How therapy exercises can help.
My clients know I love a worksheet. I’ve been in session and had clients ask for them, or I’ve offered one and then been asked for more.
Always an extension to what we’re talking about ‘in the room’, therapy worksheets and exercises enable clients to continue ‘doing the work’ from home in-between our appointments. I love therapy exercises so much that I included over 25 of them in Paperback Therapy - and now they’re available for download here.
Therapy exercises such as the Wheel of Life, Five Joyful Things, or Socratic Questioning help clients to do work through specific issues in their own time. For instance, if you have an unhelpful or intrusive thought, it can be easy to sit and ruminate on it for some time. With a therapy exercise, you can use the considered prompts provided to get to the heart of where those thoughts are coming from and challenge the reality of them.
Exercises help us to make sense of our thoughts, feelings and behaviour - especially when used as an addition to research or talk therapy, to increase our health literacy.
That’s why I will talk through with my clients how a therapy exercise can be used, including when and where to do the work. I’ll recommend a quiet place with no distraction, where you can get vulnerable with your feelings and take the time to sit with whatever comes up. Of course, this isn’t always possible and I see people using the exercises in Paperback Therapy on the train - whatever pockets of time you can find to work on yourself will do.
My favourite thing about therapy exercises is that you can look back in three, six, or twelve months’ time and see how far you’ve come.
This is especially true of the Wheel of Life exercise, Identifying Values, or the Inner Child, which identify areas that you may need to focus on. When reflecting later on these pages, ideally you could see how much you’ve grown - even if in the day-to-day it may seem like not much has changed.
This month I’m…
Reading: The Boat by Nam Le, a wonderful piece of Australian literature by a fellow Simon & Schuster author I met at the Where The Writers Are events last month. Nam Le’s second book, 36 Ways Of Writing A Vietnamese Poem, is out now.
Viewing: Selena Gomez’s documentary about mental health and chronic illness, My Mind & Me. It’s a rewatch and it’s just as fantastic the second-time around.
Following: Allyson Dinneen on Instagram, who runs Notes From Your Therapist - a page dedicated to scrawls and observations from the marriage & family therapist about grief, emotions and healing.
Something else I did:
Met and recorded two fantastic podcasts with Felicity Harley of BODY&Soul! We discussed the importance of critical consumption when searching Dr. Google for mental health advice for Healthy-ish and then went deeper into why we’re all feeling a bit ‘bleh’ and what we can do when we can’t get to a therapist for the longer Extra Healthy-ish. Download and listen today.
