Healing from trauma doesn’t happen only in clinical spaces. Digital spaces can also be a lifeline, as Ila Kumar explains in this visit with hosts Bridgette Stumpf and Lindsey Silverberg. A PhD candidate and research assistant in the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, Ila focuses her scholarship on non-traditional pathways that support mental health care, particularly for youth in foster care systems. “I don't necessarily see myself as someone who believes that these digital spaces will be sites of healing,” Ila says. “But I feel that the only way to try to get to that goal of digital spaces that are healing is to do so in a way that considers holistic wellbeing and centers the needs, voices, and context of those who are most impacted.”

In this conversation, Ila shares her approaches to helping vulnerable kids as they navigate the foster care system. As a technology designer, she explains that centering youth voice “leads to technologies that more effectively take youth's needs, barriers, cultures concerns into account and results in technologies that are definitely more impactful, engaging, and accessible.” And she stresses the balance between leveraging tools that carry potential risks – such as augmented reality platforms that claim to make lives easier – and tools that support youth self-expression, connectedness with others, and development of their identity.

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It may be invisible to some or ever present to others, but trauma entangles us all. Welcome to TraumaTies, brought to you by Volare. TraumaTies is a podcast that creates space in conversations to untangle the societal knots that keep us from addressing trauma after crime for you. We want this podcast to be an experience. One where you leave understanding how you can be a crossing point to minimize the deeply painful and costly consequences of trauma no matter who you are.

Welcome back to TraumaTies, where we believe trauma is a common thread of the human connection. I'm Bridgette Stumpf, and as always, I'm here with my co-host, Lindsey Silverberg.

Hi everybody. Today we're honored to be joined by Ila Kumar, a PhD candidate and research assistant in the lifelong kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. Ila works and sits at the intersection of trauma-informed care, community-based design and technology for collective healing, Ila designs, healing socio digital interventions with and for young people who've experienced developmental trauma with a particular focus on youth and young adults who've experienced foster care. Her work challenges the idea that healing happens only in clinical and offline spaces. Instead asking what it looks like to build safety agency creativity and connection into the digital environments where so many young people already live. In this episode we'll talk about how trauma shows up across development, how systems like foster care shape young people's relationships to safety and belonging, and how thoughtfully designed digital spaces can become sites of expression, regulation and connection rather than harm. Welcome Ila. Thank you. Excited to be here. So your work brings together trauma-informed care, community-based design and technology, which are to us fields that don't always speak the same language. Can you tell us a little bit about your pathway into this work?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I guess the earliest point is that I am the child of intergenerational trauma. I'm a queer person, so I have experienced the ways in which traditional mental health care don't meet the needs of minoritized communities. That combined with a love of art and creating things led me to explore non-traditional pathways to support mental health care in general. And I spent years working on projects to design mental health technologies for different communities that were at the margins of traditional mental health care and technology systems. And I saw that these were largely not addressing the needs of communities, and a lot of this was because the concept was brought up before communities were involved. And so it wasn't actually connecting with communities context or with their strengths or needs. And so actually doing my PhD was a last ditch effort to try to design technologies that actually help people reach their self-determined goals. So I don't necessarily see myself as someone who believes that these digital spaces will be sites of healing, but I feel that the only way to try to get to that goal of digital spaces that are healing is to do so in a way that considers holistic wellbeing and centers the needs, voices and context of those who are most impacted.

Oh, I love this all so much. I can tell the time is going to go way too quickly today. It's just so great to get your perspective. If you don't know this already, Lindsey and I are self-proclaimed nerds and I just feel like you have the coolest spot where you get to sit at this intersection of very cool nerdy stuff. And I say that with endearment, but I'm just so excited to get to learn a little bit more from your perspective. For us, this season of Traumatize is about how we can explore the ways that trauma often takes shape really early in lives, sometimes even before we're born. And you talked a little bit about your own experience, but we know that trauma takes root early and it's often shaped not only by these experiences and environments, but systems and relationships long before sometimes we even have the language to understand it and to name it. From your perspective, how does developmental trauma show up in young people's worlds and their emotional lives and their relationships? And I think especially what's your perspective as it relates to some of those vulnerable populations like kids that are navigating the foster care system?

