Trauma-Informed Care: A Guide for Technologists Responding to COVID-19
A note on this piece
I first heard the term “trauma informed” about five years ago. I chair the board of a large online queer community, and was coming to terms with the many stories of trauma that people in our community hold. Even though we hadn’t explicitly set out to build a place for trauma recovery I realized that it was a central part of why community was needed, and set out to learn what I could.
Now, in my role as the Head of Mobilization at the Center for Humane Technology, I see teams across the technology ecosystem asking the sorts of questions I was asking in 2015. I chose to write this piece as a resource to them, drawing heavily on the wisdom of those whose work directly addresses experiences of trauma. I am grateful for the feedback of Hyunhee Shin, Vanessa Callison-Burch and Avani Parekh, as well as Melissa Barker of the Phoenix Project and her team of advisors: Mark Goldman, Andra Vanduva, Maris Degener, Alexander Walker-Griffin, Audra Cassanova, Karen Cahn and . I also relied on the writings of Gladys Noll Alvarez, MSW, Carmela J. DeCandia, Psy. D. and Kathleen Guarin and Meryl Schulman and Christopher Menschner of the Center for Health Care Strategies and The Icarus Project. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the Kate Werning of the Irresistible Podcast for her support and wisdom on this journey.
We can’t talk about tech in the time of COVID without talking about trauma
Trauma is unique in its ability to fundamentally reshape the human psyche. The journey of coping with trauma can both leave someone stronger, more compassionate, and more resilient and it can leave someone fractured, violent and avoidant. Now that journey is playing out at a civilizational scale, how it plays out could shape the world that we live in for decades to come. Most of tech may not understand trauma, but that can change if the right coalition of tech workers and experts in trauma-informed care decide to do something about it.
Historically tech companies have imagined themselves making already happy and balanced people happier and more balanced. Instagram helps creators share their work and realize their dreams. Pinterest helps people discover inspiration. Twitch helps people enjoy and connect around the things that they love. Within the internal mythos of these companies there sits an emotionally balanced platonic user living a marginally more ideal life because of everyone’s hard work.
Now, in the midst of a global pandemic, unprecedented economic downturn and terrifying surge in misinformation, the inaccuracy of that platonic ideal is becoming widely acknowledged. Widespread trauma has always shaped how people experience social media, but now it is impossible to ignore. That platonic user is feeling overwhelmed and anxious. Many are grieving, coping with the loss of income, stuck at home in a toxic or even abusive family. Someone may self-soothe by watching Twitch for hours a day and find themselves drawn to streamers who express the kind of anger that they feel unsafe expressing at home. They may respond to losing their income and sense of self-worth by turning to the internet to find someone to blame who they can actively fight back against.
My role at the Center for Humane Technology has me talking to a wide range of tech employees about their hopes and fears. In my conversations I see a quiet acknowledgement that beneath their desire for inspiration, connection and joy, many people are turning to social media to do the hard and extremely messy work of coping with trauma. Platforms built to serve users engaging content are ill-equipped for this task, they’ve hired and trained very few people who understand this work and how to support it. That needs to change.
A Brief History of Trauma Informed Care
Traditionally mental health institutions have seen themselves as experts offering solutions. Thanks to their sophisticated training they understood what was best for clients and gave it to them. When clients failed to comply with what was “in their best interests” they were compelled to do so, sometimes with force, often with more subtle persuasive techniques, to ensure that as many as possible would be converted back to “health”. This command and control view of mental health often has disastrous consequences.
Historically whenever a population has experienced widespread trauma, such as in a war, this top-down view of mental health has shifted. Instead of focusing on a single path to recovery, healthcare institutions begin to see both “healthy” and “unhealthy” actions as individuals struggling to find a way to cope with their trauma that works for them. Coping with trauma is envisioned not as the healing of a wound, but as a skill to be mastered. In this approach, the job of institutions is to support people in mastering whatever version of this skill is most empowering to them. Not to help people return to a “normal” pre-traumatic life, but to help them develop strength, resilience and confidence out of the coping skills that they have mastered.
In the context of the pandemic this skillbuilding is happening online, largely with tools built for radically different purposes. Facebook groups are both providing desperately needed emotional support to healthcare workers and providing recruitment pathways for violent extremism. Zoom is both hosting funerals and accidentally enabling new ways for hurt people to take out their pain by hurting others. In order to navigate this new world, tech employees need to update the platonic user at the center of their product’s culture. And to do that, we must change how we listen.
Towards Trauma-Informed Product Design
These steps, adopted from materials designed to create trauma-informed social services, are intended as the starting point of a discussion about how to create a trauma-informed culture inside of a tech platform or individual product team. Not a culture which fixates on or celebrates trauma, but a culture which works to build the skill of coping with trauma. It has been reviewed by individuals with experience in trauma-informed care and product design, but is not intended to be authoritative. When it comes to building trauma-informed social technology, there are no straightforward answers.
1. Listen, Don’t Solve
In CS and UX courses, we are often trained to think in terms of problems and elegant solutions. Now is a time to abandon that way of thinking. An individual’s trauma is not a problem that can be understood or solved by anyone else. A discussion about addressing trauma should start not with feature ideas, but with new ways to understand and make sense of others’ experience.
