Badass Therapists Building Practices That Thrive

159 Help Your Supervisees When Their Clients Disappear

• Dr. Kate Walker Ph.D., LPC/LMFT Supervisor • Season 3 • Episode 159

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What happens when clients don’t come back after the first or second session?

For supervisors, this pattern is more than a numbers problem. It’s a mirror. High early drop-off often reflects gaps in a supervisee’s session structure, boundaries, or clinical stance that can (and should) be coached, not shamed. When supervision reframes “ghosting” as actionable data, associates gain clarity, confidence, and practical tools to keep clients engaged.

The first trap is interrogation disguised as concern. Firing off questions (“What did you do? Why didn’t they rebook?”) breeds defensiveness and shuts down learning. A better path starts person-centered: slow the pace, reflect on what you’re noticing, and observe the process through short role-plays. That’s where parallel process and isomorphism surface, manifesting in over-seriousness that constricts warmth, humor that avoids depth, or family-of-origin patterns that make hard moments feel unsafe. Name the pattern, then coach the skill.

Sometimes the fix isn’t deep. Rather, it’s logistical. Clock placement, session endings, and professional presence matter more than new clinicians realize. Starting late, eating during sessions, or letting intakes feel like interrogations can push conscientious clients to quietly disengage. Supervisors can normalize structure as care: clear openings, visible time cues, and intentional closures that protect the client’s hour.

Evaluation turns insight into growth. Anchoring remediation in concrete assessments (e.g., SPAI for Level 1 skills, CCSR for Level 2) keeps plans specific and fair. Define target behaviors, practice them on camera or in role-play, and document small wins at each supervision. When supervisors coach like future colleagues (not bosses), associates learn to convert first sessions into second, third, and a full course of meaningful work.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • How to replace rapid-fire questioning with person-centered supervision that reduces defensiveness.
  • Where parallel process and isomorphism show up in early sessions—and how to coach around them.
  • Simple environment and structure fixes (clock, openings/closures, intake framing) that improve retention.
  • How to use SPAI/CCSR-anchored remediation so growth plans are objective, specific, and doable.

Ready to turn ghosting into growth? Subscribe for more practical playbooks on supervision, ethics, and building robust clinical systems that help clients stay and clinicians thrive.

If you’re ready to lead with confidence, join the 2026 Supervisor Course waitlist for early access to bonus tools, templates, and fast-track grading. Strengthen your systems today with the free Supervision Onboarding Checklist, and get ongoing CEUs and live coaching inside the Step It Up Membership. You’re not just building a practice, you’re building a legacy.

Get your step by step guide to private practice. Because you are too important to lose to not knowing the rules, going broke, burning out, and giving up. #counselorsdontquit.

SPEAKER_00:

You may think, oh, this is great. My client and I have such great rapport. Well, that client may be thinking, gosh, you know, I I was kind of hoping this time was just for me, but they're too nice to say anything. And so what do nice people do when they don't want to confront you? Oh, they ghost you.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to the MS Therapist, building practices online. When it's all about working smart, not hard. And if you're a host, Dr.

SPEAKER_00:

