Clinical Supervision, Training, and Consultation

Specialised supervision and training in family therapy, eating disorders, and Open Dialogue

Lisa specialises in clinical supervision, training, and consultation for mental health professionals. She is committed to supporting clinicians to continue to develop and deepen their practice across their career-span. Her supervision is informed by dialogical practices which includes creating a safe space for reflective practice that integrates the role of self into the supervision. Lisa is a Board-Approved supervisor and supervises Clinical Psychology Registrars as part of their registration program. She is experienced in providing both individual and group supervision.

Supervision is responsive to the individual needs of the clinician and can focus on:

  • FBT and other family therapy approaches for young people with eating disorders

  • Dialogical practices/Open Dialogue

  • Multi-Family Therapy for eating disorders

  • Systemic Family Therapy and Attachment-Based Family Therapy

  • Clinical psychologist registrar approval

  • Mental health teams

  • Group therapy facilitation

  • Moving through ‘stuckness’ in therapy

Clinical Supervision

Training and
Service Consultation

Lisa is an experienced trainer in Family-Based Treatment (FBT) for eating disorders, Open Dialogue/dialogical reflective practices, and Multi-Family Therapy. She has provided training for a variety of community-based mental health teams, hospital teams, mental health clinicians and eating disorder clinicians. Lisa has provided service consultation to services developing dialogical approaches, Multi-Family Therapy, eating disorder Day Programs, and other family therapy approaches. Training and/or consultation can support development of these areas for teams and be tailored to a service’s specific needs. 

About Me

Lisa Dawson (B.A., Grad. Dip. Psych, DClin. Psych, PhD) is a Senior Clinical Psychologist, Family Therapist, and researcher who has been working with young people with eating disorders and their families for over a decade. In 2014 she completed her PhD and Doctorate of Clinical Psychology at The University of Sydney. She is currently the Team Leader of the Eating Disorder Intensive Program for Adolescents at Sydney Children’s Hospital, a specialist tertiary, state-wide eating disorder service created to provide treatment to young people for whom standard treatments have not been sufficient. Lisa’s clinical work has focused on responding to complexity in families experiencing eating disorders, and considering how to respond when families experience ‘stuckness’ in treatment.

Lisa is trained as an Open Dialogue trainer and has completed three years of training in Dialogical practice by Finnish experts in Open Dialogue. Lisa’s clinical work and supervision emphasises the values of dialogical practice where openness, social inclusion, and genuine user and family involvement in decision making is emphasised.

Lisa’s research has focused on Open Dialogue, family-based approaches for eating disorders, and recovery from anorexia nervosa.

She is a Board Approved Supervisor and has provided supervision and training for clinicians in family therapy, Multi-Family Therapy, and Open Dialogue as well as teaching and training for students from the University of Sydney, UNSW, and UTS, where she is an Adjunct Associate Professor.