Self-reflection: knowing what you bring into the room

Notions clés

Reflection in and on action

Schön described reflection-in-action: noticing surprise and adjusting while the work is under way. Reviewing work afterward, reflection-on-action, complements it. One catches a misstep in the moment; the other finds patterns across sessions and clients that no single moment reveals.

Values and cultural self-awareness

APA's Multicultural Guidelines ask psychologists to recognize that, as cultural beings, they hold attitudes and beliefs that shape how they perceive and interact with others and how they conceptualize clients. A value that feels like common sense may be one culture's norm.

Implicit bias

Health professionals show implicit racial and ethnic bias at levels similar to the general public, linked in some studies to interactions and outcomes. Yet meta-analyses disagree on how well Implicit Association Test scores predict behavior, so a score is a prompt to audit one's work, not a verdict.

Well-being and competence

Under APA Standard 2.06, psychologists refrain from work when personal problems are likely to impair it, and when they become aware of such problems they take steps such as consultation and decide whether to limit, suspend or end their work. The CPA code treats self-care under Responsible Caring.

Self-doubt as a resource

In one outpatient study, therapists who reported more professional self-doubt and also related to themselves kindly saw more client change in interpersonal distress, while little self-doubt combined with high self-regard was not a fruitful combination.

Exemple commenté

A psychologist raised to value early independence rereads three months of notes and sees that she has described two young adult clients who live with, and lean on, their parents as "enmeshed" and has steered both toward moving out. Neither client named leaving home as a goal.

1. Reflection-on-action finds the pattern: the same label and the same push appear for clients whose families and cultures differ.
2. Name the value behind it: her belief that healthy adults separate early from their parents is a cultural norm, not a clinical finding about these families.
3. Check the formulation against each client's goals and context by asking what closeness with family means to them and what they want to change.
4. Take the pattern to consultation and revise the treatment plans where her value, rather than the client's aim, had set the direction.

Reflection becomes practice when a noticed value or bias leads to a checked formulation and a changed plan.