What Does Good “Trauma-Informed Writing” Look Like?

Over recent years, the term trauma-informed has become en vogue in the mental health arena. But what does trauma-informed mean for a practitioner’s content? What conditions or guidelines does it imply should be present in the writing and supporting content (e.g., videos)?

Hand drawing heart, congerdesign from Pixabay

What does trauma informed even mean?

To first understand what trauma-informed writing means or should require, we have to unpack the term trauma informed more broadly.

Practitioners who use trauma informed usually are trying to indicate to survivors (i.e., potential clients) that they have a certain level of clinical training around trauma. They often specify that they have specific certifications or other credentials, mention experts they’ve studied with, or identify modalities of care they can offer.

In short, trauma informed is often used to mean having received trauma-specific education.

But as a survivor, I define trauma informed much differently. It means

• you’ve experienced or seen trauma in yourself or others so closely, often for many years, that it’s in your own bones.
• you can not only see the massive spiderweb of what’s happened, but also that you can read and be empathetic inside the unpredictable, secondary spiderweb of reactions that come from what happened — and that you can respond to it in real time, understanding how it all links to many practical elements of the survivor’s life.
• being honest with yourself that sharing the load of how heavy trauma is will almost break you — and feeling obligated enough to pick it up with the survivor anyway.
• abandoning models, terms, and all the usual boxes to let the survivor sit and have connection inside simpler realities that should have been voiced long before now — realities like “I hurt.”
• focusing more on presence than on the “one small thing” the survivor can try to do to be proactive — because you recognize they’ve been doing “one small thing” alone over and over again their entire life and are exhausted from it.
• being willing not just to help the survivor “discover” themselves, but to speak the permissions they never had that will allow them to step into the core parts of their identity they’ve seen but been too terrified to set free.
• understanding the difference between a survivor genuinely not being aware and them slipping into all kinds of defense mechanisms because they’re scared of what will happen if they’re honest.
• knowing when the survivor needs conversation and when they need silence.

None of this comes from formal education paths. It comes from interacting with yourself and other people in their most confusing, vulnerable, and painful moments. The database you build from that is raw and messy, but you’ll learn to trust the framework that materializes out of it.

The survivor will scan you in a million ways to see if you have that infrastructure. They will respond to it when they see it. In that quick, initial moment of trust, you have the tiniest of windows in which respond well back, and you take that incredibly seriously.

Key ingredients for content survivors trust

Using this perspective, we can start to see how much of the language found on therapy websites falls short. It speaks to what the therapist has achieved or gone through or asserts a safe environment through common therapeutic phrases (e.g., inner child, grounding, dysregulation). It does not speak to the survivors felt sense of experience, describing what living with trauma actually is like.

Describing the survivor’s physical, spiritual, mental, and relational battles with clear, relatable analogies, metaphors, or anecdotes is what foundationally conveys that a practitioner is trauma informed in the way bulleted above. It’s what conveys to the survivor that the practitioner grasps their struggle beyond what can be taught in the classroom, giving examples the survivor can immediately resonate with and trust in their internalized familiarity.

Importantly, whatever visual images are on the site have to match the tone of the analogies, metaphors, or anecdotes selected. On many sites, for example, providers focus on staff pictures or photos of the lobby — not images that reflect the survivor audience or their recovery journey.

But trauma-informed content also recognizes the survivor’s limited tolerance for the content itself. People who come to trauma therapy websites are often overwhelmed, hypervigilant, easily triggered, and stressed out. This means that everything in the copy has to get to the point even more so than other copy does. Everything in the content needs to be easy to navigate, including shorter paragraphs, clear buttons, white space, and everyday language.

Lastly, trauma informed means that the content is realistic. It doesn’t gloss over the realities of living as a survivor or paint flowery, toxically positive portraits of hope. Additionally, even as it’s affirming, it doesn’t overly focus on the survivor’s own strength — many survivors are desperate to have a place where they don’t have to be the strong one anymore, and they don’t want to be misled, oversold, and disappointed in treatment in a way that retriggers their pain. Instead, the content is clear that the work will be complex, unique to each survivor, and completed with an emphasis on restored interpersonal connection.

A principle to write by

Looking at all of the above, this is the overarching, counterintuitive principle: Trauma-informed content is most effective when the provider speaks from inside the survivor’s pain, rather than from inside professional expertise.

This doesn’t mean it’s not important to clarify credentials or show that the physical environment is inviting. It just means that a survivor’s primary subconscious question will be whether the provider will truly see and understand them, and that the survivor usually digs into therapist- or clinic-specific data (e.g., degrees, address) only when they sense that those core needs of visibility and understanding will be met.