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Childhood Trauma Checklist: Score Descriptions


Thank you for completing the checklist. Please find a summary of your checklist score below. 

If you’re interested in learning more about childhood trauma, you can check out my
Guide to Childhood Trauma. An e-book version of this guide will be emailed to you.

I will also email you a copy of the symptoms you selected in case you’d like to refer to them in the future.

If you would like to discuss your score, or would like further support please complete my intake form.

Please note that this checklist is a general guide and is not intended to provide an assessment or a diagnosis. It offers a general indication of potential areas that could be related to trauma. If you find that several of these apply to you, it could suggest that there are unresolved issues worth addressing and it might be helpful to explore them further with a mental health professional, who can provide a more thorough assessment.

You selected the following symptoms:

Emotional
Symptoms

es-answers

Behavioural
Symptoms

behavioural-answers

Cognitive
Symptoms

cognitive-answers

Somatic / Physical Symptoms

somatic-answers

Sensory
Symptoms

sensory-answers

Total number of symptoms selected: 100

0-7
Some – Reasonable impact

It seems like you have probably experienced relational trauma in your childhood. Your past could be impacting several areas of your life, such as emotional reactions that are hard to manage, challenges with relationships, or overwhelming feelings. It might be worth checking in with a trauma therapist who can help you heal the past.

8-15
Moderate Impact

It seems like you may have experienced a reasonable amount of relational trauma in your childhood. Your past might be impacting quite a few areas of your life. You may be experiencing difficult emotional reactions or challenges with relationships, or maybe feelings of overwhelm that are hard to manage. I would encourage you to check in with a trauma therapist who can help you heal the past.

16-24
Noticeable Impact

It seems like you have experienced quite a bit of relational trauma in your childhood. Your past might be impacting lots of areas of your life. You may be experiencing challenging emotional reactions, relationship difficulties, and feelings of overwhelm that are hard to manage. You may also struggle with an eating disorder, substance abuse issue and/or self-harm. I would really encourage you to check in with a trauma therapist who can help you heal the past.

25-31
Significant Impact

It seems like you may have experienced a lot of relational trauma in your childhood. Your past might be impacting lots of areas of your life. You may be experiencing complex emotional reactions, relationship challenges, and feelings of overwhelm that are difficult to manage. You may also struggle with an eating disorder, substance abuse issue and/or self-harm. I would strongly encourage you to check in with a trauma therapist who can help you heal the past. 

32-37
Deep Impact

It seems like you may have experienced a huge amount of relational trauma in your childhood. Your past might be impacting lots of areas of your life. You may be experiencing complex emotional reactions, relationship challenges, and feelings of overwhelm that are difficult to manage. You may also struggle with an eating disorder, substance abuse issue and/or self-harm. You might even find that you have frequent memory gaps or periods of time that you can’t recall or that you have a sense of being more than one person. I would strongly encourage you to check in with a trauma therapist who can help you heal the past. 

Relational Trauma

This checklist relates to relational trauma, which is childhood trauma that occurred within your family environment as a child. Relational trauma is tricky because, unlike one-off events like car accidents, where you can point to a specific incident and see a clear result—like a broken leg—it’s quite different. Relational trauma happens over years and is often invisible to outsiders. There’s no single event or visible injury to show for it. Sometimes, we don’t even fully grasp all the nuances of what happened (or didn’t happen) and how it impacted us.

Symptoms like depression, emotional overwhelm, anxiety and most of the others listed in the checklist, seem to have no similarity to the trauma of childhood, so most of the time we don’t connect the symptoms to trauma from the past.

What the symptoms actually are, are triggers or bodily memories from the past (with the exception of eating disorders, addictions, and self-harm, which are ways to manage the feelings from the past). For example, imagine that every time you check your emails in the morning, your anxiety spikes and your heart races because you’re dreading what you might find. Even though you never encounter anything that bad, you always anticipate the worst. 

What’s happening is that the current situation (checking your emails and experiencing the anticipation of what you might find) is triggering a bodily memory from childhood (or maybe adolescence), when you repeatedly anticipated something frightening and your flight response (anxiety) was triggered. The fact that you’re experiencing this anxiety now, shows that there’s past trauma that hasn’t been healed.

This checklist is just a general guide

As a final note, it’s really important to remember that this checklist is just a general guide. If you have a strong reaction because your experience or the suggested actions don’t quite fit, please trust your reaction over this guide. Your body is giving you valuable information, so make sure to listen to it.