The Wholeness Path was not invented from scratch. It is a synthesis — an integration of frameworks that have been studied, replicated, and refined for decades — applied to a population whose experiences those frameworks were not always designed to capture.
This page is here for the skeptic. For the clinician evaluating whether to recommend the platform. For the funder deciding whether the work has intellectual rigor. And for the person taking the assessment who wants to understand what stands behind it.
What follows is honest about both — the scholarly lineage the platform draws on, and the limits of what any single tool can claim. Lived experience opened this work. Established research grounds it. The remaining work — formal validation of this specific instrument — is named openly at the bottom of the page.
The ACE Study.
Felitti, Anda, et al. — American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 1998. Conducted with Kaiser Permanente; over 17,000 participants.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences study is one of the most consequential pieces of public health research of the last fifty years. It established something that had been intuited but never measured at scale: that adversity in childhood produces dose-dependent effects on adult physical and mental health, decade after decade, across nearly every category of outcome — depression, addiction, chronic illness, early death.
Its ten original categories — abuse, neglect, household dysfunction — gave a generation of clinicians, educators, and survivors language for experiences that had previously been silent. The ACE framework remains the backbone of modern trauma-informed practice.
The first three domains of the Wholeness Path map directly onto the original ten ACEs. Items are written in the spirit of the validated ACE-Q, adapted for self-paced use without a clinician present, with crisis routing always available.
The ACE study was a beginning, not a completion. The work that has followed it — the Philadelphia Expanded ACEs (2013), the WHO ACE-IQ, complex trauma frameworks, intergenerational trauma research — has consistently demonstrated that the categories of adversity shaping human lives are broader than what was measured in 1998. The remaining six domains of the Wholeness Path live in that broader territory.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
Maslow, A.H. — Psychological Review, 1943; expanded in Motivation and Personality, 1954.
Maslow's hierarchy is a developmental scaffold. Physiological needs, safety, belonging, esteem, self-actualization. The framework is widely taught, widely critiqued, and — when applied with care — quietly indispensable to trauma work, because it names something the assessment alone cannot: healing is not only the processing of what happened. It is the rebuilding of conditions for a full life.
The phased structure of the regimen — Stabilization, Processing, Emergence — follows the hierarchy's logic. Stabilization addresses the foundational tiers (sleep, nourishment, safety) before processing work begins. Emergence is where esteem and self-actualization become accessible. The order matters; trauma work attempted at the wrong tier tends to fail.
Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems.
Bronfenbrenner, U. — The Ecology of Human Development, Harvard University Press, 1979.
Urie Bronfenbrenner reframed how developmental psychology understood the human person. He argued that individual development cannot be understood in isolation — only within the nested systems that surround it. The microsystem of family. The mesosystem where family meets school, neighborhood, peers. The exosystem of institutions one does not directly inhabit but which shape one's life. The macrosystem of culture, policy, and historical moment.
For trauma, this framework matters profoundly. It gives intellectual lineage to a truth survivors already know: that wounds are inherited across generations, that systems can harm as surely as individuals can, and that healing — when it happens — ripples outward through the same systems that carried the harm.
Inside the Wholeness Path, this framework is presented to users as Social Responsibility — the recognition that personal healing is inseparable from how a person shows up in their relationships, what they pass forward, and how they participate in their community. The domains beyond the original ACE ten — community, transgenerational, relational, identity — are organized by Bronfenbrenner's nested-systems logic. It is also why C.U.R.E. is structured as a social enterprise rather than a for-profit clinical product: individual healing and systemic repair are the same work at different scales.
Polyvagal Theory.
Porges, S.W. — Psychophysiology, 1995; The Polyvagal Theory, W.W. Norton, 2011.
Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory describes how the autonomic nervous system — particularly the vagus nerve — regulates our shifts between safety, mobilization, and shutdown. The theory has become foundational to somatic trauma work, because it explains in physiological terms what survivors have always known intuitively: that trauma lives in the body, and that the body can be approached as an entry point to healing rather than an obstacle to it.
Porges' work is the reason that breath, posture, vocal tone, and co-regulation with safe others are not soft suggestions in trauma recovery — they are direct interventions on the system that produces the symptoms.
The breathwork in Lighthouse Lite — inhale four, hold four, exhale six — is a polyvagal practice. Extended exhale activates the parasympathetic branch and shifts the nervous system toward what Porges calls the ventral vagal state, where regulation and connection become possible. The Body pillar of the regimen is built on the same physiology.
Trauma-Informed Care
& the Four Pillars.
SAMHSA — Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach, 2014.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's 2014 guidance is the consensus framework for what trauma-informed practice requires. Its principles — safety, trustworthiness, peer support, collaboration, empowerment, recognition of cultural and historical context — are the operating ethics of the Wholeness Path, not just its content.
The platform's four healing pillars are organized around the dimensions of recovery that trauma-informed care explicitly recognizes — physical, psychological, emotional, and social. They are not a clinical taxonomy. They are a practical synthesis, designed to make the regimen livable for someone navigating it without a therapist in the room.
- The BodySleep, breath, movement, nourishment. Anchored in polyvagal practice and the somatic literature.
