After trauma, imagining a better tomorrow can feel impossible. MyWhatIf is an applied research nonprofit helping people rebuild hope, agency and purpose, and the early signals say it works.
What does trauma take away?
Not only a sense of safety. For many people, trauma narrows the future they believe is possible.
Most recovery works on what happened.
MyWhatIf works on what can happen next.
What needs to come back?
Three capacities. Not a mood, and not a personality trait.
Hope is measurable, and how much of it a person has predicts how far their trauma symptoms fall.
The ability to imagine that a different future is possible.
The belief and ability to participate in shaping that future.
A reason to move toward it.
Dignity is not a fourth capacity and not something we measure. It is the principle that governs how everyone in this work is treated.
It starts with your question.
What a person actually does, in four moves.
A meaningful What If? about your own past or future.
Your experiences, values, beliefs and relationships shape what comes next.
Personalised narrative experiences, built to help you imagine possibilities trauma may have made harder to see.
Over time, the intervention works on the capacities we measure. Hope. Agency. Purpose.
What if language is a code that could help us understand the person?
Language is the human operating system. Every person runs on a unique internal code, built from memory, meaning, beliefs, values, relationships, culture and imagination.
HERS, the Hero's Emotional Relationship Structure, is a non-generative model that maps those narrative structures so the system can understand the individual rather than the average.
EPSTUDE & ROESE · PERS SOC PSYCHOL REV · 2008 · read →
We use the language of code because it makes one idea legible: a pattern that keeps producing the same output can be examined and changed. People are not software, and the metaphor stops where the person begins.
Recovery does not stay with one person.
The impact does not stay where it started.
How far it travels is the open question.
Everything to the left of the dotted boundary is something we measure in a person. Everything to the right is what successful trauma recovery makes possible.
“I felt held. It felt like I was in something safe. I felt loved.”
What have we seen so far?
In an early internal validation, 82% of 200 participants with PTSD reported meaningful symptom improvement.
Self-reported PCL-5 reduction of 10–20 points across 200 veterans with PTSD within 6 weeks.
87% would recommend it. Retention above 80%. No dropouts attributed to emotional distress.
LIMITATION: SELF-REPORT, NO CONTROL GROUP, NOT PEER REVIEWED, SINGLE POPULATION
STATUS: EARLY SIGNAL. IT IS THE REASON TO RUN THE TRIALS, NOT A RESULT OF THEM.
The questions we are testing now.
Each project is listed under the question it exists to answer. The question stays a question until the results say otherwise.
This work is not being built alone.
Building a new model for trauma recovery takes many researchers, clinicians, hospitals, universities, community organizations, volunteers, and people willing to test novel ideas seriously.
