These person-centered exercises do not make any recommendations on what people should do. Instead, they offer open questions and reflective prompts that your clients can consider upon as they move toward their own resolutions. The prompts ask them to reflect upon their daily activities, their feelings, and their thoughts. They provide a structure to empower clients to develop answers that make sense in the contexts of their own lives. In addition to exercises focusing on heterosexism for LGBTQ+ people generally, there are specific exercises designed for autistic LGBTQ+ people and that focus on transphobia for trans, gender non-conforming, non-binary, and genderqueer people, listed on our “Grow” webpage.

In all the exercises on the “Grow” Webpage, the first day is a survey questionnaire (designed to help clients identify a troubling experience to focus upon and to inquire about contextual factors) and then there are three days of writing exercises in which clients write for approximately a 20-30 minutes per day (a bit longer on the final day; about 45-50 minutes) and a follow up survey a month later — in total about three hours.  If they choose to begin the exercises and participate in the research via the links on our “Grow” webpage, we will email them reminders, with links, to prompt them to complete the exercises on the following days.

Because the expressive writing exercises are non-prescriptive, they appear to be helpful for a wide range of clients. Clients are encouraged to think about how their LGBTQ+ experience might converge with other minority identities that they hold and many write about experiences that are influenced by those convergences. We are careful not to make any suggestions on how experiences should be resolved, but ask people to think about how they would like to move forward, after engaging in the expressive writing. In that way, people arrive at ideas tailored to their own individual contexts, cultures, and situations. As a result, the gains reported by participants so far have been varied, including feeling more empowered, developing healthier boundaries, developing empathy with others, deciding to share experiences more, becoming more assertive, better understanding one’s own feelings and reactions, becoming less self-critical, and seeking support and connection. The gains made are highly individualized.