The 10-Question Locus Assessment: Where Is Your Worth Anchored?
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The first step in any structural work is an accurate diagnosis. Before you can shift the locus of your worth from external to internal, you need to know clearly where it currently lives — which external sources it is tethered to, how strongly, and in which specific domains of your life the tether is most active. The 10-Question Locus Assessment in the Internal Locus Practice Guide provides this diagnosis: a structured self-inquiry that maps the architecture of your current worth structure with enough precision to know where to direct the practice.
This article walks through the principles behind the assessment, the domains it covers, and what the results tell you about where your practice needs to focus.
What the Assessment Is Measuring
The assessment is not measuring self-esteem in the conventional sense — how good you feel about yourself in general. It is measuring the structural dependence of your felt sense of worth on specific external sources. The distinction matters: you can have high self-esteem in most contexts and still have significant external locus in specific domains. High-achieving people, for example, often have strong internal locus in their professional capabilities but extreme external locus around recognition and approval — they feel competent but require the achievement to be seen and acknowledged in order to feel genuinely worthy.
The assessment targets this domain-specific architecture rather than producing a single global score. The goal is a map: where specifically is your worth externally sourced, and how structurally dependent is it on the external confirmation remaining present?
The Five Domains the Assessment Covers
Domain 1: Approval and Validation
This domain asks: how does your felt sense of worth respond when approval is withdrawn, withheld, or ambiguous? Do you feel genuinely stable when someone important to you is silent, cold, or critical? Or does the absence of approval trigger an urgency — a need to repair, to explain, to seek reassurance — that feels driven rather than chosen? The approval domain is one of the most common sites of external locus because the developmental need for parental approval is so foundational that its internalization is rarely complete.
Domain 2: Achievement and Performance
This domain asks: what happens to your felt sense of worth between achievements? When a project is complete but not yet recognized, when you are in a fallow period rather than an active productive one, when you fail at something you attempted — does your worth remain stable, or does it track closely with the success or failure of what you are producing? Achievement-based external locus is particularly common in high-functioning individuals and is often invisible precisely because the achievements come reliably enough to keep the vacuum from opening too frequently.
Domain 3: Relationships and Belonging
This domain asks: does your felt sense of worth depend on the stability and warmth of your primary relationships? When a relationship is strained, distant, or threatening to end, does the threat feel like the loss of something external — or does it trigger a collapse of felt worth that goes beyond the relationship itself? Relationship-based external locus is at the root of most patterns that present as "attachment issues" and most of the behaviors that relationship therapists identify as codependent.
Domain 4: Role and Identity
This domain asks: how much of your felt worth is tied to the roles you perform — the parent, the provider, the therapist, the leader, the helper? When a role is threatened, completed, or removed, does a significant portion of your felt sense of self and worth disappear with it? Role-based external locus is particularly relevant for people in transition — career changes, relationship endings, the completion of a major life project — and for people whose identity has been heavily defined by a single role for an extended period.
Domain 5: Appearance and Perception
This domain asks: does your felt sense of worth track with how you believe you are being perceived? When you feel physically unattractive, socially awkward, or unfavorably compared to others, does your worth feel diminished? Appearance- and perception-based external locus is among the most culturally reinforced — enormous social and commercial infrastructure is devoted to amplifying this specific form of external dependence — and is often experienced as the most shameful to admit, which is itself a sign of its structural depth.
How to Read Your Results
The assessment is not designed to produce a diagnosis of "healthy" versus "unhealthy." It is designed to produce a map with two specific outputs:
Your primary locus domain: the domain in which external dependence is most structurally active and most likely to trigger the Value Vacuum. This is where your shadow work practice needs to focus first — not because other domains are unimportant, but because starting where the structural dependence is strongest produces the fastest and most generative shifts.
Your locus archetype: the characteristic pattern of external dependence that most closely matches your overall profile. The three archetypes in the guide — The Performer, The Beloved, and The Needed — each represent a distinct configuration of external locus that carries its own strengths, blind spots, and characteristic shadow patterns. Identifying your primary archetype provides a framework for understanding your patterns that goes beyond the domain map.
What Honest Assessment Requires
The most important instruction for the assessment is the simplest and the hardest: answer from your felt experience rather than your ideal self-image. The assessment is not measuring what you believe you should feel or what you aspire to feel; it is measuring the structural reality of where your worth is currently sourced. A spiritually sophisticated person who aspires to radical non-attachment but actually collapses when criticized needs to answer from the collapse, not from the aspiration. Accurate diagnosis requires honest reporting of what actually happens, not of what you wish happened or believe should happen.
The complete 10-Question Locus Assessment — with scoring guide, locus archetype profiles, and the 3-card diagnostic spread — is in Shadow Work Tarot: Internal Locus Practice Guide. 32 pages. Digital PDF.
