptions, limitations and possibilities of each discipline. In complex contexts such as perinatal bereavement, intervision helps reduce the risk of misaligned, overlapping, or inconsistent interventions, and supports care that is more respectful, ongoing, and understandable to families.
Supervision for psychologists and psychotherapists: pausing in complexity
For psychologists and psychotherapists, supervision is a good practice, a responsibility and a resource.
Working with perinatal trauma exposes one to dynamics of strong emotional involvement, deep personal resonances and areas of uncertainty that cannot be dealt with in solitude. Supervision allows one to interrogate one’s clinical setup, intervention choices, and the boundaries of the therapeutic relationship, and to do so in a protected, competent, nonjudgmental space. It is an essential tool for preventing reparative drifts, unconscious acts or theoretical rigidities that, over time, can compromise the quality of the work and the well-being of the practitioner.
Individual supervision: a space dedicated to singularity
Individual supervision provides a space for deep reflection on one’s way of working, personal resonances and specific clinical situations encountered.
It is particularly indicated when experiences of fatigue, confusion, blockage emerge or when going through delicate professional transitions.
In this setting it is possible to work purposefully on the relationship with families, boundaries, emotions aroused by the work, and how one’s personal history comes into play. Individual supervision supports the possibility of remaining present, competent and human, without overloading oneself.
Group supervision: thinking together, supporting together
Group supervision provides a valuable space for shared thinking.
Listening to the questions and reflections of other practitioners, comparing cases and situations, and recognizing common difficulties allows one to break out of professional loneliness and build a sense of belonging to a community of practice.
In working with perinatal bereavement, group supervision fosters normalization of labors, mutual enrichment and the opportunity to learn from each other’s experience as well. It is a space that supports not only competence but also the emotional well-being of practitioners, reducing the risk of isolation and burn-out.
A responsibility to families, and a responsibility to us
Those who turn to CiaoLapo often entrust operators with a very fragile part of their story.
This implies responsibility not only for technical skills, but also:
- the ability to stand in the not knowing
- The way we resonate emotionally to the stories we hear
- our own experiences of loss, parenting and caregiving that we need to be able to place in a safe zone.
Updating, supervision and intervision allow us to keep the planes as distinct as possible: what belongs to the other’s story and what is ours. Not to become neutral, but to remain reliably present, without substituting for the other, who has the duty and the right to walk in his or her story in his or her own shoes.
A culture of care that includes caregivers
CiaoLapo was born and grows around a culture of care that affects not only families, but also those who work alongside them.
Promoting continuing education, supervision and intervision means recognizing that caring is complex work that requires time, reflection and support. It is within this framework that CiaoLapo’s proposed new 2026 supervision pathways and packages for member practitioners fit: an act of responsibility and mutual care for the caring community.
For information on the schedule of supervision meetings: info@ciaolapo.it
