Trauma Trigger Score: A Six-Domain Inventory

Two people finish this inventory on thirty points out of seventy-two. The first cannot stay in a room where two colleagues are disagreeing, and is perfectly comfortable being watched, filmed or put on stage. The second presents to two hundred people without a flicker and cannot let a stranger stand behind her in a queue.

The thirty they share tells you nothing whatever about either of them.

That is the case against a single total, and it is why this inventory produces six numbers and then refuses to add them up. The pattern across the domains is the result. The sum is noise.

How to score this

Six domains, four statements each. Score every statement on the same scale:

0. Not true of you.

1. Occasionally true.

2. Often true.

3. True almost every time the situation comes up.

Score for the last month, not for your life. Answer at speed, because the second thought is usually an argument with the first. Score what happens rather than what you would like to happen or what you can explain away afterwards.

Each domain gives a number out of twelve. Write the six down in order, side by side, and keep them separate.

Domain one: conflict

Not violence. Ordinary disagreement, two people wanting different things out loud.

• When a conversation turns disagreeable your thoughts empty out and the sentence you had is gone.
• You agree to something during an argument and work out afterwards that you did not agree with it.
• You rehearse a confrontation for hours before it happens and replay it for days afterwards.
• A raised voice in another room, aimed at somebody else entirely, changes your breathing.

Both the fight response and the freeze response live in this domain, and in the same person they often alternate inside a single argument.

Domain two: being observed

Attention on you while you are doing something, whether or not you are doing it well.

• Your hands become unreliable when somebody is watching you do something ordinary: typing, putting a key in a lock, signing your name.
• You avoid eating in front of people you do not know well.
• Being asked to speak in a meeting produces heat in the face and the loss of the thread before you have started.
• You reread a message you have already sent, working out how it looked to the person who got it.

This domain frequently runs alongside general background scanning, which the hypervigilance scale measures directly rather than by inference.

Domain three: physical touch

Contact, expected or otherwise, from people you know as well as people you do not.

• An unexpected hand on your shoulder produces a jolt out of all proportion to the touch.
• You brace very slightly when somebody moves inside arm's reach, including people you trust completely.
• A hug that lasts longer than you expected makes you want out of it.
• You notice that you go still rather than move away.

That last statement is the one most often scored zero by people for whom it is a three. Going still looks like acceptance from the outside, and it can be mistaken for acceptance from the inside too.

Domain four: authority

Anybody with the power to affect your circumstances: managers, landlords, officials, medical staff, police, and in some families, parents.

• An email from a manager, a landlord or an official body sits unopened for hours.
• You explain yourself at considerably more length than the question asked for.
• You become noticeably more agreeable in front of somebody with power over you than you are with friends.
• The words "can I have a word" begin a review of everything you might have done wrong.

Domain five: unpredictability

Not bad news. Any news you did not have a shape ready for.

• A change of plan at short notice takes the rest of the day with it, including a change in your favour.
• You need to know the shape of a day before you can start it.
• Somebody else's mood shifting without an explanation sets off a search for what changed.
• An unfamiliar place requires a period of standing still before you can act in it.

Domain six: being needed

Other people's requirements landing on you.

• A request for help produces yes before you have checked whether you can.
• You feel responsible for the mood of a room you are only standing in.
• You cannot settle while somebody in the house needs something, even something that could easily wait.
• Being told somebody is disappointed lands harder than being told they are angry.

This is the domain most often mistaken for a personality trait. The fawn response reads as reliability from outside, and the reliability is real. It is the absence of any choice about it that makes it a response, which is the same distinction the over-apologising test works on.

Six numbers, not one

Read each domain against these bands, and read them one at a time:

0 to 3. Not currently reactive.

4 to 6. Present and manageable.

7 to 9. Marked. This domain is shaping what you agree to and what you avoid.

10 to 12. High. Situations in this domain are being endured or worked around rather than handled.

Now the instruction that matters: do not add them up.

Thirty out of seventy-two can be produced by six fives, or by two twelves and four ones. Those are opposite situations. They feel different, they come from different places, and the thing that helps one does close to nothing for the other. Averaging is the single operation that destroys precisely the information you came here for.

Two people, the same total, different problems

Reader A scores 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5. Nothing in her life is intolerable and everything is slightly effortful. She gets to the end of the day flat and cannot point at a single incident that did it, because there was no incident. There were forty small ones.