To support those undergoing trauma, your team must first be able to hear them and make sense of what they are saying and experiencing. Is the way that your team collects data, conducts user research, or performs data science geared to understand how your users are coping with trauma? Once that data exists, is your team prepared for a discussion where team members become triggered, anxious, dominant or avoidant? Strong feelings coming up in your team aren’t a roadblock to understanding the data, they’re an indicator of the work necessary to understand it.
2. Support Inside and Out
The way that we individually cope with trauma profoundly impacts how we support others in doing so. Similarly, the way that our organizations cope with trauma will profoundly impact how they support their users. Think about trauma-informed care not just for users, but for internal teams, especially those directly engaging with the traumatic experiences of others. They will both need the most support and be your greatest source of wisdom in understanding what the skills of coping look like.
The inverse is also true. Helping others cope with trauma can be a powerful way to cope with one’s own. Don’t feel that your organization’s internal culture has to be perfect before it can start the work of supporting its users, if done right the external work can bring clarity and purpose to tensions happening on the inside.
3. Focus on Supportive Relationships
Most social platforms exist to build relationships, but not all relationships help. Research into social isolation shows (citation to be added) that people with too many relationships experience isolation alongside those with too few. Instagram celebrities are as likely to be socially isolated as those with no followers because what matters isn’t quantity, it’s how easily someone can access trusted support.
Supportive relationships are central to how people learn to cope with trauma, and they won’t show up cleanly in your data. People may communicate lightly on your platform and have deep supportive conversations elsewhere, and when they are on your platform it’s impossible (and privacy-violating) to detect good support algorithmically. Instead of trying to detect and A/B optimize for these relationships, you’ll need to get really good at using mixed-methods approaches to understand when, where, and how they happen.
On the flip side, unsupportive relationships and interactions tend to be the focus of integrity teams, but how is the presence of such relationships analyzed for patterns? Is there a collective tide rising where more and more bad actors are coming about from their own unprocessed trauma. Rather than just seeking to identify and silence bad actors, try to understand and counteract the relational environments in which they thrive.
Above all, you will need to supplement traditional data collection and analytics with trusted relationships of your own. Look for communities that have excelled at building supportive relationships through your platform and give them a seat at the table.
4. Support Those Who Build Trust
Processing trauma requires deep trust. However noble your intentions, your platform won’t have that level of trust with the vast majority of its users. Find and support those who will. Facebook Group Admins, Twitch Streamers, Patreon Creators, Nextdoor Neighborhood Leads and YouTube Celebrities are the front line workers of the internet’s trauma-response crisis. They are the best equipped to create spaces where people can find support and practice the work of coping with trauma. They are also the best equipped to exploit others’ trauma for their own gain.
Community leads and those who directly support them are central to a trauma-informed response, the best source of insight about how to support others in coping with trauma. They are a place to focus your listening. Trauma response has been described as an “ecology,” (citation to be added) expect to find a diverse ecosystem of effective, sometimes destructive methods for addressing trauma to be growing in response to the widespread need. You will need to form an opinion about which parts of this ecology to support and which to prune. Some, who encourage people to bury their trauma by lashing out at others or who prey on feelings of disorientation with sophisticated disinformation campaigns should be forwarded to your policy team. But others will have found incredible ways for people to ground in their bodies, build trusting relationships or tell stories that let them feel seen. These leaders should be actively supported and invited to meet with product teams.
5. Make Choices Collaboratively
Trauma-informed product design requires humility. Insight into how your product can change won’t primarily come from your team and it won’t be discernable from your metrics, it can only come from those you are working to support. This means inviting people with experience addressing trauma on your platform into your design process and compensating them for their work.
On a product level, this means changing how you give users agency. It’s common to think of user choice as a friction to be minimized, to use recommendations and A/B optimization to make choices as effortless as possible so that users get what they want. But in trauma recovery an effortless choice is often a destructive one. Moments of choice that invite people to pause, breath, and reflect can be as important as choices that are seamless. Nextdoor pops up an interstitial when a user writes a post that contains angry sentiment. Having people pause and take in more information about what they’re about to do, whether it’s retweeting, joining a group, or watching a video essay, can mean the difference between acting instinctively and acting in alignment with users’ deeper intentions.
6. Encourage Skillbuilding
Living with trauma is a skill that is learned over time, and the skill looks different for everyone. Instead of a happy and balanced user experiencing an extra moment of connection, inspiration and delight, imagine a badass survivor cobbling together the strength, resilience and calm that they need to make it through the day, and, on good days, using the extraordinary strength and wisdom they’ve developed to help others.
Our role as technologists has shifted. Before we could use positive emotions as our compass, serving users by giving them more of whatever made them happy. Now, it’s our job to support them in building skills that we can never fully understand. It used to be our job to understand what users want, now it’s our job to help them find that understanding.
Where To Start
This level of transformation can feel intimidating, even impossible. It starts with pausing to reflect on how you listen: to yourself, to your body, to your community, and to those who may have wisdom that you don’t. If you’re someone who builds technology, bring this topic up with your colleagues or find someone you trust to help you understand it more deeply. If you’re someone who does the hard work of helping others cope with trauma, speak up about how tech platforms can help. Very few of us have listened in the past, but hopefully that can change.
