Two phases. One artifact.

Why recognition, not articulation

The blank page is the obstacle most people cannot get past. Therapists assign the unsent-letter exercise routinely; the page stays empty. The feelings are present; the words are not.

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 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 1 — Assessment

Two frameworks, one questionnaire. 200 questions total — 69 covering abuse and neglect, 131 covering dysfunctional family dynamics. 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.

Two assessment-only signals

• Review — flag this for a second look before you finish.
• Triggering — mark this as something you want excluded from the letter.

The letter respects both. Items you mark triggering are not used to compose your letter unless you explicitly opt them in.

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.

Before the assessment: a safety check

Two short instruments run before the main assessment:

• SRS-8 (Safety Risk Screener). Eight questions maximum, two for low-risk respondents, with adaptive branching. If the screener detects acute risk, the assessment is paused and crisis resources are surfaced before anything else. The eighth question is intentionally about help-seeking readiness — a quiet therapeutic contact point, not just data collection.
• PWA-9 (Personal Wellbeing Assessment). Nine questions measuring current wellbeing across seven dimensions, plus a perceived-trajectory signal and a distress-tolerance signal. The output is a baseline, not a diagnosis.

Both instruments 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, and we say so plainly.

Screening data lives in your browser session only and is deleted when the tab closes.

The customisation step

Between the assessment and the letter, a short customisation step shapes what you receive.

• Writing style. Nine styles for letters to parents, six for letters to a partner, and seven for letters to your younger self — ranging from a balanced therapeutic voice to clinical, confrontational, allegorical, journal-raw, and reparenting registers. Each style adjusts tone and structure, not the facts your letter is built from.
• Recipient. Parents (default), partner, or your younger self.
• Letter structure. Standard (a therapeutic 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).
• Length. Approximate page count.
• Score threshold. Items below this score are omitted by default. Default is 3 — moderate or significant impact only.
• Item-by-item exclusions. You can drop any specific question from the letter regardless of its score.

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

Phase 2 — Letter generation

The letter is assembled from your answers. It is not interpreted, not diagnosed, not extrapolated.

What goes into the letter

• The questions you confirmed at or above your score threshold.
• Their attribution (Mom, Dad, Both).
• Your personal notes, if you wrote any.
• Your customisation choices.

What does not

• Generic content the model invents.
• Items you marked triggering and did not opt in.
• Items below your threshold.
• Anything the system does not have evidence of from your responses.

The mechanism. The model's job is assembly — turning structured data into prose, in the style you chose, addressed to the recipient you chose. The human truth comes from your answers. The model is the pen, not the author.

The output. A .docx document. Yours to keep, print, share with a therapist, hand to a trusted person, send to the recipient, or never open again. The choice is yours — we make none of it for you.

Generation time. Seconds, in most cases. What might take months to articulate in therapy is assembled from your assessment.

See Evidence for the academic basis of each letter style and the eight 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.

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.

Contained, not open-ended. There is a beginning and an end. You complete the assessment, you receive a letter, you have a tangible artifact. The process does not extend itself indefinitely. For people whose anxiety is partly driven by open-endedness, this is the point.

One short note about retraumatisation

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:

• A safety screener 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 on any question you want excluded from the letter.
• Pause-and-resume at any point.
• A reset that fully removes your responses from the database.
• Crisis resources surfaced on every public page.

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.