A Therapist-Built Coping Skills App For Daily Stress With Jack Wilson LMSW

I talk with Jack Wilson and Eric Malcolm about turning DBT-inspired, named coping skills into a simple phone app that helps you interrupt negative self-talk in real time. We break down how the app is structured, why self-talk drives so much anxiety and low mood, and how both clients and clinicians can use these tools day to day. 

• why Jack built a published list of named and defined coping skills 
• how negative self-talk prolongs anger anxiety depression and low self-esteem 
• the three categories of self-talk and why naming them helps 
• what you see in the app including 50 coping skills and organized coping methods 
• how coping strategies add step-by-step plans for persistent problems 
• using the template and AI prompt to build a personalized strategy 
• how clinicians can assign skills for home practice and review outcomes 
• plans to expand modules for couples parents kids teens and more 
• where to find PDFs the book Coping Skills For Everyday Life and other resources 

Visit Coping SkillsApps.com for more information on the app or on Jack's book. Feel free to connect on different social media platforms .

Transcript

Sabrina Duong (00:44)
Welcome to What Would Sabrina Say? I'm your host, Sabrina Duong. Here today on this episode, we're talking about a great coping skills app and tool for people to use every day. And we have the creator and founder as well, Jack Wilson, licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist out in Michigan. Thanks so much for joining us today, Jack.

Jack (01:07)
Thank Thanks for the invitation.

Sabrina Duong (01:09)
And I also have joining us today, Eric Malcolm, who helped with the creation of the app. Eric, if you'd like to also introduce yourself and we'll get started.

Eric Malcolm (01:17)
Yeah, I'm Eric Malcolm, I'm a software engineer. I help build the mobile app, mental health advocate and stuff like that. yeah, that's about it.

Sabrina Duong (01:31)
Great, thanks for joining. Just wanted to get started on how this app developed for you and where this all started, how the idea came about.

Jack (01:32)
Mm-hmm.

Well,

as a therapist, many times I would be asked for coping skills. And typically, that would mean brainstorming, coming up with something right on the spot and trying to make it work and that'd be it. But I decided that it would make sense to create a coping skill list to share with clients.

And then I discovered that dbt actually has been using what I now refer to as named and defined coping skills. And it made sense to me that, well, why should people who are not dbt clients, but would still benefit this don't have access to a published list of named and defined coping skills? So I went about creating that.

And then one of my younger clients said, this should be an app. And I thought that sounded like a good idea. So I set about looking for somebody who could help me with that. And I found Eric. And Eric has entered into this project with lots of enthusiasm and skill and expertise. And here we are.

Sabrina Duong (02:54)
That's great. And Jack, sounds like you've brought in your 30 plus years of clinical expertise and working with clients and creating this app. So it's really developed specifically for people helping with coping day to day. But if you wanted to maybe give an example of what it could be used for.

Jack (03:13)
Well, just to give you a little more about understanding. First of all, the concept of coping skills. Initially, was pretty, I mean, it's a generic kind of term that I never really thought about specifically. And I think maybe that's the way many people use it. But when I discovered that there is actually kind of a format or a name to define coping skill, I decided to start thinking about, how does that work?

And then I realized, as I thought about it, I realized that we all naturally use coping skills. Whenever we have a problem that we been confronted with and we have to come up with a response. And these coping skills typically are created and applied in the spot. Sometimes they're remembered, but rarely are they named. So these natural coping skills usually occur in our self-talk.

and sometimes occur in a discussion with another person. After discovering that DPT actually does this, and then I went ahead and created some coping skill sets, I began to share them with my clients. And this was probably back in 2017, so it's been a while. And through that process, I would get feedback. I would discuss the coping skill idea with my clients.

And we'd see how it works. We kind of follow the process. And I began sharing it with my colleagues and began getting other suggestions and slowly developed a format for what I call the coping skill set. And I initially started out with what I called coping skills for adults and then began to expand that into other sets.

and came up with COPI skills for couples and then COPI skills for parents. And then that followed COPI skills for kids and then COPI skills for teens. And then we began expanding beyond that so that we could provide COPI skills for more specific kinds of issues. And so we began, I began rather, this was earlier before I met Eric.

