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Track PTSD symptoms across the four DSM-5 clusters — intrusion, avoidance, negative cognitions and mood, and arousal and reactivity — to monitor progress through treatment.
Use this diary daily or every few days to track your PTSD symptoms. Rate each symptom cluster and note any significant triggers or flashbacks. This creates a record you and your therapist can review to see whether symptoms are reducing over the course of treatment.
Use throughout treatment to monitor PTSD symptom frequency and severity between sessions. Particularly useful for establishing a baseline, tracking treatment response, and identifying symptom patterns linked to triggers or avoidance.
Present as a brief daily or weekly log that helps both therapist and client understand the rhythm of symptoms. Emphasise that the diary is for noticing patterns, not for dwelling on distress — brief entries are sufficient.
For clients who find daily monitoring burdensome, use a weekly summary format instead. For clients with significant avoidance or numbing, include prompts for avoided situations and emotional blunting alongside re-experiencing and hyperarousal symptoms.
If the diary is increasing rumination or hypervigilance about symptoms, simplify to a weekly rating scale rather than detailed daily entries. Discontinue if the client reports that monitoring is worsening their relationship with their symptoms.
Use the diary to identify triggers that can be targeted with stimulus discrimination and behavioural experiments. Track all three PTSD symptom clusters (re-experiencing, avoidance, hyperarousal) to ensure treatment is addressing the full presentation and to detect compensatory increases in avoidance as re-experiencing reduces.
Suitable for clients working with ptsd, symptom diary, trauma, cbt, flashbacks, intrusion, avoidance, negative cognitions, arousal, dsm-5. This tool can be used as a standalone worksheet or as part of a structured homework plan.
Create a free account to access 10 worksheets per month.
Practise and record the use of grounding techniques when experiencing flashbacks, dissociation, or overwhelming emotions.
Explore how the traumatic event has affected your beliefs about yourself, others, and the world.
Write a structured impact statement exploring how the trauma has affected your beliefs about safety, trust, power, esteem, and intimacy.
Prepare for a visit to the trauma site, record predictions, and process the experience afterwards to update the trauma memory.