45+ Powerful Therapy Exercises For Clients, Couples & Groups

Psychotherapeutic interventions have proven effective at treating a wide variety of psychological disorders and promoting client wellbeing both face-to-face and remotely (Bandelow & Wedekind, 2022).

By identifying and sharing appropriate therapy exercises with clients, therapists help clients learn to manage existing problems and gain self-help skills for use going forward (Nelson-Jones, 2014).

In this article, we share many of our favorite free therapy exercises and suggest situations and groups where they may be best placed. Why not review them and reflect on their potential to boost engagement while supporting growth and development in individual, couple, and group settings?

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive CBT Exercises for free. These science-based exercises will provide you with detailed insight into positive Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and give you the tools to apply it in your therapy or coaching.

How to Use Exercises in Therapy

A vital aspect of therapy is for the counselor or therapist to “collaborate with clients to achieve change and then for clients to maintain that change” long after treatment ends (Nelson-Jones, 2014, p. 52).

Mental health practitioners must understand the skills their clients need to develop, demonstrate how they can be implemented, and engage them in performing structured activities and homework tasks.

While it is essential that the counselor form a solid therapeutic bond with their client, it is similarly crucial that they identify and share powerful therapy exercises that support them in replacing their old self-defeating ways with more helpful, better skills (Nelson-Jones, 2014).

Unsurprisingly, research recognizes a significant connection between completing therapeutic homework and treatment outcomes (Mausbach et al., 2010).

19 Popular Therapy Exercises to Try

Therapy offers a powerful tool for clients to overcome past trauma, manage existing challenges, and create fulfilling and flourishing lives, particularly when they feel that their need for autonomy is met (Dwyer et al., 2011).

The following exercises can be empowering when working with clients experiencing anxiety.

6 Exercises for managing anxiety

While the effects of anxiety can be catastrophic and far reaching, therapeutic interventions can be highly successful in helping clients redirect their minds away from “worry and negative self-appraisals and toward greater acceptance of internal states” (Crowley et al., 2017, p. 130).

The following therapy exercises will help:

1. Event Visualization Worksheet
   Detailed imagination of a future event or challenge offers a safe and controlled environment for reducing concern and anxiety and gaining confidence without risk of failure.
2. Tackling Anxious Thoughts
   Clients can learn how to notice anxious and irrational thoughts and find more helpful and rational alternatives.
3. Managing Panic
   This is a valuable worksheet for identifying triggers and sources of panic and anxiety and recognizing associated feelings and behavior.
4. Anxiety Record
   Maintaining a record of the causes of anxiety can be enlightening and empowering.
5. Best and Worst
   When working with children, creating a Venn diagram can be a helpful visual representation of their anxieties versus potentially positive outcomes.
6. Labeling Your Emotions
   Giving names to feelings can help children identify and understand their anxiety without forming guilt or engaging in judgment.

6 Best exercises for depression

Depression can be helped by understanding its causes and triggers while building a resilient mindset that increases positivity, improves stress recovery, and maintains flexibility in challenging environments (Waugh & Koster, 2015).

The following worksheets are valuable tools for use when working with clients experiencing depression or at risk of future episodes:

1. Recognizing Rumination
   Persistent negative thinking is a key risk factor for depression. This template helps identify unhelpful thoughts and how they interfere with daily living.
2. Guilt and Shame Emotions That Drive Depression
   Feeling guilt and shame can push an individual deeper into their depression. The clients answer questions in this exercise to help identify and better understand such emotions.
3. Depressive Thought Worksheet for Teens
   Young people can benefit from reflecting on situations causing negative thinking and changing them into more realistic thoughts.
4. What Is Depression? A Fact Sheet for Teenagers
   This valuable and insightful fact sheet explains what depression is, its signs and symptoms, potential behavioral changes, and how to seek help.
5. My Depression Story
   Use this worksheet with clients to create a timeline of their lives to understand the key moments that shaped their perspective.
6. Unhelpful Thinking Styles
   Our underlying thought patterns can worsen our depression. Share this worksheet with clients to identify unhelpful thinking styles and how to reconstruct them more positively.

7 Helpful exercises for building self-esteem

While poor self-esteem may emerge early in life, it can also develop in adulthood, caused by a combination of negative self-beliefs, harsh feedback, and challenging environments (Orth & Robins, 2019).

