Tools for Families
Games and exercises you can try with your child to help them feel calm and safe. These are things a therapist might teach in session — practicing at home can make them easier to use when a hard moment comes. These tools are a support, not a replacement for therapy.
Building a calm place
Tools that help create a safe, comforting inner space to return to when things feel big.
Container Exercise
Interactive container visualization — pick a box, name what's bothering you, put it inside, lock it, put it somewhere safe until you can come back to it.
Clinical consensusLightstream Visualization
Guided color-flow visualization: pick a healing color, watch it flow through a body outline, follow the script to soften tension.
Clinical consensusSafe Place Builder
Guided picker for building a calm, safe inner place with sensory details. Phase 2 resource installation made interactive.
Clinical consensusSandtray
Build a scene with figures on a sand canvas. A digital adaptation of sandtray therapy — place people, animals, nature, and symbols to express what feels hard to say in words.
Clinical consensusFor big feelings
Breathing, grounding, and body-based tools to help when feelings get overwhelming.
5-4-3-2-1 Grounding
Step-by-step sensory grounding: 5 things to see, 4 to touch, 3 to hear, 2 to smell, 1 to taste. Doesn't record what you name.
Widely usedBreath Pacer
Animated breath pacer with box breathing, 4-7-8, and coherent breathing patterns. For closure, grounding, and home use.
Clinical consensusButterfly Hug Guide
Paced self-hug tapping visual. A gentle, self-administered bilateral technique originally developed for children after disaster.
Research-backedUnderstanding how I feel
Ways to name, measure, and talk about what's happening inside.
Feeling Wheel
Clickable emotion wheel. Six core emotions at the center, specific variations around the edge. Helps clients — especially kids — name what they feel.
Clinical consensusSUD Scale (Subjective Units of Disturbance)
Measure distress from 0 (none) to 10 (worst imaginable). Includes a kid-friendly faces mode for younger clients.
Research-backedVOC Scale (Validity of Cognition)
Rate how true a positive belief feels, from 1 (completely false) to 7 (completely true). Used in Phase 3 assessment and Phase 5 installation.
Research-backed