Adult Self Skills and Traits
24 Nurturing & Protective Adult Self Skills & Traits
| Empathic | Able to recognize someone’s distress and sense it from their perspective |
| Compassionate | Able to feel concern and sympathy for someone’s distress with an urge to relieve it. |
| Understanding | Able to fully comprehend and empathize with someone’s story of distress. |
| Accepting | Able to welcome and value someone as they are, with their strengths and weaknesses. |
| Patient | Able to stay calm, pleasant, and tolerant with someone who is distressed. |
| Nurturing | Able to be loving, patient, and kind while meeting someone’s physical/emotional needs. |
| Warm | Able to be welcoming, friendly, generous, affectionate, cordial, polite, and empathic. |
| Open | Able to listen to someone without prejudice. Approachable and friendly. |
| Able to attune | Able to read someone’s nonverbal cues and respond appropriately with empathy. |
| Good at listening | Able to hear someone’s verbal or nonverbal communication, comprehend it, and follow up with a thoughtful, attuned response. |
| Good with boundaries | Able to be nurturing and protective of self or others besetting and maintaining appropriate rules and limits in a kind, respectful way. |
| Reliable | Able to be reliable and dependable. Able to keep promises and commitments. |
| Trustworthy | Able to be honest and dependable. Worthy of someone’s confidence. |
| Confident | Able to feel self-assured in one’s actions and decisions. |
| Respectful | Able to convey to someone their intrinsic value by being kind and courteous. |
| Appropriately responsible | Able to make and fulfill appropriate commitments and obligations in the best interest of self and others. |
| Problem solver | Able to acknowledge a problem, understand it well, and find a solution. |
| Action taker | Able to take steps to solve a current problem or prevent a future problem. |
| Decision maker | Able to select a best option after thoughtful consideration of many. |
| Logical | Able to be rational and reasonable. ; |
| Strong | Able to be resilient in the face of adversity and stay grounded when distressed or confused. |
| Courageous | Able to stay present and lean in to deal with or withstand danger or adversity. |
| Protective | Able to take actions that prevent harm, reduce harm, or stop harm. |
| Grounded | Able to be “in the body,” in present time, with a sense of peace and stability. |
From “Ego State Therapy Interventions to Prepare Attachment-
Wounded Adults for EMDR” by Shirley Jean Schmidt
