Four phases. One letter.

The approach, in plain terms

Aletheia is a structured way to put a childhood into words. At its centre is a 200-question self-assessment in which every question describes a specific experience in plain first-person language — something that happened in childhood, or a pattern in adult life that grew out of it. You read each one and mark whether it is true for you, who it involved, and — most importantly — how much it affected you. The assessment measures your experience as you lived it, not events as a record.

Around the assessment sits a safety layer: a short safety check before you begin, crisis resources within reach throughout, and pacing that you control. Nothing pushes you forward; everything waits for you.

When the assessment is complete, the product assembles what you confirmed into a letter with a named recipient. The primary recipient is your parents — the people at the centre of the experiences the assessment covers, and usually the ones responsible for them; the letter can address both of them or just one. You can instead address your younger self, or a partner you want to understand you better. Whoever you choose, the letter is written in a style you choose, built only from your own answers, and yours to download as a document you keep. The rest of this page walks through each phase in detail.

Contained, not open-ended. The process has a beginning and an end: you complete the assessment, you receive a letter, you have something you can hold. The full result arrives at once — nothing is stretched out to keep you engaged. If you want more from it, that door stays open: the assessment can serve as a place for ongoing self-reflection and note-taking for as long as it is useful to you. But that is a choice, never a requirement. For people whose anxiety is partly driven by open-endedness, the closed shape is the point.

Why recognition, not articulation

Start from a common experience: you sit down to make sense of your past — in a journal, in a notes app, in the unsent letter a therapist suggested — and nothing specific comes. The feelings are present; the words are not. The blank page defeats the attempt before it starts.

The therapy room has its own version of it: sitting across from a therapist, trying to answer what brings you here — knowing something is wrong without being able to name it. A good therapist helps draw it out, session by session, but that first uncomfortable naming is the same obstacle in another form.

Recognition removes that requirement. A specific experience, described in plain first-person language, is easier to confirm or reject than to invent from scratch. You read each question and know — sometimes with a quiet yes, sometimes with a wince — whether it applies to you. The same holds at the writing end: a letter is far easier to shape from confirmed material than to compose from nothing.

The 200 questions in the assessment are written this way on purpose: in the voice of someone describing what happened to them, not in the voice of a clinician describing a symptom.

See Evidence for the research behind why recognition-based formats produce greater disclosure than open-ended writing.

Phase 0 — Before the assessment: a safety check

Confronting childhood material can stir things up. Before the main assessment, you answer two short sets of questions — one to make sure the timing is safe, one to record how you are doing as you begin:

• The safety check (SRS-8). Its one purpose is to check that taking the assessment is safe for you right now. It asks at most eight questions — most people answer just two — and adapts to your answers as it goes. If it detects acute risk, the assessment is paused and crisis resources are surfaced before anything else. The final question is deliberately about readiness to seek help — a quiet nudge toward support, not just data collection.
• The wellbeing snapshot (PWA-9). Nine questions that capture how you are doing as you start: your current wellbeing across seven areas of everyday life, how you feel things are trending, and how much distress you can currently absorb. It gives the app a starting point to compare against later — a baseline, not a diagnosis.

Both question sets are original works built for the specific context of unsupervised digital self-administration. Both have face validity and follow established psychometric principles; neither has been empirically validated in a peer-reviewed study yet.

Screening results are kept as an encrypted wellbeing history — readable only with a key you alone hold, like your assessment answers — so the app can offer periodic re-checks and show you your wellbeing trend over time. Saving these trends is on by default; you can turn it off any time from your account, which removes the saved trend data and keeps only what the safety re-check schedule needs. For the safety check itself, only the overall risk level it produced is kept: the individual answers and anything you type there are never stored.

Phase 1 — Assessment

The assessment is the heart of the product: a structured questionnaire of 200 specific experiences, each in plain first-person language. Its purpose is to let you identify, attribute, and weigh what actually happened — so the letter that follows is built from material you confirmed, not from whatever surfaced on the day.

Two frameworks, one questionnaire. The questions come from two frameworks because they cover two different bodies of experience: 69 questions cover abuse and neglect, 131 cover dysfunctional family dynamics — the quieter patterns of everyday family life. You can run the full assessment or scope it to one framework.

What you do for each question

1. Recognise it. Did this happen to you?
2. Attribute it. Mom, Dad, or Both — who was responsible.
3. Score the impact. A 0–4 scale measuring how much it affected you.
4. (Optional) Add a personal note. A short comment in your own words.

What the scale means

The scale is intentionally simple. You are not diagnosing yourself. You are giving the system a sense of what registered.

Marks you can set while you answer

• Review — flag a question you want to come back to before you finish.
• Skip — set a question aside without answering it.
• Triggering — mark an experience that feels raw or activating regardless of the score you gave it. This is a weight signal: a way of saying this carries more than the number suggests.

The letter treats these differently. Review and Skip are unfinished business — the letter never builds on them. Experiences marked Triggering are left out by default, and a single choice in the customisation phase brings them all in — including any that fall below your score threshold.

Pace

Progress is auto-saved. You can leave at any point and return where you left off. There is no time limit and no encouragement to push through.