He said to come up because all those coping skills kind of fit with the family structure. So I came up with coping skills for specific like life circumstances, like chronic pain, coping skills for chronic pain, for dating, for pregnancy, for losing weight, for not smoking. Ended up with 25 different coping skill sets. And as we began to think about how can we make this into an app, obviously we had to start somewhere.

So we came up with the Culpey Scales for Adults. And we actually launched it back in September. So we've been offering it ever since then. And so far we're up to about almost 900 downloads without doing any advertising. We're getting the word out there. Mostly I've used taking advantage of being a LinkedIn member.

and expanding my contacts and offering the app to each new contact. And I've had a pretty good response so far. So that's kind where we're at with getting the app out there.

Sabrina Duong (06:23)
So when you talk about coping skills and just wondering if you can give people, examples like, is there visuals, is it exercises, the definitions, and also if you want to jump in, Eric, on like what people will find on the app and how it would be helpful.

Jack (06:42)
We did start with the same model that DBT uses, which typically is a logical positive statement that they give to their clients as guidelines, you know, to use when they're in stress or having difficulty. And so we didn't try to do anything visual or exercise-wise. Instead, we would offer

At least I would, when I was developing this, offer my coping skills ideas and talk about how the individual can apply it to their own specific needs. And then they would try it out, see if it worked, whether we had to modify it in some way. But the idea was to give them something to when they are caught up in negative self-talk to have a way to counteract that negative self-talk.

with a more optimistic or positive statement or a practical solution or something like that. And just kind of learned as I went and people did typically respond well. And it's just grown from there. Now, one of the things that I would typically do though, just kind of orient the person, you know, to the concept of self-taught.

because coping skills are typically used in our self-talk. I mean, we can come up with a coping skill in a discussion with somebody, like a therapist, or we can read about something and we can adopt it that way. But typically still people have to apply their method of coping with whatever their problem is in their own thinking process, which I like to refer to as self-talk.

So I would start out with a client who I wanted to introduce this topic to and say, I want to start out by offering you an interesting idea. It has to do with what I like to think of as your basic psychology. We all have a conversation in our own head all the time. At any given time, there may be any number of thoughts that you have.

in your internal conversation. It's useful to organize all those many thoughts into three categories, positive thinking, negative thinking, and neutral thinking. And then I would explain the difference between those. Neutral thinking has to do with basically thinking about something that has no emotional involvement.

Positive thinking typically has to do with optimistic feelings about things or a logical idea or a sense of confidence in what you're doing. Negative self-talk has to do with typically it could be where you're angry, maybe with other people, or maybe

You don't have any confidence in yourself. You may make self-taught statements like, can't do anything right. I fail at everything. I can't do anything right. Nobody likes me. All those kinds of self-deprecating kinds of thoughts that people get caught up in. And so that then I said, you know, now with this concept, you can make a distinction, an easy distinction between positive

negative and neutral thinking or self-talk. And from that point on, I talk about any time that you realize that you're engaged in negative self-talk, then this may well be to your advantage to interrupt it. But that's easier said than done. Because often coping skills are

very intrusive, they're repetitive, and it's hard to turn them off. So you need tools to help you with that. And the tool that works best, from my point of view, are something called coping skills. And then I would go ahead and give them examples of coping skills.

Sabrina Duong (10:48)
Great. I was wondering too, Eric, what the experience is like for you and what your goal or focus was in developing the app.

Eric Malcolm (10:56)
Yeah, for sure. So one of my main goals in, in developing the app was creating a, you know, easy to use, you know, sort of experience for, you know, mostly what Jack was talking about, right. just like, you know, named, defined coping skills quick, right. you know, so like currently you open up the app, you know, and it'll show you a list of 50 named and defined coping skills that are.

focused for adults and just general everyday life sort of stuff. then it just kind of groups all those together. There's another screen that has coping methods, which provides all the skills and stuff like that organized by different functions. And the ease of use of that and being able to make it free for anybody to be able to use.

was my main goals,

Sabrina Duong (11:42)
so wanting it to be accessible, easy to use, easy for people to find those coping tools, easy to find the definitions or terms. And I see that it's very easy to scroll through too and quick to turn to each section.

Eric Malcolm (11:45)
Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And in our main sort of sections right now in the app are, know, coping skills, coping methods, coping strategies, you know, and then we have different scenarios that, you know, people might be, you know, might be going through that they can, you know, reference, okay, if you use this method, do this, do that, you know. And then just a lot of references, definitions of the different stuff that they...

may or may not understand or just want to go deeper into.

