ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the issues raised by working in a particular context, a London-based voluntary sector counselling and therapy agency for lesbians and gay men, and in a particular way—"in-the-room" supervision with all discussion in front of the clients. Some of the issues that it raised, though initially context-specific, were in fact general issues about power, knowledge and disclosure within therapy and about the nature of the therapeutic and the supervisory relationship. The chapter discusses these issues from the angle of vision of the therapist, the supervisor, and what we surmise and were told about the experience of clients. Systemic therapy has increasingly considered issues of power and access to power within the therapeutic context, although it has tended to do so traditionally from a white, liberal, humanist, heterosexual position. The concept of therapeutic transparency is necessarily fraught in that it can be seen merely as a cherished postmodern therapist illusion rather than as a reality of systemic therapeutic practice.