Reader B scores 12, 11, 3, 2, 1, 1. Two domains, conflict and being observed, are running his life. The other four are quiet. He is fine on a plane, fine with strangers, fine with plans changing, and completely unavailable in a meeting where somebody might disagree with him while people watch.

Reader A needs the baseline raised: sleep, load, recovery time, the general amount she is carrying. Working specifically on conflict would achieve very little, because conflict is not her problem. Nothing is her problem, in particular.

Reader B needs the opposite. Sleep and load will help him by a small margin and will not touch the spikes, because the spikes are not made of tiredness. What he needs is graded work in two specific situations.

Both scored thirty. Given one number, both would have received the same advice, and it would have been wrong for at least one of them.

Reading a flat profile

A flat profile is one where the six numbers sit within about three points of each other.

Flat and low, everything under four. There is not much here to act on. If you came to this inventory because something is wrong, the something is not in these six domains, and it is worth looking at sleep, health, mood and load before looking at triggers at all.

Flat and moderate to high, everything six or above. This is a generally low threshold rather than a set of specific triggers. The content of the situation is not selecting the response; almost anything with a demand attached will do it. That changes what to work on. Stop hunting for the trigger, because there is not one, and go at the baseline instead: sleep first, then how much you are carrying, then how much recovery sits between demands.

A flat high profile that has appeared over the last few months, rather than being how you have always been, is a medical question before it is a psychological one. A persistently racing heart, jolting, flushing, breathlessness and a shortened fuse are all produced by thyroid disorders, anaemia, arrhythmia, inner-ear problems, unstable blood sugar, heavy caffeine and the side effects of a long list of common medications. Get those ruled in or out first. A trigger inventory cannot tell the difference between an overactive thyroid and a low threshold, because from the inside there is no difference.

Reading a single spike

A spike is one domain sitting four or more points above the rest.

This is, in a narrow sense, the good result. It is specific, which means it is addressable. It tells you that five parts of your life are working and one is not, and it names the one.

What to do differently: work inside the domain rather than around it, starting at the easiest version of the situation rather than the one that frightens you most. General regulation raises the floor a little and will not move a spike, in the same way that going to bed earlier does not make you better at swimming.

A single tall spike is also the profile most likely to have something specific behind it, and the one most worth naming out loud to a trauma-informed therapist rather than working on alone.

Reading two spikes

Two spikes usually share a theme, and when they do, treat them as one thing rather than two.

Conflict and authority. The shared axis is power. Both are situations where somebody else can impose an outcome and your job, historically, was to manage them.

Being observed and being needed. The shared axis is appraisal. Both are situations where you are being judged on your performance, one openly and one as a helper.

Unpredictability and touch. The shared axis is not knowing what is about to happen to your body. Both are about the next second rather than the next hour.

Conflict and being needed. This pairing usually means accommodation is being used to prevent disagreement, and it is the most common two-spike profile on the site. The accommodation is doing a job, which is why simply stopping it does not work.

Where two spikes do not share a theme, take the taller one first. Work in two directions at once tends to produce work in neither.

Rescoring in six weeks

Score it again in six weeks, and write the date next to the numbers along with two notes: how you have been sleeping, and what kind of week it was.

Both of those move the numbers by several points in either direction, which is worth knowing before you interpret a change as progress or as decline.

When you compare, compare the shape rather than the size. Six numbers that have all dropped by two are the same profile on a better week. A twelve that has come down to a seven while everything else held is an actual change in one domain.

Where this inventory stops

• Six domains is not all of the domains. Loss, money, illness, medical settings, driving and sexual situations are not represented here, and for some people one of those is the whole story.
• Every number is self-report. It is your account of your reactions, which is a real source of information and a partial one.
• There are no norms behind these bands. Nobody has scored a population against them, so a nine means nine of these twelve points and nothing more.
• Nothing here diagnoses. A high domain score is not a disorder and no combination of the six adds up to one, however tall the profile looks.
• A professional assessment is a different exercise: a full history, a structured interview, medical causes excluded, and a trained person present while you answer.

One thing a trigger score cannot do at all is tell you whether a situation is safe. A trauma response never excuses frightening, controlling or violent behaviour by anybody. If you are being frightened or controlled by someone close to you, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available on 1-800-799-7233, 24 hours a day.

Related reading: the decision paralysis test measures where choosing stops working, the stress language test sorts which response arrives first and which arrives second, and the trauma and fear response test covers the same ground in a single scored pass.