The ability for self-reflection is essential for individuals working in the helping profession as it helps to maintain personal and professional wellbeing while also facilitating an awareness of unconscious interactions within the therapeutic relationships. Within the art therapy field, the use of response art is recommended as a tool for self-care, self-reflection and for exploring and containing difficult experiences within therapeutic relationships. Using an arts-based approach, this research investigates how a series of self-portraits drawn with eyes closed, and particularly my personal interpretations of the facial compositions, can serve as a response art technique to deepen self-reflection. The series of self-portraits drawn with eyes closed and the subsequent post-viewing written reflections provided an efficient creative technique that promoted deeper self-knowledge, revealing the significance of environmental countertransference. Creating a series of response art self-portraits provided a means of documenting the evolving experience of the developing art therapist. Creating self-portraits drawn with eyes closed is recommended as a response art technique for art therapists. 

Keywords: response art, self-portrait, self-reflection, arts-based inquiry, series, environmental countertransference