ABOUT THE PRACTICES
Disclaimers
The site's scope and limitations, collected in one place.
Education and care
Already Here is an educational practice library, not individualized medical or mental health advice, diagnosis, psychotherapy, trauma treatment, or a certification course. Its selected DBT skills are adaptations, not comprehensive DBT treatment. Self-guided practice does not replace qualified care for persistent distress, difficulty functioning, addiction, or substance withdrawal. See NIMH guidance on psychotherapy and the DBT teaching sources.
Sources and evidence
Definitions explain terms, teaching materials describe methods, and clinical studies test particular interventions in particular populations. A source supporting one approach does not validate this website as a program or establish the effects of its individual adaptations. The original mini-practices, metaphors, body-representation exercises, and Mental Fortress collection are exploratory proposals, not validated protocols or tests of general ability. Research on a complete clinical program cannot be transferred automatically to a single card. The source directory identifies the relevant reading.
Outcomes vary
No exercise guarantees calm, tranquility, happiness, resilience, lasting relief from cravings, or improved ability. Responses can differ across people and occasions, including no change or an unwanted effect. Mindfulness and imagery are not helpful for everyone. A vivid, dramatic, lengthy, or unusual experience does not establish progress. Practice is not a performance requirement, and distress is not something to overcome to earn a result.
Experience and interpretation
An inward experience is worth describing, but one experience does not establish a general conclusion about self or the world, its cause, or a theory about the brain. For example, “Perhaps the boundary I experienced as fixed is more flexible than I thought” is speculation. Keep observation, interpretation, hypothesis, and speculation distinguishable. Vividness, confidence, expectation, and intuition do not establish accuracy or externally verified events. A subjective change alone does not demonstrate a mechanism or transfer of learning.
Imagination and physical events
Mental constructs can have personal meaning without being external physical phenomena. An imagined body, location, movement, weight, or passage through a boundary does not move the physical body, alter mass or gravity, reveal a hidden place, or confer an unusual physical capacity. A fortress, armor, guardian, or reminder object provides no literal protection, hidden information, or assurance that another person is available. Keep real-world safety decisions grounded in the actual situation. Related guided imagery resources describe imagery practices, not proof of these physical claims.
Memory and imagined alternatives
Remembering and rehearsing can include errors even when a memory feels clear. These exercises do not recover lost memories or previous lives, reveal hidden causes of feelings, erase an original memory, or change historical facts. An imagined viewpoint does not establish what another person thought. “Rerecording” is an informal metaphor for rehearsing a present-day response, not a literal recording replacement or an established treatment schedule. Research on therapist-delivered imagery rescripting does not establish the effects of this site's mild-memory routine or a prescribed number of repetitions.
Body cues and perception
Sensations can inform reflection but are not diagnostic tests or proof that a decision is correct. They can reflect expectation, familiarity, and other influences. An anger cue does not uniquely identify anger or prove a hidden emotion underneath it. The attention and perception exercises are not hearing or vision tests: prominence is not increased sensory range, loudness is not a distance measurement, and felt size, nearness, or position need not match physical measurements. Check an estimate against the available facts.
Site language and metaphors
Somatic Arts is this site's umbrella term for exploration involving body and mind, not an established academic definition or a claim that all somatic methods share a mechanism or evidence base. “Subconscious” means processes outside immediate awareness; it does not identify a separate inner person. Cooperation, trees, knots, shelves, roots, and inner conversations are teaching metaphors, not physiological control theories. Definitions and source summaries are editorial descriptions rather than quotations. See the glossary for the site's usage.
Notice what is already here.
Include a little more.
Listen for what changes.
And return when you choose.