Kleast or part of a conference is ever thought about supervising, but worried you wouldn't know what to say when things get tough, like when a supervisee's client just doesn't come back. In this episode, we'll talk through how to handle that moment, what to say, what not to say, and how to turn it into a powerful learning opportunity. And if you're interested in starting to explore what supervision could look like for you in 2026, join the Early Bird wait list for my brand new supervisor courses at KateWalkerTraining.com slash earlybird. Now let's get to work. Welcome to your Tuesday coaching. Today I'm going to take you through the questions to ask your associates when their clients don't come back. And when I talk about clients not coming back, I'm not going to teach you today about how to close a practice or how to, you know, deal with clients in critical incidents, you know, when things happen, something devastating happens to the client. I'm talking about situations where you have a supervisee and you notice they just keep having these one sessions with people or one in twos or one, twos and threes, and that's it. And let me preface that by saying I'm very solution focused. And I advocate for that. If you have been in any of my sessions or in any of my workshops about a cash-based practice, I'm going to teach you about how to do a solution-focused practice. It's very, very specific for folks who want to be cash-based who aren't able to, you know, contact the insurance company and just get 20 sessions approved and have that. It's almost a luxury to feel like, oh my gosh, thank goodness I've got these 20 sessions approved. I can sort of settle back and we can dig into some things. With a cash-based practice, having that solution-focused mindset informed by a theory, that will affect your marketing, that will affect how you package your sessions, how you do everything. So that's that's my foundation. So when I come to you and I want to talk about, you know, questions to ask a supervisee, I'm speaking to you as a supervisor. Because, you know, obviously my first impulse would be like, oh my gosh, you're magnificent. You have created a climate with your clients that is so therapeutically wonderful that they're cured and they don't come back good on you. But that's not what we're talking about today. What we're talking about today is how to intervene with a supervisee when they don't have a skill set that would lend itself to really, really being, you know, that super helpful, miracle-working, home run hitting counselor who gets them all well and better in in only one or two sessions. Don't even know if that exists. So anyway, that's my foundation, and I'm sticking to it. So, number one, understand that asking lots of questions breeds defensiveness. And if you have ever done couple counseling, you know this, right? If you have couples and one partner just asks a lot of questions and they don't understand why their partner is defensive all the time, you know, that's one thing I learned. You know, my husband's in the military and he went overseas. And part of his job was to ask questions of folks who were not friendly. And one of the most important things he told me was, you know, don't ask a lot of questions. You know, build rapport. Ask about their shoes if you're going to ask a question. Where'd you get your shoes? I love that. You know, what I've got similar shoes, right? So building that rapport, well, that's what we teach supervisees. Well, the first session, it's hard to build rapport because all of our supervisees are working in sessions or in settings, at least they should be, where that first session is an intake where they are asking a lot of questions. So the first thing with this point is number one, own it. Don't go asking your supervisee in this moment a bunch of questions. They will get defensive. So when you finish this episode today, if this is number one, remember anytime you want to get to the bottom of something with your supervisee, the more questions you ask, the more likely it is that they will get defensive. So take that paradigm and then talk to your supervisee about well, how did you set up this first session? Did the agency that you work for tell your client, now hang on, this first session, they're gonna take you through a list of questions. It's gonna feel like an interview, right? If this is folks' first time in counseling and they're just expecting to come in and tell their story and get some good therapeutic information right off the bat, that's just not how it works most of the time. And so ask your supervisee number one if the person answering the phone and booking the appointments at the agency tells that client, hey, your counselor is going to just be asking you questions. There won't be a whole lot of therapeutic work done in that first session. And if they don't, have you, supervisor, taught your supervisee how to prep that client for a session full of questions, right? It's as simple as, hey, welcome to counseling. I'm Jane Smith. Just want to let you know this first session, I'm gonna be asking you a lot of questions. So that's not the way counseling always goes, but these first couple of sessions tend to be me just really getting into the information and asking questions so we can develop a great treatment plan for you. All right. So number one, questions. Number two, go person centered on your supervisee. Now, if you're strict person-centered and you are a Rogerian, this might mean you don't ask questions at all. You just reflect, you extend, you create meaning from that extension. Or it could be something like, Well, what kind of climate did you create with this client? Or tell me how well you feel like you understand the world of your client. Or if you did know what to do, what would you do? So stepping