Meditation for Uncertain Times
This guided practice is intended to help ease fear, anxiety, or any heavy feelings you may have at this time. It’s nothing more than breathing and focusing your intention on deep healing.
Letting Go of Shame Meditation
This practice can help clients accept and face shame, and practice attending to it and distracting from it.
Self Compassion Break Version Two
Accepting our own vulnerability is made easier when give ourselves compassion. Use this self-compassion break with clients in session or encourage them to use it on their own when working with difficult or vulnerable emotions.
Self-Esteem Journal
Positive journaling has been found to help improve feelings of well-being and self-esteem. With this self-esteem worksheet, your clients will be asked to record three daily statements related to their successes, good qualities, and positive experiences. This worksheet is great for clients who have difficulty generating ideas for positive experiences to journal about.”
Assign this as homework for your client for a week, and use the next session to reflect on their observations after journaling about their success and strengths for a week. How did this affect their view of self? Relationships? Mental health symptoms? Explore the Ct’s experience noticing their own strengths.
Identifying Cognitive Distortions
Everyone experiences cognitive distortions at some point; they’re really common! However, these ways of thinking can misinform us about reality and influence our emotions and behaviors in ways we don’t like. Review the list of cognitive distortions, identify cognitive distortions that are common for you, and try to think of ways to adjust the thoughts so that they are more neutral and accurate.
Light Stream Technique
This mindfulness practice includes the defusion technique of imagining an emotion as an object, and a self soothing technique of imagining a healing light addressing that object.
Behavioral Activation
Sometimes we can help ourselves feel better faster by increasing enjoyable activities and decreasing the number of stressors that have been piling up. Using the following table, practice recording how you feel before and after doing enjoyable activities and completing responsibilities. (Credit: TherapistAid.com)
Core Beliefs
Look at the following list of common negative and positive beliefs that people have about themselves. Identify which negative beliefs stand out to you, as well as any associated memories, emotions, and body sensations that surface when you acknowledge those negative beliefs. Next, go through the list of positive beliefs and identify the statements that you already believe about yourself and the statements that you would like to believe about yourself.
Body Appreciation
While thinking about our bodies, many of us focus on how our bodies look (especially in the summer for a lot of people), and sometimes we forget all the other wonderful aspects of our bodies. Complete the statements below to practice thinking about your body in more ways than appearance:
Assertive Communication
Assertive Communication Activity: Assertive communication (rather than passive, aggressive, or passive-aggressive) is the ideal communication style to advocate for ourselves while still showing others respect. Many people find that they shift into patterns of ineffective communication when under stress, or in different contexts (for example, assertive at work, but passive with family and passive-aggressive with spouse). Go over the following handout with your client and explore when they utilize assertive communication and in what emotional situations/contexts they fall into less-effective communication styles. Explore what it might be like for client to practice assertive communication in one of these contexts.
