Trait Path
The story
I'm Donny, the founder of Trait Path. I'm not a therapist. About four years ago I heard Dr. Richard Schwartz on a Torah Anytime lecture and couldn't stop thinking about it. I later heard him on Tim Ferriss, Rich Roll, Andrew Huberman, and many other shows, but the first introduction is what stuck. The idea that what feels like one anxious or self-sabotaging "you" is actually a system of distinct parts, each with a positive intent, made more sense of my inner life than a decade of personality typing ever had.
The frustration: every IFS resource led to "find a trained therapist," which is the right answer for trauma work but a high bar for people who just want to understand themselves better. Books help. Podcasts help. But there was no structured way to see your own parts laid out in front of you without booking therapy you may not need or sitting on a waitlist for weeks.
Four years ago I couldn't have built this. The breakthrough is the current generation of AI. A careful, well-read enthusiast can now synthesize across Schwartz's books, his published interviews, peer-reviewed papers on IFS, and the publicly available transcripts of his teaching, in ways no individual ever could. Even a trained clinician is bounded by their own memory and the curriculum of one graduate program. That doesn't make AI a substitute for a therapist when there's real trauma to process, but it does redraw the line of what a non-credentialed builder can responsibly put in front of you for self-understanding.
Trait Path is what I built with that capability. The 48-question IFS assessment applies Dr. Schwartz's framework to your responses. The framework is the science. The application is generated by AI based on the patterns you show. Same with the Big Five reports: the percentile scoring is grounded in decades of validated research, the personalized analysis is what AI does well.
I'm still building this and learning as I go. Email me directly at contact@traitpath.com if something doesn't ring true or you spot something I should fix.
Donny
Founder, Trait Path
Mission
Make Internal Family Systems and personality assessment accessible to anyone who wants to understand themselves better, without requiring a therapist or a long waitlist. Use AI for what it is genuinely good at (synthesis, personalization, pattern recognition across vast literature) and rely on established psychology research for the underlying frameworks (Big Five, IFS, MBTI, Enneagram, Taxonomic Graph Analysis).
Research foundation
The personality models used on Trait Path are anchored in established research. The Big Five (OCEAN) shows roughly 40–60% heritability and moderate stability across the lifespan based on meta-analyses of hundreds of studies. Internal Family Systems was developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz starting in the 1980s and is recognized as an evidence-based therapeutic modality used worldwide. The 2025 Taxonomic Graph Analysis dimensions (Sociability, Integrity, Disinhibition) come from a peer-reviewed network psychometrics study (Samo et al., n=149,337).
What's on the site
- Internal Family Systems (IFS) parts discovery assessment and AI companion
- Personality Blueprint: Big Five, MBTI, Enneagram, and Taxonomic Graph Analysis combined into one report
- Career Path Analysis with an AI career coach
- In-depth blog on personality science, IFS, and self-discovery (75+ articles)
Transparency
Trait Path's assessments and reports are AI-generated based on established personality psychology research. They are not clinical evaluations. For clinical mental health concerns (trauma processing, diagnosable conditions, crisis support), please work with a qualified mental health professional. Trait Path is a self-discovery tool, not a substitute for therapy.
We are not affiliated with the IFS Institute. We apply Dr. Richard Schwartz's published framework with attribution.
Contact
Email: contact@traitpath.com