Your self-soothing toolkit

Clients with affect dysregulation, panic, grief, or chronic stress. The split into three categories matters because clients tend to think only about crisis-mode tools and skip the anticipatory and daily ones, which are often where the real prevention work happens.

The form has 3 fields. “Things you can do right now when you’re starting to feel overwhelmed” is a repeating block with at least 3 rows, each with 1 sub-field (short-text). “Things you can do when you know a difficult situation is coming” is a repeating block with at least 3 rows, each with 1 sub-field (short-text). “Things you can do every day to build the habit of self-soothing” is a repeating block with at least 3 rows, each with 1 sub-field (short-text).

A clinical note worth holding: the daily column. Clients who pick zero items there are usually the ones who keep ending up in immediate-use mode. That’s the conversation: building a daily floor of soothing activity reduces the frequency of overwhelm in the first place.

In my-cbt, this is a system template. Assign it from the case file, customise the personal message, and the submission saves with a timestamp when the client submits. The repeating sections expand on screen instead of running out of room in a margin.