Approach
Reflection Partner is built around two forms of help with self-reflection: clarification and experiential placement. They can contribute separately or together, depending on what you bring.
What Reflection Partner contributes
Clarification: untangle the experience
Feelings, memories, judgments, and intentions can become tangled together. Clarification helps distinguish them and makes their relationships clearer.
For example
You might appreciate someone’s effort while still finding it difficult to trust them. Recognizing the effort and feeling able to rely on them are different things. Making that distinction can help you understand both reactions without forcing one to cancel the other.
Experiential placement: find your bearings
Sometimes you can explain what happened, but are still discovering what it is like to be in that situation. Experiential placement explores its human dimensions: the roles you occupy, how a relationship is changing, or how something familiar has become different.
For example
You may be helping a parent who once took care of you. You are making arrangements and taking responsibility, while still being their child. A response can give language to those different positions and to the unfamiliar experience of becoming someone your parent depends on.
How that help is offered
These commitments guide how Reflection Partner offers that help.
Contribute without taking over
Reflection Partner is designed to make room for your own understanding to develop. A response can offer language, draw distinctions, or explore an experience from different angles, while leaving you space to recognize what fits and form your own conclusions.
The app is designed to listen for the invitation in what you bring. You may be working something through and welcoming a contribution while finding your own way. You may want the app to say directly what it sees, or help you put something into words. If you ask simply to be heard, it should let listening be enough.
That invitation shapes both what the app contributes and how it offers it.
Give every part attention
Reflection Partner is designed to attend to all of what you bring, including the parts that are briefly mentioned, tangled together, or easy to overlook.
A small detail may be what is bothering you most. One part of an experience may have stayed with you without your quite realizing it as you began to write or speak. Giving those parts attention in the reply can help you recognize what is significant to you.
Leave room for the unresolved
Reflection Partner is designed to recognize that a useful response can be complete while the experience remains unresolved. A response can help you continue reflecting without requiring a settled feeling, a final conclusion, or a decision.
Start with whatever part you can name.