Tick what applies. The result groups it, names what each group usually is, and gives you something more useful to bring to a first session than anything you can reconstruct under questioning.
Reviewed by Albert Wong, PhD·Clinical psychologist·Last reviewed September 2026·About this site
What to do with it
Take it to a first session. Not as a diagnosis — as a way of skipping the twenty minutes of context that otherwise eats the hour. Handing a clinician a page is considerably more efficient than reconstructing it under questioning.
It’s also useful for a different purpose: seeing that the thing you thought was one general sense of heaviness is actually four or five separate things, several of which are workable and at least one of which isn’t yours.
The thing worth noticing about the groups
People frequently expect the family material to dominate and find that the expectation and the outside columns are longer than they thought.
And the reverse: people who arrived certain their difficulty was about work find most of their ticks in obligation.
The counterweight
This tool asks only about cost, which makes it a partial picture by construction. Before you conclude anything from it, it’s worth doing the other exercise:what you can do because of how you were raised. Most people find that list is longer than they expected, and holding both is where the movement is.
Keep reading
45 guides on Asian American family life, free and without an account. There is a directory of therapists here too — it is new, and growing.
General information, not clinical advice; the people and families described are composites, not real clients, and no description here speaks for every family or every culture. Listings on this site are maintained by independent practices. If you are in immediate danger, call 911; the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text any time, and offers support in several languages.