Written by clinicians. Checked by clinicians.

Last updated September 27, 2026

You are about to trust a website with something that matters. Before you do, you should know exactly who made what you are reading, what they drew on, and where its limits are. Here is all of it.

• Counseling

  Master’s degree in counseling. Fifteen years of clinical experience in mental health, licensed as a counselor for ten of those years.

• Psychiatric nursing

  Board certified psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, APRN. Ten years of clinical practice.

• 78 manuals

  Every one of them developed and reviewed by both.

Two clinicians, two vantage points

The manuals on this site are developed and reviewed by two clinicians who come at the same problems from different sides of the room.

One brings a master’s degree in counseling and fifteen years of clinical experience in mental health, and was licensed as a counselor for ten of those years. That is the side of the work that spends the hour with someone: how a course of work is paced, which skill has to come before which, the exercises that hold up between sessions, and the questions that turn out to matter.

The other is a board certified psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner with ten years of clinical practice. That is the medical side: how symptoms actually present, when something is more than a rough patch, when sleep, a medication, or a physical cause needs a prescriber’s attention, and when the honest answer is to stop reading and get seen.

Most self-help is written from one of those chairs. These are written from both, and every manual on this site has been developed and reviewed by each of them.

Why these exist

The same conversation happens over and over in clinical practice, and most of it can be written down. The structure of a good course of work, the order things go in, the practice between sessions, the things people are relieved to hear are normal: all of that survives being put on a page. What cannot be written down is the reason clinicians exist, and nothing here pretends otherwise.

Meanwhile, most people who want help wait weeks for a first appointment, and many never get one at all. A manual is the part of the work we can hand over now. Read it while you wait, alongside the care you already have, or on its own if that is what you decide.

What goes into every manual

• A safety page first. Every manual opens on what to do if you are in danger, and says plainly when a manual is the wrong tool and a person is the right one.
• Its reasoning, up front. The second page of every manual names the approaches it is built from and why they fit the problem, so you know what you are working with before you start.
• Established approaches, not trends. The material draws on methods that are well established in the clinical literature and taught as standard practice: cognitive behavioral therapy and the methods that grew out of it, behavioral activation, exposure based work, grief and bereavement models, and the sleep protocols used for insomnia.
• Plain language. Written for the person living it, not for a textbook. No jargon you have to look up to follow along.
• Work you actually do. Each manual is a sequence of modules with exercises you write into, saved to your account so you can pick up where you left off on any device.

One honest limit. Saying an approach has strong research behind it is not the same as promising you a result, and we do not promise results. People differ, circumstances differ, and a manual read on your own is not the same as the studies those methods were tested in. What we promise is that this is real clinical material, built and checked by people who have used it in practice, and not repackaged internet advice.

What you can count on

• Privacy that is structural, not a setting. No advertising pixels, no conversion trackers, no social media buttons, and no data sold or shared for advertising. Card details go to Stripe and never reach us. The privacy policy has the detail.
• Yours to keep. One purchase, no subscription, nothing that renews quietly in the background.
• A fair refund. Fourteen days from purchase if you have opened fewer than three modules. The terms spell it out, and we do not make people argue for it.
• Built to be usable. The site is built to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 at Level AA, and tested with a keyboard alone, at 200% zoom, and at phone width. What was tested.
• People, not a ticket queue. Mail to support@myownmanual.com comes to us.

What a manual is not

These manuals are educational material. They are not therapy, diagnosis, or medical care. Buying one does not make you anyone’s client or patient, does not create a clinician and patient relationship, and does not put anything you write into a clinical record. We do not know your situation and we are not assessing you, so nothing here is individual advice, and a reply from support is never clinical guidance.

If you are already working with a clinician, tell them you are using this. Most will be glad of it. If you are thinking about suicide or you are not safe, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or go to your nearest emergency department.

Contact

My Own Manual is published by The Space in Between LLC.
support@myownmanual.com