A 42-item situational assessment that maps which of five core emotional wounds runs deepest in you: Abandonment, Rejection, Humiliation, Injustice, and Betrayal. Inspired by Lise Bourbeau's five-wounds model and the early maladaptive schema framework of schema therapy (Jeffrey Young). Every item is original and describes a specific everyday moment, reaction, or choice rather than diagnosing you, and each subscale includes reverse-keyed items to balance the picture. Your overall score reflects how active these wounds are on average, and the breakdown shows which wound runs deepest (your primary) and which is next (your secondary). Built for self-understanding and reflection, not clinical diagnosis.
Your result is broken down across 5 distinct dimensions rather than collapsing everything into a single number. Each dimension is scored from its own set of items, so you can see which specific pattern is driving your overall result.
Scores fall into one of 5 interpretive bands. Here is what each one means, what tends to sit underneath it, and what usually helps.
Lightly Marked
None of the five wounds runs especially deep for you right now. Even your highest subscale landed at the low end, which suggests you mostly meet people and situations as they actually are rather than through an old hurt.
What it suggests
Your strongest wound theme barely registered, and your reverse-keyed answers backed that up rather than contradicting it. That points to a fairly secure baseline: when a text goes unanswered or a plan falls through, you're more likely to reach for an ordinary explanation than a catastrophic one. Either your early relationships gave you a stable footing, or you've already done real work to soften these patterns.
What helps
Notice the few specific situations where your top subscale still flickers, because those quiet moments are your growth edges even when the overall picture is calm. Treat this as a baseline and consider retaking the assessment after a genuinely depleting stretch, since wounds surface most when we're tired, threatened, or stretched thin.
Tender in Places
One or two wounds show up here and there, mostly under pressure, but they don't run your daily life. Once the moment passes, you can usually see around them.
What it suggests
Your highest-scoring wound is the lens that snaps into focus when you're stressed, tired, or caught off guard, and the rest of the time you can mostly correct for it. The subscale that topped your profile is the story you're most likely to fall back into when a relationship turns uncertain or a moment goes ambiguous, but it's a tendency, not a default.
What helps
When your dominant wound flares, try naming it plainly to yourself, 'this is my fear of being left,' or 'this is my fairness radar,' to buy a half-second of distance before you react. Pick one recurring trigger this month and rehearse a steadier response in advance, so the old reflex has some competition the next time it fires.
Clearly Patterned
A distinct primary wound is shaping how you read closeness, conflict, and trust, with a secondary wound layered underneath. Together they color a real portion of your relational life.
What it suggests
Your profile shows a clear lead wound paired with a supporting one, and together they form a consistent way you interpret other people, often filling ambiguous moments with exactly the meaning your wound expects. The people closest to you have likely learned to navigate around this pattern, stepping carefully in certain spots, even if no one has ever named it out loud.
What helps
Study the gap between what literally happened and the meaning you assigned it, because your wound lives in that gap and catching it in real time is most of the work. Consider structured support, guided journaling, a schema-informed workbook, or a few sessions with a therapist who works with attachment, since a pattern you can name is far easier to change than one you can't.
Deeply Driven
A core wound is doing a lot of the driving, strongly coloring your closest relationships and your sense of self. Even neutral moments tend to get pulled into a familiar painful storyline.
What it suggests
Scores this high mean your primary wound isn't an occasional reaction but a near-default interpretation that can override the evidence in front of you, so even caring behavior gets filtered into the old storyline of being abandoned, rejected, shamed, wronged, or betrayed. This is exhausting to carry, and it almost always traces back to something real that happened to you, not a flaw in your character.
What helps
The protective strategies that once kept you safe, pulling away, over-giving, score-keeping, leaving first, scanning for the catch, are likely now costing you the very closeness you want, so the goal is to update the strategy rather than blame yourself for having it. Working with a therapist trained in schema therapy or attachment repair usually moves this faster than going it alone, and a structured daily support tool can be a steady companion alongside that work.
Wound at the Wheel
Your responses point to a powerfully active core wound steering much of how you experience connection and safety. The painful interpretation tends to arrive instantly and feel like plain fact.
What it suggests
At this intensity the wound and your read on reality have largely fused, so the painful interpretation lands the moment something is ambiguous and feels indistinguishable from the truth, which makes relationships feel high-stakes and unsafe far more often than the situations themselves warrant. That depth almost always reflects early experiences that genuinely overwhelmed you; it's a measure of how hard you've worked to protect yourself, not evidence that you're broken.
What helps
This is the level where self-help alone rarely reaches the root, so prioritize working with a licensed therapist experienced in trauma, schema therapy, or attachment repair, who can help you separate the old wound from the present moment. In the meantime, lean on steady daily support and the few people who have actually earned your trust, and treat the intensity as information about what needs care, not a verdict on who you are.
Core Wound Identifier contains 42 items and takes about 10 minutes. Responses are combined using a subscale weighted method across the dimensions listed above, then mapped to the interpretive bands above. Your percentile is an interim estimate that sharpens as more people take the test, and is labelled as provisional in your result.
This assessment also includes hidden validity items that detect inattentive or socially-desirable answering. When they trigger, your result carries a lowered confidence rating and we tell you — rather than presenting a skewed score as fact.
The test ships in 10 parallel forms that rotate between takes, so repeat visitors do not simply memorise the same items.
This is an educational, self-reflective assessment — not a diagnosis. A questionnaire can describe a pattern and point you toward language for it, but it cannot account for your history, context, or circumstances, and it is not a substitute for evaluation by a qualified professional. If a result concerns you, treat it as a reason to talk to someone rather than as a verdict.
Your answers are scored on your device. Taking this test requires no account, no email address, and no payment, and your full result — every band, every dimension — is shown to you immediately and in full.