Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet
Assess your PTSD patient’s spite using the Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet.
Fact Checked by Ericka Pingol.
What are trauma and PTSD?
Before we discuss what the Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet is all about, let’s briefly discuss what trauma and PTSD are.
In the context of , trauma is the intense and severe psychological and emotional scars and responses people sustain due to going through an experience or situation that one considers overwhelming, violating, horrifying, and/or harrowing.
An example of such an experience would be losing your entire home and possessions to a fire or natural disaster. Other examples include being sexually harassed and assaulted, being the victim of a hate crime, being kidnapped, witnessing a murder or someone dying, being trapped in a cramped space for a long time, etc.
The mental scars these events leave in their wake make it difficult for the traumatized to cope and work through what happened. What makes things worse is that these scars can be triggered by something as simple as remembering what happened, their senses, seeing people involved in the traumatizing experience, and being close to where the incident or event occurred.
The traumatized will likely develop a complex mental health condition known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD for short. This disorder is characterized by a wide variety of symptoms, such as:
- Changes and personality
- Irritability
- Emotional outbursts
- Aggression
- Hypervigilance
- The tendency to avoid places, certain people, or things
- The tendency to not participate in certain activities
- The tendency to isolate oneself from others and the world
- Difficulty sleeping
- Disassociation
- Harmful thoughts/behaviors
- Self-harming thoughts/behaviors
They will also feel numerous emotions, including anger, disappointment, despair, fear, and spite.
Printable Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet
Download this Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet to help clients manage their feelings of spite.
How to use the Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet:
Spite is the subject of the worksheet that we’re about to discuss. It’s a negative emotion that’s also potentially dangerous. Spite is characterized by: 1) at its most tame, the desire to annoy or offend someone; 2) at its worst, the desire to harm someone. This is considered one of the most negative emotions because it often springs from anger, resentment, envy, greed, and desires for revenge and retribution.
If you’re a mental healthcare professional, you shouldn’t be surprised if you have a PTSD patient harboring feelings of spite, especially if another person caused their trauma. Considering how problematic spite is, you shouldn’t be surprised if your patient has difficulty discussing and working through it.
What the Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet does is allow patients to take a step back and adequately examine their feelings of spite. Awareness of how their spite influences their life, worldview, perspectives, and relationships is essential to finding ways of coping healthily and working through their trauma. They mustn’t act on their spite because someone might get hurt.
All they need to do is to answer the following prompts and questions on the worksheet:
- Describe the feelings of spite that you remember after going through traumatizing experiences. What were the situations and experiences that made you feel spite?
- What did you do and think about during those situations and experiences that made you feel spite?
- Did these feelings of spite motivate you in any way? If so, how?
- Can you notice if other people feel spiteful? If so, what do you think about and do concerning what you notice?
- How do your feelings of spite affect your relationships?
- OPTIONAL: Do you have any coping strategies that help you avoid feeling spite? If so, what are they? It’s okay if you don’t have any. We can work together to develop strategies down the line.
Mental healthcare professionals who issue this worksheet must remind their patients to write descriptively.
Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet Example:
The Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet was adapted from the original version by Tijana Mandić for the book entitled The PTSD Workbook. The original version is longer and encompasses numerous emotions, each with its segment.
For our version, we took the original segment that concerns spite and used the same five questions. We added more to each item and another question asking patients if they have coping strategies to curb their feelings of spite. This question is optional, and it comes with a statement that says it’s okay for patients not to have coping strategies yet because they can work with their therapist/counselor to develop some down the line.
Our version has six items, each with a comment box with enough space for patients to write their answers. These worksheets can be answered with a pen if you issued physical copies or a keyboard/touchpad if you sent them a digital copy instead.
If you like what you see and believe this PTSD worksheet will help you understand your patient’s spite, download our free Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet PDF template!
Download this Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet Example:
When is it best to use the Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet?
The best time to use the Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet will depend on who you are.
