Dayna Guido, MSW, LCSW

Ethics & Supervision

Dayna Guido, MSW, LCSW, ACSW, is a psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, ethical consultant, educator, trainer, and author based in Asheville, North Carolina. Her work focuses on helping mental health professionals develop the judgment, confidence, self-awareness, and relational skills needed to practice responsibly in complex clinical environments. She is particularly recognized for her work in clinical supervision, professional ethics, supervisory boundaries, clinician development, and experiential education.

Dayna approaches supervision as more than administrative oversight or licensure documentation. Her work treats supervision as an active professional relationship in which clinicians can examine their cases, emotional responses, use of authority, cultural assumptions, ethical concerns, and areas for continued growth. She supports provisionally licensed clinicians, independently licensed professionals, supervisors, agencies, and organizations through individual supervision, consultation, professional groups, and continuing education.

Her teaching style integrates professional standards with creativity, humor, reflective exercises, mindfulness, expressive activities, and realistic case situations. This approach helps participants move beyond memorizing ethics codes and toward understanding how ethical principles apply when responsibilities conflict, boundaries become unclear, technology changes the clinical relationship, or practitioners must make decisions without a perfectly straightforward answer.

Professional Background

Dayna earned her bachelor’s degree from Valparaiso University before completing her Master of Social Work at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Jane Addams College of Social Work in 1984. Her professional development was influenced by the family systems movement in Chicago, which contributed to her continuing interest in relationships, family functioning, communication, and the broader systems affecting client behavior.

Her early professional roles included residential care for adolescents, individual and group services, family therapy, clinical and administrative supervision, staff development, and the creation of clinical programs serving young people and families. She also contributed to the development of residential programs, foster-care services, clinical departments, and a shelter for runaway and homeless youth. These roles provided practical experience with the organizational, relational, and ethical challenges that arise when clinical work is delivered across multidisciplinary systems.

Dayna later established a private practice in Asheville and expanded her work across individual, couple, family, group, hospital, residential, and community-based settings. Her experience has included psychiatric assessment, parent education, work with children and adolescents in out-of-home placements, family therapy, and consultation with programs serving clients with complex behavioral and developmental needs. Her official professional profile identifies clinical supervision and ethical consultation as central areas of her current practice.

Through her clinical supervision and consultation practice, Dayna provides individual and group supervision, supervisor consultation groups, training, and organizational consultation. Her services address clinical practice, professional relationships, life and end-of-life transitions, creative expression, leadership, and ethical decision-making. She currently facilitates multiple recurring groups for clinicians and clinical supervisors while also offering remote supervision and consultation.

Dayna has also held graduate-level educational roles in social work and counseling. Her documented academic experience includes work with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work, Lenoir-Rhyne University, and East Tennessee State University. At UNC-Chapel Hill, her roles included Adjunct Clinical Instructor, field instructor, field advisor, and program director for the Mountain Area Distance Education MSW Program. These were previous academic roles and should not be presented as current employment without updated confirmation from the institutions.

Her current professional service includes membership on the NASW North Carolina Ethics Committee. The committee processes ethics complaints involving NASW members in North Carolina, provides peer ethics consultation, promotes professional education, and develops ethics resources for social workers. Dayna’s current listing on the committee provides a strong, verifiable connection between her educational work and continuing involvement in professional ethics.

Dayna is the author of Creative Ways to Learn Ethics: An Experiential Training Manual for Helping Professionals, published by Routledge, and co-author with Jim Guido of The Parental Tool Box: For Parents and Clinicians. The ethics manual uses experiential methods—including expressive arts, games, mindfulness exercises, film, journaling, and group activities—to help educators and professionals explore ethical conduct. The parenting book presents practical communication and relationship tools that can be used by parents independently or alongside a clinician.

Areas of Expertise

Clinical Supervision. Dayna’s work helps supervisors create a learning relationship that balances encouragement, accountability, professional development, client protection, and regulatory responsibility. She encourages supervisors to examine how power, feedback, documentation, evaluation, cultural context, emotional reactions, and professional boundaries affect the supervisory process. Her approach is relevant to new supervisors as well as experienced professionals seeking consultation on challenging cases or supervisory relationships.

Ethical Decision-Making. Ethical practice often requires more than locating a rule in a professional code. Clinicians may encounter competing responsibilities involving confidentiality, informed consent, client safety, professional competence, organizational policy, cultural considerations, technology, or legal obligations. Dayna’s training uses discussion, reflection, and experiential learning to help practitioners slow down, evaluate relevant standards, seek consultation, and document a defensible decision-making process. Clinical Events’ guide to ethics, boundaries, confidentiality, and professional competence provides related context for clinicians navigating these responsibilities.

Professional and Supervisory Boundaries. Dayna addresses how boundaries operate in therapy, supervision, consultation, education, and workplace relationships. Supervisors must remain approachable without turning the supervisory relationship into friendship, personal therapy, or an arrangement that obscures evaluation and accountability. Her teaching examines boundary drift, dual-role concerns, technology, remote supervision, self-disclosure, favoritism, cultural differences, and the distinction between supportive supervision and overinvolvement. Clinicians can explore these issues further through Clinical Events’ resource on professional boundaries for therapists.

Ethical Courage and Professional Accountability. Dayna’s educational work encourages professionals to address ethical problems directly rather than avoiding difficult conversations or relying on organizational habit. Ethical courage may involve asking for consultation, acknowledging a mistake, challenging an unsafe policy, clarifying a boundary, documenting a concern, or responding appropriately when a colleague or supervisor makes an unethical request. Her work helps clinicians connect personal integrity with formal professional responsibility.

Trauma-Informed Supervision. Supervision involving trauma-focused clinical work requires attention to the effects that repeated exposure to client distress can have on practitioners. Dayna’s background supports consideration of emotional safety, reflective practice, countertransference, secondary traumatic stress, clinician regulation, and the need for consultation. A trauma-informed supervisor can provide accountability without using humiliation, intimidation, or unnecessary authority, while still addressing performance concerns and protecting clients. Clinical Events’ overview of trauma therapy and clinician well-being offers complementary guidance.

Mindfulness, Creativity, and Experiential Learning. Dayna integrates mindfulness, expressive arts, journaling, games, film, and creative exercises into ethics and professional education. These methods allow participants to examine how values, emotions, physical responses, assumptions, and interpersonal patterns influence professional decisions. The purpose is not to replace ethical standards with intuition, but to help clinicians become more aware of the internal processes affecting how they interpret and respond to challenging situations. Clinical Events’ article on integrating mindfulness into trauma therapy provides related discussion of pacing, presence, grounding, and clinical responsibility.

Social Work and Counselor Education. Dayna’s graduate teaching and field-education experience inform her ability to translate complex professional concepts into practical instruction. Her work supports students, provisionally licensed clinicians, experienced therapists, field instructors, supervisors, and organizational leaders. She emphasizes that professional development continues beyond graduate education and licensure through consultation, peer learning, continuing education, reflective practice, and sustained engagement with ethical standards.

Organizational Consultation and Clinical Leadership. Ethical challenges frequently arise from systems rather than isolated clinician decisions. Workload, inadequate supervision, unclear policies, conflicting roles, leadership practices, and poor communication can affect both staff functioning and client care. Dayna consults with individuals and organizations on professional relationships, supervision structures, leadership challenges, and ethical concerns, helping participants consider both the immediate situation and the larger system in which it occurs.

Authored Publications

• Creative Ways to Learn Ethics: An Experiential Training Manual for Helping Professionals
• The Parental Tool Box: For Parents and Clinicians