Reflection Through Creation: A Different Way to Close the Year
Photo Credit: Kiki Siepel
Reflecting Creatively on 2025
As the year draws to a close, we’re often asked to look back: What did you achieve? What didn’t you do? What goals fell away? But for many therapists and helping professionals, these questions can make reflection feel heavy. You may have spent the year holding space for others, managing complexity, navigating systems, advocating, documenting, and absorbing information and people’s stories. And there may not have been much room left for doing things that felt generative, expressive or playful.
So it’s understandable that reflecting on everything you gave, everything you held, and everything you didn’t give yourself permission to need can bring up complex feelings. And sometimes, this style of reflection is more exhausting than helpful. The use of creative reflection can offer a unique and fun approach to reflecting on your year.
Most year-end reflection activities ask us to think more: to evaluate outcomes, identify gaps, and set better goals. But for those of us whose work already requires constant thinking and planning, more cognitive effort rarely brings the clarity we’re seeking. More often, it recreates the same depletion we’re trying to understand. Creative reflection works differently.
When we engage with writing, drawing, collage, or music, we access a form of knowing that lives beneath analysis. We create from the unconscious and through the body, often bypassing the thinking mind. What’s more, nervous systems typically reflect through image, metaphor, sensation, and symbol rather than through logic and analysis. And creative practices can provide you with access to this embodied wisdom, the kind that can reveal what you actually need, rather than what you think you should need.
If you’re open to trying it, here are a few example ways to reflect creatively, without the pressure to do them “well”:
Give this past year a title, like a book or film. Then write a blurb briefly describing 2025. Try to make it a blurb that you wish someone had given you at the start of the year to help you prepare! Let it be honest rather than aspirational.
Listen to a piece of instrumental music and write down whatever images, memories, or sensations arise from this past year. Don’t analyse them or make meaning while you are listening. Just witness what appears.
Write a dialogue between two parts of you: the part that kept going, and the part that wanted to stop. Let those two parts speak without interruption or resolution.
Create a simple collage using words and images cut from magazines or old books. The theme of this collage is what nourished you this year, even in small or surprising ways. Let the unexpected have a place in your collage and notice what emerges.
These types of practices aren’t about producing insight on demand or creating something aesthetically pleasing. They’re about giving your nervous system a language it understands. They make room for complexity, for the truth that you can be capable and exhausted, devoted and depleted, grateful and longing for change.
Creative reflection also loosens the belief that exhaustion is a personal failure. It helps us see where we’ve been trying to solve what are actually collective problems individually. And where something different might be trying to emerge.
As you close out this year, consider reflecting creatively. You don’t need to arrive in January with everything figured out. You may simply need space to listen, imagine, and to remember that you are still becoming. And that can be enough to set you on the path to flourishing.
Ready to explore more ways to flourish in your creativity and life?
Taking the Next Step
If this resonates with you and you're ready to explore deeper ways to nurture your creativity and build a flourishing life, I'd love to support you. You can explore my services here.
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