Grounding Cards: grounding lines and practices for hard moments
Grounding works best when it’s simple, believable, and within reach. Each card pairs a short, honest line on the front with one practice on the back. On one card, “I am here, in this moment, and I can get through this moment” is paired with “Press your feet into the floor. Name five things you can see, slowly, one at a time.”
Seven themes:
- Body: settling a nervous system on alert, with options for every body (“Safe enough, right now.”)
- Mind: unhooking from thoughts and stories (“A thought is not a fact.”)
- Schema and parts: meeting scared, critical, and protective parts with care (“Every part of me is welcome. Not every part has to drive.”)
- Skills: distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and asking for what you need (“I can pause before I respond.”)
- Self and relationship: worth, boundaries, repair, and belonging (“Ruptures can be repaired.”)
- For hard moments: after a hard conversation, during numbness, when sleep won’t come, after a big session (“I only have to get through the next few minutes.”)
- Reaching out: a card with crisis line and text line information, plus space for the client’s own person to contact
Ways to use them in your work:
- Close a session with one card to carry into the week
- Build a personal set of three to five cards for a safety or coping plan
- Practice a card on a calm day so it’s familiar when distress is high
- Use the write-your-own cards for lines and practices in the client’s own words
Built on trauma-informed principles: every body-based practice is offered as an option (“if that feels okay”), the language validates rather than dismisses, and the deck draws on somatic, ACT, DBT, schema, and parts-informed approaches without requiring any one model.
What’s included:
- 60 grounding cards across seven themes, each with a practice on the back
- 10 write-your-own cards (My own words on the front, What helps on the back)
- A crisis resources card
- A cover card
- Playing card size, 2.5 x 3.5 inches
Part of the Seen and Known: Healing on a Continuum collection. Our clinical tools are trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and made by a clinician for clinicians.
For use by licensed or pre-licensed mental health professionals and supervised trainees within their scope of practice. These cards support, and do not replace, clinical care or crisis services. Purchase includes a license for use in your own clinical practice.
Grounding Cards: grounding lines and practices for hard moments
Grounding works best when it’s simple, believable, and within reach. Each card pairs a short, honest line on the front with one practice on the back. On one card, “I am here, in this moment, and I can get through this moment” is paired with “Press your feet into the floor. Name five things you can see, slowly, one at a time.”
Seven themes:
- Body: settling a nervous system on alert, with options for every body (“Safe enough, right now.”)
- Mind: unhooking from thoughts and stories (“A thought is not a fact.”)
- Schema and parts: meeting scared, critical, and protective parts with care (“Every part of me is welcome. Not every part has to drive.”)
- Skills: distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and asking for what you need (“I can pause before I respond.”)
- Self and relationship: worth, boundaries, repair, and belonging (“Ruptures can be repaired.”)
- For hard moments: after a hard conversation, during numbness, when sleep won’t come, after a big session (“I only have to get through the next few minutes.”)
- Reaching out: a card with crisis line and text line information, plus space for the client’s own person to contact
Ways to use them in your work:
- Close a session with one card to carry into the week
- Build a personal set of three to five cards for a safety or coping plan
- Practice a card on a calm day so it’s familiar when distress is high
- Use the write-your-own cards for lines and practices in the client’s own words
Built on trauma-informed principles: every body-based practice is offered as an option (“if that feels okay”), the language validates rather than dismisses, and the deck draws on somatic, ACT, DBT, schema, and parts-informed approaches without requiring any one model.
What’s included:
- 60 grounding cards across seven themes, each with a practice on the back
- 10 write-your-own cards (My own words on the front, What helps on the back)
- A crisis resources card
- A cover card
- Playing card size, 2.5 x 3.5 inches
Part of the Seen and Known: Healing on a Continuum collection. Our clinical tools are trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and made by a clinician for clinicians.
For use by licensed or pre-licensed mental health professionals and supervised trainees within their scope of practice. These cards support, and do not replace, clinical care or crisis services. Purchase includes a license for use in your own clinical practice.