The following helpful exercises can boost clients’ self-esteem and challenge harsh self-evaluations:

1. Designing Affirmations
   Positively focused self-affirmations can reinforce our self-identity and outcomes related to meaningful personal values.
2. The Self-Esteem Checkup
   This valuable tool offers clients insight into their degree of self-love, self-respect, and confidence in their capabilities.
3. Understanding Self-Confidence
   This worksheet helps teens, adolescents, and adults familiarize themselves with the mental and bodily experiences associated with self-confidence.
4. My “Love Letter” to Myself
   Use this worksheet with clients to help them identify their best traits, abilities, and talents and consider how they have benefited them and others in their lives.
5. Things I Like About Me
   This worksheet helps children and teenagers see the beauty resulting from their uniqueness. Use this worksheet to encourage them to understand all they can do, how they treat others, and what they like about themselves.
6. Self-Esteem Journal for Adults
   Journaling can promote positive self-reflection and enhance self-esteem. Ask the client to complete the questions and then reflect on their thinking patterns, feelings, and emotions.
7. Track and Measure Success
   We are all much better at remembering what we did wrong rather than our successes. Ask clients to keep a copy of what went well and review it before future challenges.

14 Exercises and Activities for Couples

Inevitably, couples disagree. However, when differences become irreconcilable, couples therapy can help regain trust, rebuild communication, and strengthen relationship bonds (Greiger, 2015).

The following exercises and activities are powerful tools for use with clients to support them on their journey.

30 Questions to ask couples

1. Conflict Resolutions Checklist
   This valuable set of 10 questions ensures both partners have taken the steps to reduce or remove conflict.
2. Valuing My Partner
   These five questions support clients in seeing their partners in a more positive (and realistic) light.
3. Relationship History and Philosophy Questionnaire
   These 11 questions encourage couples to rediscover their admiration and love for one another through revisiting their shared history.
4. Marital Conflict Questionnaire
   Use this four-question sheet to recognize and understand multiple conflicts the couple is experiencing.

4 Couples exercises to build trust

1. Anger Exit and Re-Entry Routines
   This exercise builds relationship trust by identifying when conversations become heated and when it is time to exit, cool down, or re-enter.
2. Imago Workup
   Identifying each other’s needs, desires, and past experiences can enhance understanding, encourage vulnerability, and boost trust in any relationship.
3. Things I Love
   These are 10 prompts to be answered by each partner to encourage more robust, fruitful connections and strengthen the couple’s bond.
4. Good Qualities
   Ask couples to work through the four prompts and capture and share good qualities, cherished memories, what they appreciate, and how the other person shows they care.

3 Exercises couples can perform at home

1. From My Way to Our Way
   Couples may find living together challenging. This helpful exercise encourages partners to find a middle ground between two possibly very different views of everyday activities.
2. Turning You Into I Worksheet
   “You” statements can sound critical and judgmental. In this exercise, each partner focuses on using the “I” pronoun to express how they feel and thereby support empathy.
3. 10 Tips for Coping With Your Partner’s Upset
   While listening to a partner’s pain is sometimes difficult, this exercise can help avoid becoming overwhelmed.

3 Exercises for long-distance relationships

1. Active Listening Reflection Worksheet
   Being apart can significantly strain a relationship. Each partner will benefit from improving their active listening skills to boost understanding and reduce the likelihood of misinterpretation of what is being communicated on a call, video chat, or in person.
2. Traps to Avoid and Tips for Success
   Conflicts can often be avoided — or at least managed better — by learning the mistakes we make in our communication and following these six tips for conflict resolution.
3. Effective Communication Reflection Worksheet
   Provide clients with this helpful worksheet to encourage them to reflect on their communication and how it might be improved.

7 Group Therapy Exercises for Your Sessions

Group therapy has proven to be a powerful and practical tool for multiple client groups, including those dealing with depression and managing anxiety (Lenz et al., 2015; Crowley et al., 2017).