back, slowing down and getting into a person-centered stance with your supervisee can help them open up and process. And, you know, they're not getting defensive because they don't feel like they have to have the right answer for you. And at the same time, you can sort of settle back and watch them and see if they can process and come up with the answers on their own. Number three, invite them to role play. Ask them, may I sit with you and pretend to be the client? And you take me through a first session. We'll set up the camera or no camera and let's see. I want to see how you're going through that first session. And if it's okay with you, I'd like to give you some feedback. Number four, go deeper. So when you invite them to role play, you're gonna notice some things happening here. And yes, role plays they can be really fake. And you know, the supervisee may be putting on their best, you know, foot for you, and it's nothing like what they're doing in session. But what you will see are uh it's parallel processing here. So sometimes what happens, what we know in supervision is the way that the supervisee is with you, it parallels the way that they are with their client. So if you notice that they get super serious and you know, or they're they're trying to be, you know, very clinical, that may be how they're acting with their client. Or if they get in front of you and they act kind of goofy and silly and informal, that may be how they're acting with their client. Another piece of this is isomorphism. So isomorphism is this replication of uh the place in the family of origin. So, for example, if your supervisee is a youngest child and they're used to being kind of the clown in the family, or they're used to being, you know, the one that lightens things up when dad comes home mad. Maybe what you'll notice in the role play is they're not able to stay with a client in a hard conversation or a hard question or an answer to a hard question, or they giggle inappropriately, or they just move on, keep it moving. And yes, I get it. This is a first session, and they may be asking a lot of questions. But if you're role-playing a second or a third session and your supervisee is giving you that impression that they're not able to stay with tough things and they keep trying to lighten the mood, you may have something there that you can help them with in a genogram or just asking them, you know, put on your clinical hat for a second, supervisor, and ask them about some trauma maybe that they've dealt with in their family that can help them. Now, don't stay in that counselor role, right? If you find things are getting heavy and it looks like your supervisee needs to work through that, then of course, recommend that they get their own therapy. So you're looking for countertransference, isomorphism in your supervisee to help them along. Quick pause. If you're ready to lead with confidence in 2026, get on the wait list for my brand new supervisor course. Early birds get bonus tools and my favorite supervision templates. Head to KateWalkerTraining.com slash earlybird to join now. Now the logistics, it may be something number, this is number five. A question to ask is hey, where's the clock in your office? And I know that sounds super simple, but think about a supervisee. They're working in an agency or they're working in a practice where everything is back to back to back to back. So they greet their client and they're kind of like running late. I'm so sorry I'm running late. Come on in, have a seat. We'll get through this, I promise. Or, you know, they're ending a session and they just don't know how to end it. And it's five minutes beyond time or 10 minutes beyond time. And you ask them where the clock is, and your supervisee says, Well, there's not one in the room, or the clock is behind me, or well, I use my phone. You know, something as simple as helping them put a clock where they can see it and their client can see it, or helping them with like audible cues, like a little bell going off or music coming on so that they know it's time to wrap up the session, right? It may not be something super deep like countertransference and isomorphism and parallel processing things, issues. It may just be that they are too new and they feel too inexperienced to move the clock or ask to put a clock in a different location. And you can empower them to do that because we know what happens if we're running late or we're coming into session and we've got our lunch and we're still chewing or something like that. Our clients tend to caretake us, right? They're polite people or they're dealing with their own issues with boundaries and codependency, and they're gonna say things to us like, oh, no, no, no, it's fine. You eat your lunch, right? And if you're an inexperienced supervisee, you may say, Oh, great, hold on, I'm gonna eat my lunch, and they eat their lunch. And so the client who has now taken on this role of caretaker, right? They have now gotten an impression of your supervisee that maybe just it, they're too high maintenance, right? Like the super their clients, the client is coming in, they're greeting this supervisee who's running late, they haven't eaten their lunch, and now the client is thinking, oh gosh, I don't want them rushing to my session. I don't want them doing a session with me hungry. Oh my gosh, how do I make this a more comfortable space for my counselor? Yeah, no, that's not good. I'm gonna go find a new counselor and they don't come back. And even if you're listening to me as an experienced counselor, if you find that someone who maybe has been with you a long time stops coming and you notice you have been letting things slide, and maybe you have started coming to sessions late, or you're saying things like, Hey, you don't mind if I eat a sandwich in