How you want to be treated by the people around you

Most clients in distress are surrounded by people who mean well and help badly. The mother who says “just cheer up.” The partner who fixes the problem instead of listening. The friend who goes silent during hard times because they don’t know what to say. The client typically responds with frustration that gets read as ingratitude, then guilt, then withdrawal. By the time they arrive in your room, they’ve concluded they have to manage their distress alone.

The intervention is not to teach the client’s family to be different. It’s to give the client language to ask for what they actually need, in specific terms, before the next round of well-meaning unhelpfulness happens. The worksheet does that by separating two lists: what kind of support helps, and what kind of support actually makes things worse. Both are usually missing in clients who have spent years feeling unsupported without being able to say what would have been support.

Use it for clients with social-support gaps, clients with chronic illness whose family responses have become a problem in themselves, depressed clients who’ve withdrawn from people who don’t know how to engage with them, and post-loss clients dealing with the awkward sympathy patterns that follow bereavement.

The clinical patterns to read in submissions. The don’t-want list usually surfaces specific people. “Don’t tell me other people have it worse” often has a face attached. Ask who in next session, gently. The data is the relationship, not the abstract list. The do-want list is often shorter than the don’t-want list, sometimes much shorter. Clients who can list ten things they don’t want and only one thing they do want are reporting they don’t know what would help. The next session is about that. Generating real do-wants together is part of the work.

A second pattern: clients who fill in the do-want list with things only the therapist could provide. “Someone who really listens.” “Someone who doesn’t try to fix me.” Those are not requests to family. They’re descriptions of the therapy relationship the client wants to extend into their life, and the conversation in session is about how to ask for them in language family and friends can actually deliver on.

In my-cbt, the worksheet is one of the bundled system templates. Assign it after a session where the client has named frustration with how their support people respond. Submissions save in the case file and you read them together as preparation for the conversations the client is going to have outside session.