Self-Reflection Tools I Love as a Therapist

You know how people say they’re ‘doing the work’ of healing or growing and you’re never quite sure what that means?

Well it could be that they are attending weekly therapy, but often times there may be other tools they are using alongside therapy - or even as a substitute for therapy - that support them in self-reflection and processing on their own time.

In my personal experience, as a client, I have found that using self-reflection tools alongside weekly therapy allowed me to get the most out of my healing and growth.

However, not everyone in every season wants or needs therapy, so here are a list of self-reflection tools I love whether you are in therapy or not.

1. Audre Lorde’s Questionnaire to Oneself

   1. What are the words you do not have yet? [Or, “for what do you not have words, yet?”]

   2. What do you need to say? [List as many things as necessary]

   3. “What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” [List as many as necessary today. Then write a new list tomorrow. And the day after.]

   4. If we have been “socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition,” ask yourself: “What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?” [So, answer this today. And every day.]

2. Ten Minute Brain Dump

   Do you ever feel like you have too many things on your mind? Or you brain is so consumed by one thing? Or you feel so stuck in a behavior or relationship? This is the exercise for you.

   Set a timer for ten minutes and open up an empty page or document and write everything that comes to mind. Even if it starts out “I feel so silly for doing this, I’m only doing this because I saw it on the blog at The Orchard and Dr. S mentioned this tool..” then so be it. But allow your mind to wander and your thoughts and feelings to spill and don’t edit yourself. It’s alright if the sentences run on and its okay if you are writing things you don’t want to come to the light of day.

   The point in these ten minutes is to unburden yourself, to give yourself permission to think the thoughts and feel the feelings.

   Afterwards, if you find it helpful, you can do a bit of an audit. Were there patterns or themes in what you wrote down? Is there anything you can learn about yourself through these sentences?

3. A Letter to My Future Self

   What you might need to say to yourself will change with the winds and the rains, but it’s a beautiful exercise, learning to process the thoughts you don’t want to say aloud yet or forgive yourself or cheer yourself on or write down your dreams for yourself. There are websites where you can email yourself the letter for a future date (you decide when), which can be a nice exercise for anniversaries or celebrations in your life. It can also be helpful to dedicate a box or folder or something and write physical letters to yourself and save them; to be able to revisit them when you need to look back on how you’ve changed or grown or healed.

4. Enneagram

   An old therapist of mine is the first person to introduce me to the enneagram, which is a sort of personality typing. While there are quizzes online to explore your type, it’s actually meant for you to read through all of the nine types and explore which one resonates the most with you. There are also subtypes within each of the nine to help tease out what may not ring entirely true to you but still mostly feels correct.

   The reason I found it to be such a useful reflection tool is because of it’s growth and stress components. It explores how you might behave and what you might feel as this ‘type’, depending on if you’re in growth or in stress. I found this to allow for some flexibility in the typing, rather than a rigid conceptualization, and created space to talk about how we might feel different or act different in different spaces due to confidence or safety or suffering or insecurity, etc.

   In my experience, the enneagram allows for a lot more conversation and contextualzing in ways that can help folks identify patterns, explore needs, determine sustainable behaviors, and learn more about themselves in a dynamic way.

5. Sarah Kay’s Poetry exercise

   1. Thing one I know to be true

   2. Thing two I know to be true

   3. Thing three I know to be true

Continue until you have a list of ten things you know to be true right now. This can be not only a grounding exercise but can also help you explore what stories you have floating around or what your feeling certain about, or have curiosity and creativity towards.

These self-reflection tools can support you in learning more about yourself, accepting yourself in your whole humanness, contextualizing yourself in the world around you, and explore your creativity! All which can aid you in healing and growth.

Dr. S