Life Review and Meaning
A structured life review worksheet that guides the client through the chapters of their life, the values that run through them, and what they want the story to mean now. For depression, retirement, illness and other major transitions.
About this resource
Life review is a structured form of reminiscence in which a person looks back over their life as a whole, chapter by chapter, and makes sense of it: what happened, what it meant, what they learned, and how it connects to who they are now. Butler first described the process as a natural task of later life. Since then, structured life review has been developed as a brief intervention and has a reasonable evidence base for reducing depressive symptoms in older adults, with meta-analytic support. The approach is compatible with narrative therapy, which treats identity as a story that can be re-authored, and with the role-transition focus of interpersonal psychotherapy.
This worksheet organises the review into life chapters, then asks the client to look across chapters for recurring values and strengths, to revisit difficult periods with the perspective they now have, and to write a short statement of what they want their life to mean going forward. It is deliberately open enough to suit clients in their thirties facing illness or divorce as well as clients in later life facing retirement or bereavement.
The professional version includes guidance on pacing the review across several sessions, on staying with painful chapters without either rushing past them or getting stuck, and on the difference between integrative reminiscence, which is associated with better mood, and rumination on regret, which is not.
How to use it
- Introduce the worksheet as a way of taking stock rather than as an exercise in nostalgia. Explain that looking back at the whole shape of a life, including the hard parts, tends to help people feel more settled about who they are and what still matters.
- Spread the work over three to five sessions. Complete one or two chapters per session, in session or as homework, and discuss what came up before moving on. Rushing through the whole life in one sitting produces a summary, not a review.
- Listen for repeated values and strengths across chapters and reflect them back. Clients in a depressive episode typically overlook their own consistency, and hearing it named is often the most powerful moment in the work.
- When a chapter holds regret, loss or shame, ask what the client knows now that they did not know then, what they were up against, and what a compassionate observer would say. Do not push for a positive reframe; the aim is a fuller and fairer account, not a happier one.
- Finish with the meaning statement and the section on what comes next. Link these to concrete goals, particularly for clients in a role transition, so the review turns into forward movement.
References
- Butler, R. N. (1963). The life review: An interpretation of reminiscence in the aged. Psychiatry, 26(1), 65-76.
- Bohlmeijer, E., Smit, F., & Cuijpers, P. (2003). Effects of reminiscence and life review on late-life depression: A meta-analysis. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 18(12), 1088-1094.
- Westerhof, G. J., Bohlmeijer, E., & Webster, J. D. (2010). Reminiscence and mental health: A review of recent progress in theory, research and interventions. Ageing and Society, 30(4), 697-721.
- White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. W. W. Norton.