Sabrina Duong (12:26)
Right, learning more about that skill or tool. Zach is wondering what outcome are you looking for for people to use this app? So we talked about self-talk being intrusive. What are you hoping that people can do in using the coping skills on the app?

Jack (12:45)
Well, first of all, I think most people will acknowledge that negative self-talk is a common affliction that we all kind of suffer with and it can prolong anger, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem. And when we get caught up with that, a lot of times we may not recognize it's happening initially, or when we do, we don't know what to do about it.

or we may get defensive or whatever. But what I want to do with the app is help people realize that when they do get caught up in negative self-talk, there is a way to counteract that by adopting some coping skills. So if they have the app and they know they do have that type of problem, they get angry easily, that type of thing, then by becoming familiar with the app,

they can identify some coping skills that are helpful for them. And I like to suggest that they adopt those skills. So they actually learn them. Then as time goes on, they may look for other skills, for other concerns or issues. So that kind of applies to just anybody at any time who realizes they're having a hard time managing their negative self-taught.

But we also know that some people will have a persistent problem that will be ongoing, a chronic anxiety, for example, or something like that. So we realized that, we have to offer people something for dealing with those chronic issues. So that is what the coping strategies are for. So I don't know if you've had a chance to look at it yet, but the coping strategies actually provide step

by step process that you can adopt as your strategy for managing your anxiety or your panic attacks or your depression, whatever it is for you. there's about 10 different examples of coping strategies in the app. And they're actually there to give examples of how you can develop a step by step

response to a persistent problem. So along with that, we've included a template and even an AI prompt that people can use to develop their own customized coping strategy. And so our hope is that people, once they become familiar with that, they'll begin doing that. So far in my actual practice, I've helped my clients do that.

But typically, I'm taking the lead. To be honest, I haven't had anyone actually say, I ran with this. I did the AI prompt. I came up with this great strategy. So I'm still looking for that.

Sabrina Duong (15:40)
I was wondering if you could share quickly,

how clinicians can use this in the practice. You gave examples of how you can introduce it and talk about it, but what are some ways? Would it be for home practice? Would there be follow-up? Just giving some examples of how the app can be used.

Jack (15:57)
Yeah, I kind of see the app for therapists. I see the app as a resource that they can share with clients. If they recognize that a client does have a chronic problem with anxiety, say, and they want to help that person develop a strategy for managing that, then they would offer the app as a tool to help them develop that. As opposed to having do it, do it with scratch, it's pretty structured.

You know, like the names of all the coping skills. We didn't have any DSM-5 to come up with those names. So obviously they were made up based on what makes sense. the first one, the Interruptions skill. Well, that makes sense because when you are realizing that you're engaged in negative self-talk, the first thing ideally that you would do is interrupt it.

and then try to refocus on something else. So it made sense that the very first skill on the list is the interrupt skill.

there's 50 different skills. what I often suggest to clients is go through the list, find four or five that you think would be helpful for you, and then try them out. So that would be something a therapist, any therapist could do with their clients. And then,

talk to them about it at the next session. How did that work? Did that help? Maybe is there another skill that you would maybe respond to better? The reason for the coping methods is it organizes all 50 skills into 10 categories. So that if you're struggling with anxiety, you can look at the calming strategy.

That would, that provides about four or five different coping skills that help somebody who typically is tense and needs to learn how to calm down and be relaxed. And then they can choose between them and try them out and see if they work.

Sabrina Duong (17:53)
That's great. Thank you for that example and walking us through how, it could be used for anyone day to day and not necessarily after a company therapy, but it can certainly be used with a therapist checking in, filling up, and asking how it's going and giving that as a tool.

Jack (18:05)
Alright.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

yeah. And so our intent now is to expand our app so it won't just be limited to coping skills for adults. Like I said, we have 25 different coping skill sets, coping skills for couples, parents, et cetera. And so our challenge has been how to make those available.

Initially, we thought we might put out, I don't know, 25 different apps, which probably wasn't very practical. So we've since come up with the idea of creating, making each of the, each set, each Copic skill set, a module that will be available in the basic app. And the Copic skills for adults will be the basic app that will come with the app for free.

