The Trust Disruption Assessment (Trust Disruption Scale for Partners)

A free, confidential 20-question self-assessment for anyone whose trust has been deeply shaken by betrayal — infidelity, secret sexual behaviour, or compulsive pornography use. It takes about five minutes and gives you a total score plus four subscale scores.

It is not a measure of how badly you were hurt. It is a picture of where the relationship stands now, and how far the work of rebuilding has come.

Who this is for

Partners. If you are the one who discovered something, this is written for you and about your experience — not as an appendix to somebody else's recovery.

You do not need to have decided anything about the relationship to take it. People take this while committed to repair, while unsure, and while working out whether to leave. The assessment does not push in any direction and it does not assume an outcome. That decision is yours and nobody else's.

Which direction the score runs

Worth saying plainly, because it runs the opposite way to most screening tools: on this assessment a higher score is better. The total runs from 0 to 80, and the higher it is, the more likely it is that trust is genuinely being rebuilt. A low score means safety and honesty are not yet in place — not that you are doing something wrong.

What it measures

Four areas, each scored separately, so you can see where repair is happening and where it is not.

Emotional safety and support

Whether you feel connected to your partner and genuinely understood by them, or whether you are managing your own distress alone. Betrayal damages the relationship you would normally turn to for comfort, which is part of what makes it so disorienting.

Honesty, transparency and accountability

Whether you can believe what your partner tells you now. This is usually the slowest area to move, and the one that matters most: repair does not run on apologies, it runs on a track record of small truths accumulating over time.

Sexual safety and fidelity

Your confidence in your partner's sexual commitment, and whether intimacy feels safe rather than fraught. It is common for this area to lag well behind the others even when things are otherwise improving.

Residual betrayal impact

The pain that is still with you — intrusive images, hypervigilance, sudden flooding of feeling long after the discovery. These are ordinary responses to betrayal, not evidence that you are stuck or failing to move on, and they respond well to the right kind of support.

How it works

Twenty questions, about five minutes, answered privately. Nothing is timed and there are no right answers.

At the end you see your total, your four subscale scores, and a plain explanation of each. You can have a copy emailed to you, and if you are working with a therapist you can have it sent to them as well. Your responses are kept confidential.

What your score means

The total runs from 0 to 80 and falls into three ranges. A score is a snapshot of one moment, and on this assessment scores move — that is rather the point of taking it again later.

A total of 0 to 26

Trust is badly damaged and the relationship does not currently feel safe. If your score is here, that is a description of your situation, not a judgement of you. Almost everyone lands in this range in the period straight after a discovery, and support at this stage makes a real difference to what the next year looks like.

A total of 27 to 53

A mixed and often confusing picture: some repair is happening, but you are still uncertain, and your feelings probably contradict each other from one day to the next. That contradiction is normal in the middle of this work rather than a sign that it is not working.

A total of 54 to 80

Relative safety has returned and trust is genuinely being rebuilt. That does not mean the betrayal no longer matters or that hard days have stopped — it means the foundation is holding while the rest continues to heal.

What this assessment is not

This assessment is intended for self-reflection only. It is not a diagnostic tool and it does not replace professional mental health care, therapy, or medical advice.

It also cannot tell you whether to stay or go. It measures where things stand, not what you should do about it, and a low score is not an instruction any more than a high one is a guarantee.

If your score is low

The most useful thing to know is that betrayal trauma is a recognised experience with established ways of treating it, and that partners recover whether or not the relationship does. Support for you is not contingent on what your partner decides to do.

We work with partners directly, and have written about the stages of partner recovery and about intrusive thoughts after discovery. There is a self-paced healing course if you would rather begin on your own, and we also work with couples together where both people want that.

Other tools and reading

If the behaviour behind the betrayal is what you are trying to understand, there is the Sexual Addiction Screening Test — note that it runs the other way round, where a higher score indicates more concern. We have also written about sex addiction, pornography addiction, and relapse.

You can browse our other self-discovery tools, read our frequently asked questions, meet our team, or get started whenever you are ready.