A pattern that works well: make a quick first pass and answer everything that is immediately clear, marking Review on anything that needs thought — then return for a slower, more careful second pass on what you flagged. The first pass builds familiarity with the questions and calibrates your sense of the scale; the second pass is where accuracy happens. You are not expected to get everything right the first time through.

Your saved progress is encrypted with your account passphrase — what is stored on our side cannot be read by us. See Privacy & Security for details.

Standalone value. The assessment has value even if you never generate a letter. Systematically identifying and rating your experiences provides clarity, validation, and a sense of control. The letter compounds that — but the assessment does not require it.

Phase 2 — Customisation

Between the assessment and the letter sits the phase that defines what you will receive. No letter exists yet — here you set the frame it will be written inside, stacking choices on top of what you confirmed in the assessment. And like the assessment, this phase works by recognition: you pick from options you can read and weigh, rather than having to specify anything from a blank page.

Every option has a sensible default. Accepting the defaults gets you a letter quickly; exploring the options takes longer and rewards the time, because this is the stage that shapes the output. There is no right pace.

• Recipient. Who the letter addresses:
  • Parents (default) — childhood experiences addressed directly to the people they involve. The letter can go to both parents, or to one — keeping or leaving out the experiences they shared.
  • Your younger self — a reparenting letter to the part of you that still carries what happened.
  • A partner — helping them understand the patterns and needs your childhood left behind.
• Letter structure. Standard (a pre-set section format — 8 sections for parents, 6 for partner, 7 for younger-self), Auto (the model organises the flow), or Custom (an outline you write yourself).
• Writing style. 9 styles for letters to parents, 6 for letters to a partner, and 7 for letters to your younger self — ranging from a balanced default voice to clinical, confrontational, allegorical, journal-raw, and reparenting registers. Each style adjusts tone and structure, not the facts your letter is built from.
• Length. Approximate page count — from 1 to 10 pages, default 4.
• Score threshold. The automatic pre-selection: every experience you scored at or above the threshold is in the letter by default, everything below it is left out. The default is 3 — significant or maximum impact only — and you can move it.
• Item-by-item control. Beyond the threshold, you can drop any specific experience from the letter regardless of its score, and choose whether the experiences you marked Triggering are included at all.

The personal notes you wrote during the assessment travel with their experiences into the letter, and the Custom structure option is where you can shape the letter's outline in your own words.

Nothing here is hidden behind a paywall. The customisation is part of the same flow.

Phase 3 — Letter generation

When you press generate, the product gathers everything the previous phases produced — the experiences that qualified, who you attributed each one to, your notes, and the frame you set in customisation — and hands it, under strict instructions, to a language model (an AI). This is the one place AI is used, and it is used for the thing it is genuinely good at: reading a large set of confirmed experiences at once and composing them into a coherent whole — grouping related experiences, addressing each to the right parent, and naming the feelings and patterns they add up to — in the style, structure, and length you chose.

It works only from what you gave it. It is not asked to invent experiences, diagnose you, or add anything you did not confirm.

What goes into the letter

• The experiences you confirmed at or above your score threshold — plus the Triggering ones, if you chose to include them.
• Their attribution (Mom, Dad, Both).
• Your personal notes, if you wrote any.
• Your customisation choices.
• The feelings, consequences, and patterns those experiences add up to — deduced from what you confirmed, and only from what you confirmed.

What does not

• Generic content the model invents.
• Experiences you marked Triggering and did not opt in.
• Experiences below your threshold, and any you excluded by hand.
• Anything the system does not have evidence of from your responses.

The mechanism. The model's job is composition — turning your confirmed experiences into prose in the voice you chose. Where the letter names a feeling, a motive, or a pattern, it is drawn out of the experiences you confirmed, never imported from outside them. The human truth comes from your answers; the model gives it form.

The output. A .docx document. Yours to keep, print, share with a therapist, hand to a trusted person, or send to the recipient. Some people never send it at all — reading it aloud, putting it away, or even ceremonially burning it can be the point. The choice is yours — we make none of it for you.

Generation time. Seconds, in most cases.

See Evidence for the research behind each letter style and the seven mechanisms behind why a structured letter has therapeutic value.

What the letter is, and what it is not

It is a personalised document built from your own identified experiences, in coherent form, in the style and structure you chose.

It is not therapy. It is not a diagnosis. It is not a clinical instrument. It is not a substitute for professional support, especially in acute crisis or for clinical-level conditions.

One short note about retraumatisation

This last note sits apart from the phases above, because it applies to the whole practice. Trauma-informed care guidelines (SAMHSA TIP 57) are clear that confronting traumatic material without sufficient safety supports can do harm. We take this seriously.

The protections built into the flow:

• The Phase 0 safety check before the assessment, with crisis intervention if it triggers.
• A wellbeing baseline before you begin.
• Self-paced recognition rather than open-ended writing — graduated, not flooding.
• A Triggering mark that keeps raw experiences out of the letter unless you deliberately include them.
• Pause-and-resume at any point.
• A reset that removes your responses from the app immediately.
• Crisis resources surfaced on every public page, expanding into a full directory of crisis lines.

Self-paced, structured, recognition-based formats are at the safer end of the exposure spectrum. They are not zero-risk, and we do not pretend otherwise.

See Privacy & Security for what reset deletes and what is never stored in the first place.