The others, people can browse and see which ones they might be interested in. And then they can turn them on by paying a nominal fee.

And that's what we're working on right now.

Sabrina Duong (19:18)
Wow, that's great. people will be able to use your app for coping right in the moment. That's when people are needing something, right? In that time, that current present time. So it's so great to have that available.

Jack (19:26)
Yeah.

Yeah, we're hoping that it will be that practical resource as you described right in the moment. You just pull out your phone and you bring up the app and there it is. And if you're feeling the stress, maybe it can even help you immediately at the moment.

Sabrina Duong (19:47)
Right, and a great tool even for couples if they downloaded this each, right, the app and were able to work on it together.

Jack (19:53)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and we think too that as indicated by the first set of modules that I described, skills for couples, for parents, for kids, for teens, we might even be able to offer like a family package or something for a family that's having difficulties with behaviors and just getting along. And they might benefit.

as a family by having one module for each that would apply to their needs.

Sabrina Duong (20:25)
⁓

Jack (20:26)
Yeah.

And I'm excited for some of the other potential for some of the other apps. For example, when we get to coping skills for chronic pain. As a therapist, I've worked a lot with people who have chronic pain. And by definition, they've had lots of treatment, but the treatment is not taking care of the chronic pain. They still suffer with it. So what do they do? They need alternative ideas.

I've intrigued with the idea of using bilateral stimulation, where people chant or use other kinds of ways of using rhythm or I mean, or different ways that they can use to manage that pain that the medicine isn't helping them with. So I'm pretty excited about

developing that concept. This is more than just reading some ideas. It's giving you ideas that you can actually do things, like the tapping thing. Apparently, that's kind of connected with EMDR. That's bilateral stimulation. So I'm interested in that concept and how we can apply that.

We're working hard at it. We hope to have at least couples, parents, kids and teens out pretty soon.

Sabrina Duong (21:41)
Great. I was wondering where people would be able to reach you, Jack and Eric. They're wanting to know more information about the app and how to access it or for more information and resources. Is there a website or how they can connect with you?

Jack (21:57)
Yep,

CopingSkillsApps.com. So it's pretty simple, CopingSkillsApps.com. Did I say that right, Eric?

Eric Malcolm (22:08)
Yep, yep, coping skills app.com or coping skills apps.com. Either one will take it to us. Yeah, and feel free to connect with us on different social media, where we can reach out. We got contact form on the website, contact form within the app

Sabrina Duong (22:23)
Great. And are you open to, know, if people have feedback to give you on the app or just sharing their experience to you?

Jack (22:28)
for sure.

As I have reached out to my LinkedIn connections, I've invited every one of them, you know, to send feedback. That's how we met you was through that process. And you responded by saying, Hey, would you like to be on a podcast? And I've been getting a lot of responses from the many therapists who I've been contacting through this process. Some giving good ideas, some showing interest.

Eric Malcolm (22:32)
Yeah. ⁓

Jack (22:58)
I have learning from others who actually are also developing apps. So it's really been an interesting experience for me. Reaching out to basically, I'm up to 4,500 connections now.

Sabrina Duong (23:11)
I know we're talking about the app today, Jack, but just about yourself and other resources that you might have for people if they're interested in terms of books or. ⁓

Jack (23:16)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

our website does have a products section and it does identify, we have, in fact all those CopicSkill sets that I mentioned are available as PDFs.

And yeah, and we also, I wrote a book called Copic Skills for Everyday Life and it's featured on the app as well.

Sabrina Duong (23:31)
Thanks, Denise.

Jack (23:40)
it's available on Amazon. It's self-published, but it's available on Amazon.

Eric Malcolm (23:45)
yeah and you can get to it through the site as well to find it

Sabrina Duong (23:50)
Perfect. Well, thank you so much, both of you, and Jack, for your time today and joining me to talk about the Coping Skills app and so excited to hear about our next steps for it and plans. And I'm excited to share with others and seeing just such benefits and how it can help in that present moment tools and develop step by step action plan, right, and strategies.

Jack (24:02)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Sabrina Duong (24:16)
So thank you for your time. I'd love to have you back on and share any updates.

Jack (24:20)
Yeah, well, be very interested in doing it. Yeah, thanks.

Eric Malcolm (24:20)
Awesome. Thank you for having us.

Sabrina Duong (24:25)
And congrats on it too as well.