Skills and Concepts Handouts
Deepen your understanding with curated guides, handouts, and frameworks for mental health and self-regulation.
Understanding Stress & Anxiety
Thought Patterns & Mindset
States of Mind (Wise Mind)
DBT skill explaining Emotional Mind, Reasonable Mind, and Wise Mind - and how balancing emotion with reason leads to healthier decisions and a more fulfilling life.
Mindset Handouts: Fixed vs Growth
Explore the two mindsets and how shifting from fixed to growth mindset changes how you handle challenges, effort, criticism, and the success of others. Includes a Willingness vs Willfulness comparison and simple steps to get unstuck.
Cognitive Distortions
A clear guide to 12 common irrational thought patterns - from catastrophizing and mind reading to all-or-nothing thinking - and how they shape your feelings and actions.
Core Beliefs
Based on the work of Judith S. Beck - understand how core beliefs, underlying associations, and automatic thoughts are connected, and how examining the evidence can help restructure negative beliefs into more accurate ones.
Core Beliefs Worksheet: Examining the Facts
A structured worksheet to examine automatic thoughts, identify cognitive errors and underlying associations, and use Socratic questioning to develop a new, evidence-based core belief.
Core Belief List: 9 Core Beliefs That Can Control Your Life
Common examples of unhealthy core beliefs - including "I am not good enough", "I am unlovable", "the world is dangerous", and more - and how they shape decisions, relationships, and emotional wellbeing. Includes the good news: core beliefs are changeable.
Body Regulation
TIP Skills: Changing Your Body Chemistry
DBT distress tolerance skills using Temperature, Intense exercise, and Paced breathing to rapidly calm your nervous system during intense emotional moments.
Grounding Techniques
Practical grounding methods - including the 5-4-3-2-1 sensory technique, body awareness exercises, and mental grounding - to anchor yourself in the present moment.
Mindful Breathing, Notice & Return, and Mindfulness
Three practical skills in one: the Breathing Skill for calming anxiety and distress, the Notice & Return Skill for managing racing thoughts and improving focus, and a guide to What is Mindfulness including components, benefits, and practices.
Your Autonomic Nervous System & Automatic Reactions
A visual mapping of the ANS — Ventral Vagal Complex (safe/regulated), Sympathetic Nervous System (fight/flight), and Dorsal Vagal Complex (freeze/dissociation) — showing how historical context, situational triggers, and SPACE reactions relate to each nervous system state.
Distress Tolerance
IMPROVE the Moment
A DBT skill using the IMPROVE acronym - Imagery, Meaning, Prayer, Relaxation, One thing, Vacation, Encouragement - to cope when situations have no quick fix.
Improving the Moment (Worksheet)
A companion worksheet to practice applying the IMPROVE skills to a specific distressing situation in your own life.
Radical Acceptance
Learn what radical acceptance really means through real-life examples - accepting reality fully, without judgment, to redirect energy toward coping rather than resisting.
Relationships & Communication
Fostering Relationships
Healthy relationship skills including the 5 keys of communication (cooperation, compromise, caring, trust, flexibility), the EAR technique for active listening, BRAVING anatomy of trust, fair fighting rules, assertive communication, setting boundaries, resentment, forgiveness, love languages, and more.
Relational Context Diagram
A visual diagram showing a system of relationships based on trust — from the Holy Spirit at the center, to your support system, acquaintances, and how to think about trust boundaries with others.