What is Spiritual Self-Care?
Spiritual self-care is a practice used across CBT, ACT, and DBT to help patients reconnect with meaning and restore a sense of safety after trauma or emotional distress. When therapy includes dimensions of spiritual and religious content, individuals experience positive mental health outcomes, and attending to spiritual distress and challenges, revising one's spiritual worldview, and focusing on spiritual strengths and resources can support the healing process and journey through trauma.
This worksheet contains two parts. First, patients list spiritual self-care activities they want to incorporate into their routine. Second, they select one activity to practice and journal about how it made them feel, creating a record of what works for their recovery.
How therapists use it
Introduce this worksheet when a patient is ready to explore practices that support their sense of safety and connection. Assign it as a between-sessions activity. Ask the patient to choose one spiritual self-care activity from their list, practice it, and return with their reflection on the experience. Use their journal entry to understand what practices resonate and what barriers they encounter. This feedback shapes the next steps in their healing work.
Who it's for
This worksheet suits patients working through trauma, grief, anxiety, depression, or other conditions where spiritual disconnection or distress is present. ACT is a value-driven therapy that shares common ground with spirituality and can help clients access spiritual resources and create life meaning as well as aid in the resolution or transformation of spiritual struggles. DBT skills include mindfulness, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, and emotional regulation, and spiritual self-care supports these capacities. It is less suited to patients who are actively in crisis or who have not yet stabilized, as stabilization comes before interpretation, and you begin with what the system can tolerate, then build capacity over time.
What clients see
The patient reads an explanation of how spiritual self-care supports healing after trauma. They list spiritual activities they want to do more of, then select one to practice. After practicing, they journal about the experience and reflect on how it made them feel.
Modality fit
Cognitive-behavioral therapy that has been modified to incorporate clients' spiritual beliefs and practices has been used to treat a variety of problems. This worksheet operationalizes that integration by helping patients identify and practice spiritual activities aligned with their beliefs, which supports the cognitive and behavioral change work of CBT.
ACT is a value-driven therapy that involves facilitating transcendence of physical, mental, and emotional experience to alleviate human suffering and shares common ground with the domain of spirituality. This worksheet supports ACT by helping patients clarify spiritual values and commit to actions that align with those values.
DBT modules include mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion-regulation, and interpersonal relationships, and mindfulness was derived from western and eastern contemplative practices, most notably from Zen-Buddhism. Spiritual self-care practices often embody these contemplative traditions and support the mindfulness and acceptance skills central to DBT.
Common questions
When should I assign this worksheet?
Assign it when a patient has stabilized enough to engage in reflective practice and is ready to explore what supports their healing. It works well after initial crisis intervention or when a patient is beginning to rebuild their sense of safety and connection.
What if a patient's spiritual beliefs conflict with my own?
This worksheet is designed to honor the patient's own spiritual framework, not yours. Your role is to help them identify and practice what matters to them. Remain curious and non-judgmental about their choices.
Can I use this with patients who don't identify as religious?
Yes. Spiritual self-care includes any practice that restores a sense of meaning, connection, or peace—meditation, time in nature, creative expression, or community involvement. The worksheet is flexible enough to accommodate secular and religious approaches.
How do I use the journal entry they bring back?
Use it to identify which practices feel grounding or restorative for this patient. Ask what barriers they faced, what surprised them, and whether they want to repeat the practice. This informs your next intervention.