Individual Supervision with Dee Donaldson
Clinical Psychologist | Former Police Officer | Board Approved Supervisor
Individual supervision for clinicians, practitioners, allied health workers, sector workers and other professionals who want a practical, applied understanding of coercive control they can use directly in their work.
This is not general clinical supervision. It is supervision focused on the patterns of coercive control and the impacts it has on victim-survivors:
how to recognise it,
how to formulate it without pathologising the person experiencing it, and
how to support clients to safely identify and track patterns of control and their effects over time using the Relationship Coercion Mapping Framework (RCMF™).
Specialist Expertise. Practical Application.
Who this supports
Supervision suits psychologists, mental health practitioners, social workers, allied health professionals, domestic and family violence sector workers, and any professionals in client-facing roles who want to strengthen their competence in recognising and responding to coercive control. You bring your professional context and existing skills. Supervision builds the coercive-control-specific capability to bring to your own professional context.
What supervision develops
Sessions are shaped around your caseload, individual cases and your questions, and concentrates on three areas of applied practice:
developing a conceptual understanding of coercive control as a pattern of behaviour driven by specific psychological schemas, rather than a series of isolated incidents or a feature of the a victim-survivor’s personality. Clear conceptual grounding changes what you notice in client sessions, how you formulate an understanding of your client’s experience, the risk factors to consider and the appropriateness of evidence-based treatment/support planning based on a thorough understanding of the impacts of coercive control.
recognising when a client is experiencing coercive control, including in presentations that are easily misunderstood and misdiagnosed as individual dysfunction when coercive control hasn’t been identified, and how to hold that possibility without leading the client or mislabelling their experience. This is particularly relevant to risk mitigation and the need to recognise escalation patterns developing in coercively controlling relationship dynamics.
safe tracking: how to support clients to record patterns of coercive control and their cumulative effects using the RCMF™ mapping method, in a way that keeps the client's safety first and keeps the client, not the clinician, in control of the process.
Formulation without pathologising
The approach is trauma-informed and non-pathologising throughout. Coercive control produces psychological, emotional and behavioural responses that are readily misread as symptoms of individual disorder. When those responses are treated as pathology, formulation can reinforce the very self-blame and self-doubt that the control has already established.
I hold a values-based personal commitment to this point: that clinicians should not, through well-intentioned but decontextualised formulation, compound the harms already carried by victim-survivors of coercive control or intimate partner abuse. Supervision gives you a structured way to formulate distress as a response to a pattern of control and harmful behaviour, consistent with the Power Threat Meaning Framework, rather than as evidence of internal deficit.
Why this matters now
In Australia and internationally, many regions are recognising the harms of coercive control as being a criminal offence. The media and social media platforms are using the language (often inaccurately) more and more. Clients are increasingly presenting with greater awareness of coercive control, however many are uncertain, confused and often don’t have the words to describe their experiences to those they are seeking support from. It’s essential that the professionals who are engaged in roles that offer support to victim-survivors familiarise themselves with the mechanisms and impacts of coercive control in relationship contexts as the risks involved in failing to do so are significant for the client presenting.
For psychologists practicing in Australia, the new Code of Conduct took effect on 1 December 2025. Alongside it, the Psychology Board of Australia has encouraged psychologists to build family, domestic and sexual violence knowledge into their continuing professional development, on the basis that understanding these dynamics is integral to practising safely and competently.
High-level supervision in coercive control is a highly appropriate option to meet that registration expectation with depth rather than general awareness.
Allied health and sector professionals face the same rising expectation from their own bodies and employers.
And that’s a very good thing for clients who are living inside coercive control dynamics.