The following exercises support group-based therapy in children and adults:

1. Telling an Empathy Story
   Telling someone else’s story can be a powerful way to understand their perspective while developing empathy. This five-step worksheet helps group members focus on feelings and what it’s like to be in someone else’s situation.
2. What I See in You
   We rarely see ourselves as others do. In this exercise, the group takes turns offering compliments to an individual member, which they then repeat back using the pronoun “I.”
3. Nudge Interventions in Groups
   A group environment creates a powerful opportunity to identify, explore, and discuss small changes that can have significant behavioral outcomes.
4. Group Boundary-Setting Exercise
   This exercise provides an opportunity to practice using body language and speech to set boundaries with others in a group setting.
5. Creating an Empathy Picture
   Helpful for multiple age groups, this exercise encourages members to reflect on and understand another person’s feelings.
6. Support Group Evaluation Form
   It is vital to assess the appropriateness of interventions performed continuously within a group setting to ensure their suitability.
7. Group Counseling Permission Form
   This is a helpful form for parents to give their consent for their children to attend group counseling.

5 Simple Therapeutic Writing Exercises

“Writing about traumatic, stressful or emotional events has been found to result in improvements in both physical and psychological health.”

Baikie & Wilhelm, 2005, p. 338

Simply capturing our thoughts, emotions, and concerns regularly — perhaps daily in a journal — has been shown to boost our moods and improve our overall sense of psychological wellbeing (Baikie & Wilhelm, 2005).

The following five exercises encourage clients to self-reflect and then capture how they feel and think digitally or on paper:

1. Gratitude Journal
   Writing down daily everything that we are grateful for and learning from the challenges we face provides a powerful exercise for boosting our focus on the good things in life.
2. Who Am I?
   Stopping to reflect and answer questions about ourselves increases self-awareness and self-knowledge. This two-part writing activity can be used in individual and group settings.
3. Self-Love Journal
   These 10 self-love writing prompts encourage self-inquiry while identifying ways to introduce more self-directed compassion and kindness.
4. Self-Love Sentence Stems
   Completing these 20 self-love partial sentences can boost self-awareness and self-kindness in clients who tend toward self-criticism.
5. Reverse the Rabbit Hole
   Capturing worries and potentially positive and negative outcomes on paper can make clients’ concerns more manageable.

Resources From PositivePsychology.com

As we have already seen, we have many resources for therapists working with individuals, couples, and groups to support multiple issues and concerns while promoting overall wellbeing.

More extensive versions of the following tools are available with a subscription to the Positive Psychology Toolkit©, but they are described briefly below.

Building the rituals of connection

Regular, relationship-focused habits can help foster more productive communicative behavior in a relationship and can offer emotional significance.

The four steps include:

• Step one – understanding various ritual types and timings, such as when parting, showing affection, and arranging date nights
• Step two – identifying specific actions for inclusion in each ritual
• Step three – planning how and when they should take place
• Step four – reflecting on the positive emotions that arose from each ritual and recognizing their importance

A strengths versus weakness focus

We often devote more time to our weaknesses than our strengths. The following two steps can be performed in a group setting to improve awareness regarding the importance of strength awareness and focus.

• Step one – Divide the group into three subgroups, as follows.

– Group 1 (weakness focus) spends time reflecting on challenging aspects of their jobs that drain their energy.
– Group 2 (strength focus) discusses the highlights of their job.
– Group 3 (observers) keeps an eye on the other two groups, noting their distinctions and dynamics.

• Step two – After 15 minutes, regroup. The “weakness” and “strength” groups share what they discussed first. Then, the observers point out the contrasts in energy, mood, and behavior between the two.

This exercise supports participants as they introspectively analyze their strengths and weaknesses, all while fostering group communication and collaboration.

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others through CBT, check out this collection of 17 validated positive CBT tools for practitioners. Use them to help others overcome unhelpful thoughts and feelings and develop more positive behaviors.

A Take-Home Message

Therapy exercises are powerful tools for therapists and counselors working with individuals, couples, and groups. Such interventions, performed as homework between sessions, are linked to successful treatment outcomes (Mausbach et al., 2010).

The article shares many free therapy exercises and interventions grounded in research that support working with various psychological challenges, including complicated relationships, anxiety, depression, and self-esteem issues.

Such therapeutic exercises have the potential to foster meaningful change in your clients, equipping them with the tools to manage immediate challenges and the skills to solve issues in the future and after therapy. In doing so, they support and encourage individuals to participate actively in their healing and growth.

Besides the free therapy exercises highlighted, we offer various resource packs available on our website that underpin successful client outcomes. As therapists and counselors, you can use these activities and exercises as they are or tailor them to your clients’ specific needs and situations, ensuring you provide the best support for a positive therapeutic outcome.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. For more information, don’t forget to download our three Positive CBT Exercises for free.

Ed: Updated November 2023