Compassionate self-care

Clients who are harshly self-critical, perfectionists, depressed clients with strong self-blame patterns, and trauma clients with shame-based cognition. Particularly useful when a client can be kind to others but flips into cruelty when the target is themselves.

The form has 5 fields.

A clinical note worth holding: the gap between the two halves of the worksheet. If the client writes a tender, generous response to a hypothetical friend and then a curt or hostile response to themselves, that’s the working material. Make the gap explicit. The therapeutic move is asking why their friend deserves kindness and they don’t.

In my-cbt, this lives in the system worksheet library. Assign it from the case file with a personal message at the top, in your voice. Each submission saves with a timestamp.