A Supervision Journey: From Listening to Liberation

Some thoughts about being a supervisor of others

By Lex E. Santí, LCSW, MFA

I didn’t become a therapist in the traditional way. In fact, my path into supervision, therapy, and healing work has been layered with contradiction, travel, disruption, and deep soul-searching. What has held steady, however, is one lifelong gift: I listen deeply.

That gift began in childhood, not as a profession but as a survival strategy. As the child of Cuban refugees, I grew up attuned to unspoken grief, generational trauma, and the clash of cultures and class inside our home. My parents' separation marked a turning point, but long before that, I had already learned to observe moods, interpret silences, and try to make sense of pain that didn’t belong to me but shaped me all the same.

Here we go...

When I was twelve, I had a devastating experience with a therapist—a betrayal of trust so sharp that it stayed buried for decades. That experience taught me about boundaries in the harshest way possible. Decades later, I filed a formal grievance. That act wasn’t just about justice—it was about reclaiming power. It seeded a core truth I carry into every supervision session: safety and trust are sacred. Without them, there is no supervision, no therapy—just performance.

In college, I found expression where it hadn’t existed before: poetry, writing, and student activism. I learned that writing could be a sword when there was no clear enemy and a balm when wounds had no name. Among my fraternity brothers, I was known as "the cleaner"—the one who could sit with you, no matter what storm you were in. I was honored by that trust. But it also blurred boundaries I hadn’t yet learned to enforce. That became my next lesson: empathy without discernment leads to burnout.

And then came Making Connections—a student-led social justice course that started at Cornell and spread to Hobart and William Smith that changed everything. In that program, we facilitated conversations about race, class, gender, and ability with unflinching honesty and structure. Every week, a different “ism” was taught, debated, and deconstructed. It was rigorous. It was volatile. It was beautiful. Over four years, I went from student to facilitator to trainer to curriculum designer. That program didn’t just shape my worldview—it gave me a model of supervision rooted in co-inquiry, historical consciousness, and collective healing. I’ve yet to find another structure quite like it.

After college, I threw myself into the world. Peace Corps. Language immersion. MFA programs. Nonprofits. Creative writing. Translation. International travel. I lived in castles. I worked in embassies. I ran businesses. I learned to sit in foreign cities without fear. All of it taught me that everyone, everywhere, is struggling to feel understood. In supervision, I hold that understanding close. I haven’t always been a therapist, but I’ve always been a human trying to translate experience into meaning. That is, in essence, supervision.

Graduate school brought me to Washington University in St. Louis, where I was honored to be a Needleman Scholar. I was deeply influenced by Mark Rank’s research on financial instability as a universal experience. I conducted research on predatory banking practices in North St. Louis, finding that communities were structurally denied financial resources. This tied back to the classism work I’d done at Cornell and reaffirmed my commitment to systemic analysis. But I was also disillusioned. I had already led seminars like the ones I was now paying to attend. That experience taught me a harder truth: our systems don’t always reward lived experience or prior leadership. That truth, too, has shaped how I now show up for supervisees who are already wise beyond their titles.

Returning to Ithaca felt like coming home to heal. I took a role in international student safety—crisis work on a global scale. For six years I helped students navigate disasters abroad. But eventually, I burned out. I realized I didn’t want to manage crises from a distance. I wanted to sit in the room with the person in pain. I joined Family and Children’s Service of Ithaca and began doing therapy full-time.

That’s where I began developing the Acceptance and Motivation Inquiry (AMI)—a tool to help therapists understand client resistance not as failure but as information. It emerged from patterns I saw again and again: clients have a type, a rhythm, a relationship to change. AMI helped me map those relational dynamics. Over time, I realized this tool wasn’t just helpful for clients—it was a mirror for supervisees too.

Alongside AMI, I dove deeper into mindfulness, Ram Dass, and karma yoga. I began to understand supervision not just as a clinical responsibility but as a spiritual practice. If I couldn’t sit in peace with myself, how could I hold space for someone else’s chaos? I cultivated stillness, studied my own resistance, and began integrating meditation and somatic awareness into how I approach both therapy and supervision.

Today, my supervision style is a union: of radical social justice, AMI inquiry, mindfulness, narrative therapy, and creative expression. I believe in the power of writing—prose, poetry, journaling—as a way to rewire the brain and reclaim story. I use narrative exercises in supervision to help therapists identify their countertransference, rewrite stuck narratives, and remember why they entered this work to begin with.

Lately, I’ve become especially interested in the brain-gut connection—how trauma, nutrition, movement, and inflammation impact mental health. As someone who has struggled with anxiety and panic, I’ve experienced how food, hydration, and gut regulation can shape emotional resilience. This, too, is part of how I supervise: holistically, with a body-based and systems-informed lens.

To supervise is to witness. To walk with someone as they deepen into their practice, and sometimes into their pain. My path has not been linear. It has been elliptical, spiral, layered. But through it all, I’ve never stopped listening.