Why Trauma-Informed Technology Matters

“Trauma” is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days. It shows up in headlines, HR memos, and everyday conversations. But I suspect we don’t always fully understand what it means—or how deeply it affects the way people show up at work, in systems, and in life. As someone who’s been a psychotherapist for almost twenty years, I’ve spent a lot of time sitting with people in the long aftermath of experiences that overwhelmed their capacity to cope. Trauma isn’t just something that happened in the past. It’s something that lives in the nervous system and shapes the present, often in invisible ways. That’s also why I’ve become the co-founder of a software company. Right now, PrimeHealth is developing absence and disability management software for the second largest health authority in Canada. But trauma-informed technology isn’t just for healthcare workers. It’s key in designing apps for everyone—especially for people going through life-altering, challenging, or transitional experiences. As AI becomes more embedded in the systems we rely on, we have to start asking how the tools we create interact with the nervous systems of the people we serve.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to write about trauma from a few different angles—brain science, behavior, developmental psychology, culture, and lived experience. I hope you’ll follow along. My goal isn’t to pathologize or dramatize, but to offer something useful—something that might help you better understand the people you work with, and maybe even the person you are.

At the SHRM conference this year, an HR manager told me about a situation that had become deeply frustrating for her team. A 55-year-old man had been absent from work for two full weeks without any explanation. Eventually, he was let go. When he returned, he explained that he’d had a cardiac event and undergone emergency surgery. He brought documentation to confirm it, but hadn’t reached out during his absence. The manager looked at me and asked, “Why wouldn’t he just communicate with us? Why did he make this so hard?”

I understood the frustration behind the question, but I also understood what might’ve been happening for him. And so I offered this: when someone goes through a sudden, life-threatening medical crisis, their brain doesn’t respond the way it would under normal conditions. The parts of the brain responsible for reasoning, planning, language, and self-advocacy—those higher functions we rely on to navigate systems and communicate clearly—can go completely offline. In those moments, the nervous system’s focused on survival, not procedure. And in the days that follow, especially if a person senses they’re being blamed or disbelieved, the fear and vulnerability they feel may quickly turn into defensiveness or anger. It’s not because they want to make things hard. It’s because they’re trying to feel safe again, often without the words to explain what’s really going on inside them.

This is one small example of why trauma-informed technology matters. The people who use our systems aren’t always operating at their best. Sometimes they’re operating from a nervous system in survival mode. Sometimes silence isn’t defiance, but collapse. Sometimes anger isn’t a threat, but a protest against feeling unseen.

If we want to build systems that truly serve people, we’ve got to design with these possibilities in mind. Not out of pity, but out of respect. Not because everyone’s traumatized, but because many people are carrying more than we know.

I hope you’ll join me in this conversation. There’s more to come.

—Carey-Jo