front of you? Or and you may think, Oh, this is great. My client and I have such great rapport. Well, that client may be thinking, gosh, you know, I was kind of hoping this time was just for me, but they're too nice to say anything. And so, what do nice people do when they don't want to confront you? Well, they ghost you. And that may be what's happening with your supervisee. So let's talk about interventions. So, one of the things I talk about in my book, the clinical supervision survival guide, and I'm very proud of this. We were able to get the SPAI republished. And the SPAI is in this book, and you can download it. There's a QR code on page 15, I think, that you can use to download every single form in this book. And the SPAI, it's a great level one instrument because you can go through and ask things like, Hey, have you ever been taught listening to verbal and nonverbal communication? Talk to me about that. Are you able to communicate empathy and genuineness? And the supervisee can answer things like, I have not been trained in this skill. I seldom use this skill. I would like additional information about this skill. So the SPAI is a wonderful level one instrument. And you can take your time with it. You can go over this instrument in the book over the course of a month with your supervisee and work through each question slowly. So they don't feel like, you know, they're just they have the dunce cap on because they were never taught or not adequately taught a particular skill that may be the reason some of their clients aren't coming back. If you have someone who's level two, right? So it's a supervisee who has, you know, 600 hours under their belt, and you're gonna think a little bit differently. So, first of all, you should have given them an enter or an assessment by their level two, right? But give them something like Gary Lamby's CCSR evaluation. That's asking questions on a scale from one to five, five meaning no problem, one meaning it's a problem. But it's a great way to really drill down on skills that are still lacking in a very objective way. So you can grade your supervisee and they can grade themselves. And at level two, it's a self-evaluation is highly recommended, right? Ask them to self-evaluate, you evaluate, and then you sit with them and have the conversation. Now, it might not go well if you have never evaluated them before and you want to go back and look at some episodes and trainings where I talk about the OER triad orientation evaluation and remediation. It's really, really important that you start evaluation early. Because if you go through all these steps and you're like, well, oh my gosh, you know, they definitely don't have the skills. I'm gonna just remediate them. If you install, if you deliver, instigate a remediation plan and you have never evaluated them before, you're gonna get some pushback, you're gonna get some shutting down, you're gonna get some relationship rupture that you may not be able to repair. So when you decide to do a remediation plan, focus on the elements you've already identified from your evaluations. When I see remediation plans go wrong, it's because supervisors are trying to remediate things that are very, very nebulous. Like if you just remediated, I'm giving you a remediation plan because your clients don't come back. I want you to read a book about first session, you know, or listen to Kate Walker's podcast about, you know, how to do a first session. Yeah, that's not gonna help, right? You have to drill down into the areas that they are lacking in. It may be something like they're not able to maintain eye contact when they're asking a question, or when they ask a question, if they're face-to-face, they are behind a desk and you know, they're just looking behind their computer. Or if they're in a camera and they're trying to deliver a first session, maybe they're not on camera at all, and all the client sees is the side of their face. So having very, very specific behaviors to remediate is key to maintaining the relationship, number one. And number two, having a successful remediation because that's what we're doing. We're growing these supervisees into our colleagues. So I hope this was helpful for you. If you're a supervisor and you are trying to help your supervisee who's feeling discouraged because their clients don't come back, or maybe you are the practice owner and you have looked at the rosters and you're like, uh-oh, I've noticed, you know, Jane's clients, they don't stay past the third session with her. This will give you tools so that you can start to intervene in a way that will help and not hurt the relationship. So have a great day. I'm Dr. Kate Walker and I will see you. If this gave you tools to handle tricky supervision moments, hit like, tap subscribe, and grab your free supervision onboarding checklists at KateWalkertraining.com slash checklist. Let's turn clients ghosting into clients growing. Thanks for listening to Badass Therapists Building Practices That Thrive. If you're ready to step into supervision and lead with confidence, the brand new 2026 supervisor courses are coming soon, and early birds get first access to bonus tools, templates, and fast track grading. Join the wait list now at KateWalker Training.comslash Earlybird. And if you want ongoing support, CEs, and live coaching, join our Step It Up membership community at KateWalkertraining.comslash step it up. You're not just building a practice, you're building a legacy. I'll see you next week. If you love today's episode, be sure to leave a five-star review. It helps other badass therapists find the show and build practices that thrive. Big thanks to Ridgely Walker for our original fun facts and podcast intro, and to Carl Guyanella for editing this episode and making us sound amazing. See you next week.