Week 17 to 21 • The Body Keeps the Score

“...help people “acknowledge, experience, and bear the reality of life – with all it’s pleasures and heartbreaks.”

The Body Keeps the Score

Currently in the midst of reading The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk and loving every word of it. It is full of insights into the brain's anatomy / functions and is a great resource for learning about how trauma affects the neurological pathways of the body. The idea of safety vs. activation and how this appears in the body is something that continues to influence how I see this project.

This month I have conducted ~almost~ all of my interviews. I ended up conducting two more interviews with participants from my survey. This was a great way to see how people with poor childhood memory retention reacted to their situation without saying it was caused by dissociation. It was interested to see how they described their childhood experiences without naming it and then what helped them push back into the present moment.

As I conducted what I thought was my last interview, I realized that I didn't want to be done with hearing people's experiences. Arguably my favorite part of the process, I know interviews bring so many unique perspectives to the process. I decided to get in touch with a school counselor because I felt like I hadn't heard enough from the people who work with kids directly and on a daily basis (a.k.a, the mentor / person in their corner). In this point of the process, a school counselor would be the perfect mix of trauma-informed psychology and the overall big picture of a child's reality. I am hoping to conduct this interview in the next few weeks and be back on track to start connecting themes by the end of November.

This past month, I finished up writing transcripts of all the conducted interviews, so now everything is recorded in writing and ready for pull quotes + gathering insights. I can't wait to dig back into the details and see what I can pull out in a new light.

As for my next steps, this month will be spent looking back through transcripts and finding common themes and insights. Then, creating visual collages of what keeps people tied to the present and aligned with the feeling of safety.

Week 11 to 16 • Interviews

These past weeks, I've dedicated my capstone time to gathering interviews and survey results to fully form the research around my capstone topic. So far, I've interviewed 2 stakeholders, 1 expert, and 2 potential users and am on the route to interview 1 more expert and 1 more user. There is always the potential for more interviews and discussions, but I feel this amount would give me a good foundation to start ideating solutions from.

Along with interviewing, I created a quick 5-minute survey regarding childhood memory retention, asking respondents about if they have childhood memories and whether they felt emotionally safe with either their caregivers or other adults around them. My goal for this survey was to identify whether the emotional environment appeared to have an affect on childhood memory retention. I also wanted to see the general prevalence of childhood memory loss and whether dissociation continued to be a problem from childhood to adulthood.

So far I have gotten 50 responses – which is awesome! This will allow me to create flushed out data visualizations, provide further insights for infographics / diagrams, and help discover more potential user interviews.

Link to research survey:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfMzswrz7VAE6dwZTSHQLw_ccFezZLrKKX6sIzr0Pc_fh8TQQ/viewform?vc=0&c=0&w=1&flr=0&usp=mail_form_link

Lastly, I began The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. As this book talks about the complex effects of trauma and how it can live with you and in you, I am utilizing this as a literary resource in conjunction with my primary research.

My goals for the next month include continuing to schedule + complete the last set of interviews along with writing transcripts of each. Once finished, I can start gathering insights and creating graphics to visualize my research.

Week 10 • Insights + Closure

As the summer semester comes to a close, my posts will become more few and far between. I still have many goals to complete for the fall semester while on co-op, but updates might be more spread out compared to the past weeks.

With this being said, I began interviewing users with childhood memory loss due to dissociation. As this week comes to a close, I have interviewed two separate users with two very different experiences. Just through these two conversations alone, I can already see how individual the experience of trauma and dealing with trauma is to each person. Hopefully by gathering more interviews and descriptions of personal experience, I'll begin to draw connections and come to some sense of a conclusion.

So far my insights are as follows:

• Memories can be informed by pictures even if you still don’t have that memory – you can hear a story around it and still feel connected to it.

• Stakeholders might try to intervene by going to the parent first, but sometimes this doesn’t trickle down to the child.

• One user related dissociation to the numbness felt during a depressive state – this could be a helpful way to look at how to either spot / bring someone out of dissociation.

• One user currently still uses dissociation as an avoidance technique. Once realized, was able to process trauma slowly over time by talking with others who have a shared / relatable experience.

Along with interviewing, I started thinking about colors + the meaning of colors. I started by benchmarking other apps that dealt with mental health and quickly saw a correlation. It's no secret why many meditative, mental health, and journaling product / apps have the same color choices. It is the meaning behind the colors that provide so much subconscious clarity.

While seeing this pattern, I also connected with them and I wanted the reasoning behind them to apply to my product / app. I decided to pull four broad color choices and then create my own palette. I decided I wanted a purple, a blue, a yellow, and an orange for the reasons specified below. Once decided, I start mixing, matching, + adjusting until I found a palette that I felt worked together well. .

Below is where my color palette is at currently:

For now, I'm off on a quick hiatus – until we speak again!