- The MindNarrative work, reflection, mindfulness. The pillar where therapy, when sought, integrates most directly.
- The SelfIdentity, purpose, ritual, lineage. Where Maslow's higher tiers and Bronfenbrenner's macrosystem meet personally.
- ConnectionRelationships, community, ripple. The recognition that no one heals alone, even when starting alone.
The Parental Alienation Literature.
Parental alienation — the pattern by which one parent works to damage or destroy a child's relationship with the other through manipulation, false narratives, and loyalty exploitation — sits in a particular place in the clinical literature. The patterns are widely recognized in family courts and in the experience of millions of families. The diagnostic nomenclature remains debated.
The Wholeness Path does not take a position on diagnostic classification. It takes a position on the wound: it is real, it is damaging, and it has been measured by serious researchers across multiple decades.
The researchers we draw on
William Bernet, MD — Vanderbilt University; founding member of the Parental Alienation Study Group; extensive published work on parental alienation as a clinical phenomenon and on diagnostic criteria.
Amy J.L. Baker, PhD — author of Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome (W.W. Norton, 2007) and over 100 peer-reviewed articles on the long-term effects of alienation on adult survivors.
Jennifer Harman, PhD — Colorado State University; quantitative researcher whose work has documented prevalence rates and adverse outcomes associated with parental alienating behaviors at population scale.
The original ACE study did not include parental alienation as a category. The Wholeness Path does — as a dedicated set of items within its assessment, and as a recurring focus across the regimen. To our knowledge, this is among the first publicly available trauma platforms to do so explicitly.
The court can terminate rights. It cannot heal what parental alienation has already installed in a child's mind. That work requires different tools entirely.
What MendMe is — and isn't.
The Wholeness Path is a self-directed psychoeducational reflection platform. It is not a medical device, not a diagnostic instrument, not a clinical assessment, and not a substitute for evaluation, diagnosis, or treatment by a licensed mental-health professional. The frameworks above are established. The specific instrument built on top of them — the items, the scoring, the phased regimen — has been written from the literature with care, but has not yet been independently validated for sensitivity, specificity, or clinical outcomes.
For someone carrying significant trauma burden, the platform is best used alongside a licensed therapist. For someone earlier in the process — not yet ready to seek therapy, or simply trying to understand their own landscape — it is designed to be a serious companion. Many users report it is the platform that helped them feel ready to seek therapy. That is the intended role.
If you are in crisis, this is not the place to start. 988 is a phone call or text away. The Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741.
Why nothing is stored.
The Wholeness Path is built to run entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter into the assessment is transmitted. Nothing is stored on any server. There is no account, no login, and no cross-session profile of you. The platform uses Plausible Analytics — a privacy-respecting, no-cookie, no-personal-identifier analytics service — to count aggregate page views and a small set of content-free usage events — that an assessment or check-in was started, how far it progressed, which sections or tabs were opened, and that it was completed. These are counts and navigation markers only. No assessment responses, scores, regimen content, or identifying information are sent to Plausible or anywhere else. Plausible does not store IP addresses, does not set tracking cookies, does not fingerprint browsers, and is open-source. We use it because foundation funders and institutional partners reasonably need to know how many people the platform is reaching, and we use Plausible specifically because it answers that question without compromising the privacy architecture that protects you. C.U.R.E. does not know who you are. C.U.R.E. does not know what you answered. C.U.R.E. knows only that, in a given month, the door opened a certain number of times.
The population the platform was built for has specific reasons to distrust data collection. Targeted parents whose case files have been subpoenaed. Survivors whose abusers had institutional access. Children of high-conflict custody who learned early that what gets written down can be used against them. Designing around their distrust was not optional. It was the precondition for building something they could actually use.
This choice has tradeoffs. We cannot run the kinds of large-scale platform analytics that data-collecting tools rely on for outcomes research. The path forward — outlined below — works around that constraint deliberately.
The path to validation.
The frameworks the Wholeness Path stands on are well-established. The specific instrument built on top of them is new. We are not pretending otherwise, and we are not waiting on validation to make the tool free and accessible — but we are taking the path toward it seriously.
- Pilot-based outcomes dataInstitutional pilots are designed with pre/post measurement built in. Aggregate, anonymized results from school, youth-org, and clinical pilots become the platform's first outcomes evidence base — gathered with consent, never tied to individuals.
- Clinical advisory partnershipsActive outreach to trauma-specialized clinicians and researchers willing to review the assessment items, scoring logic, and regimen — and to publish critique, refinement, or co-authored validation work.
- Privacy-respecting research collaborationPartnership with researchers willing to design studies that respect the local-only architecture — voluntary opt-in cohorts, anonymous outcome reporting, IRB-approved protocols. The privacy-first design is not the obstacle; it is the design specification any partner has to work with.
- Transparent iterationEvery revision to the assessment is dated. Every change to scoring logic is documented. The platform is open to scrutiny in a way most digital wellness tools are not — because it has to be, given the population it serves.
If you are a clinician, researcher, or institution interested in any of the above — particularly clinical review of the assessment instrument or partnership on outcome studies — direct contact is welcome at martincasares@mendme.org · (313) 246-7043.