For psychotherapists and similar mental healthcare professionals:
The best time for mental healthcare professionals practicing psychotherapy and similar practices is during the early stages of your therapy or counseling program. These would be the stages where you’re learning about your patients, like what caused their trauma, how they cope with it, what triggers their PTSD, how their PTSD has impacted their lives, etc.
The Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet is best used during these stages because the prompts and questions are geared towards having patients discuss their feelings of spite in detail. Their answers will be helpful to you because you can determine the necessary follow-up questions to have them expound on their answers. Having a nuanced understanding of their spite will aid you with creating coping strategies for them down the line to prevent them from enacting spiteful acts.
For non-mental healthcare professionals:
If you’re not a psychotherapist or a mental healthcare professional and have stumbled on this guide, we’d like you to know that you can use our template for the Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet. It’s free, so that anyone can download and use it anytime.
Suppose you’ve been harboring feelings of spite due to your trauma and acknowledge that it’s problematic. In that case, you can use this worksheet when the time is right for you to examine your feelings and see how spite has impacted your life, views, and relationships. If this worksheet helps you work through your spite, we’re happy! Though, please don’t consider this worksheet as a substitute for therapy.
We recommend seeing a mental healthcare professional so someone can support you as you work through your trauma, PTSD, and related feelings and behaviors.
What are the benefits of using the Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet?
The answers on the worksheet will give professionals something to work with.
As mentioned earlier, spite is one of the most negative emotions. And it’s potentially dangerous, considering a person with PTSD can act on them. This worksheet will serve as a way for professionals to understand the spite of their patients.
By understanding what caused them to feel spite in the first place, what they often think about and do when they feel spite, and how it has affected their relationships, professionals can develop coping strategies so their patients can ward off their spite.
The worksheet works better if issued alongside other PTSD worksheets.
A person with PTSD may feel numerous negative emotions other than spite. It’s also essential for healthcare professionals to examine those emotions so that they have a nuanced understanding of their patient’s PTSD. So, while the Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet is a good tool, it’s best to issue it alongside other PTSD worksheets so you can learn how their negative emotions work with one another and how they negatively impact your patient.
By learning enough about their negative emotions, you’ll be able to better tackle and grapple with their PTSD and have a better shot at helping them work through their trauma. An example of another PTSD worksheet that pairs well with this is the Unpacking Your Anger PTSD Worksheet.
It’s a nifty yet inexpensive tool to have.
The Unpacking Your Spite PTSD Worksheet is a helpful and inexpensive resource. If you print several copies to have them ready for potential PTSD patients, you’ll only spend for printing, which shouldn’t cost much. If you go paperless and send copies of the PDF to your patients instead, you won’t pay anything!
The worksheet also doesn’t demand anything special to be used. People who engage with it only need to answer the prompts and guide questions with as much detail as possible.
Commonly asked questions
Anger and spite are different, but it’s easy to mistake why they are because they’re closely related. Anger is characterized by antagonism toward someone or something that upsets or frustrates you. Spite stems from anger and is characterized by a malicious desire or intent to annoy, offend, or harm someone.
The Unpacking Your Anger PTSD Worksheet examines the antagonism people feel when they are wronged. This worksheet explores the desire to enact harmful things to others.
If we’re referring to the instructions, no. The instructions are easy enough because it only ask people to write about their spite based on the questions. Whatever difficulty a person encounters will come from their willingness to discuss or think about their spite. Some people with PTSD don’t have the energy or emotional capacity to examine how they feel correctly, so if you have a patient who hasn’t thought about their negative emotions before, it might take a while to find the distance they need to examine them with a level head properly.
Besides the Unpacking Your Anger PTSD Worksheet, we have the following:
- Unpacking Your Anxiety
- Unpacking Your Boredom
- Unpacking Your Despair and Hopelessness
- Unpacking Your Disappointment
- Unpacking Your Fear
- Unpacking Your Guilt
- Unpacking Your Shame
- Unpacking Your Sadness
We have templates for these, too! Feel free to download them!