So before I answer it, my answer will draw from both personal experience, my experience working with young people who've experienced chronic early life stressors, and largely from a framework that I love and I highly recommend, which is attachment regulation and competency, which is a framework for supporting youth who've experienced developmental trauma. So if anyone is interested in learning more or feels that it resonates with their work, I definitely recommend checking that out. So from that lens, I have conceptualized developmental trauma or these chronic early life experiences of danger or threats of danger or just not having your needs met as stressors that can lead to challenges in development across many domains. So this includes cognitive social development, self-development, and emotional development. So tangibly the way that we see this show up for young people is through challenges with identifying, expressing and regulating emotions, trusting others and forming healthy social relationships and building a positive and cohesive sense of self.

So that's developing identity. Another framing which comes from Judith Herman is more that I see you nodding, so I'm sure you already know this, but traumatic events shattering the belief that you can be yourself in relation to others leading to that feeling that the world is scary, that you're powerless and alone. And so in that framing, these experiences lead young people to have challenges, their identity separating from family and exploring a wider world. So I think that these two frameworks go hand in hand. I think for foster care specifically, this can be a site of additional trauma for youth. So it can either expose them to additional abuse at the hands of state assigned caregivers or others that they interact with while they're in the system. And it can also lead to additional neglect or what we consider not meeting the young person's needs through repeated interactions with care providers who are either not understanding their needs, not attuning to them not responding fast enough. Additionally, we see that youth have very little agency in these systems, and so that again adds to the feelings of helplessness and isolation.

That makes a whole lot of sense. And I think one thing that I'm picking up on is you place a strong emphasis on this co-design and youth agency, particularly when we think about communities that are often marginalized by any system that they're engaging in. Can you, for our listeners talk a little bit about why it's so important that young people aren't just the users of the tools, but they actually are collaborators in creating them?

So there's two main reasons. So one is that having opportunities to influence systems that either are currently ubiquitous in your life or soon will be is really important for feeling a sense of control over your life and feeling like you're a contributing member of your community. So this can be a really, really important thing for wellbeing in general, but then especially for young people who've experienced developmental trauma, this can be a particularly healing experience. Furthermore, we see through research, and I also know from my own experience as a technology designer that centering youth voice leads us to technologies that more effectively take youth's needs, barriers, cultures concerns into account and results in technologies that are definitely more impactful, engaging, and accessible.

It's so interesting. It's kind of like you want the user you're designing for to be compelled, right? So it makes so much sense that they're centered in what you're trying to develop that's going to be supportive to their needs. So it sort of seems like, yeah, of course we would do that. So it's amazing that it's taken us so long to really center communities who are most impacted by the big problems and challenges that we're trying to solve. So I am curious because I think a lot of people understandably are skeptical about technology. I have a follow-up question from my kind of parenting lens that I'm excited to ask you about. But when it comes specifically to using technology for mental health supports, I think folks have some reservation or pause, and from your work, what really distinguishes digital spaces that can genuinely offer support around regulation expression, even connection from maybe some of those other kind of risk spaces in the digital world that really reinforce harm and isolation?

Yeah, this is a great question and a one to answer, and I'm sure a controversial one to answer. In my experience, I think there are particular design decisions that can make it especially tempting for youth to engage in harmful behavior. So I especially identify technology features that make it easier to access content online. So for example, things like infinite scroll, autoplay, conversational agents or augmented reality tools that claim to make your life easier in terms of accessing information. So I think those tools I think should be used very cautiously. I think the trickier question is how to design digital spaces that actually support youth. So not just saying what's going to be most harmful, but what's actually going to be supportive. I don't think there's a clear delineation between technologies that are supportive and those that are not. I've seen trauma impacted youth use Minecraft for self-regulation in even settings like inpatient treatment facilities.

I've also seen and heard young people talk about using things like TikTok to express themselves or self-soothe. And I think that these tools can be especially successful because of the complexity of engagement that they allow for because of the powerhouse of resources and ideas behind them. And they also allow you to connect with peers. They're heavily used sites. That's some of the ways I think that these tools can be powerful. And we also hear young people talk about how much exploitation and harassment takes place on these platforms and how little control young people feel in being able to act in response to these events. So both in terms of reporting, but also in terms of how to handle the situations themselves. There hasn't been much research about trauma impacted youth interactions with chatbots or this new age of agents, but I believe that these are going to also exacerbate isolation and cognitive distortions that young people have. So I think my answer to this question, which maybe isn't quite an answer, is that I think we should support young people in building the social supports and internal supports to be able to engage with these tools in a way that actually supports their self-expression, their connectedness with others and development of their identity. I think these tools can also be helpful for emotion regulation and mediating real life relationships or deeper personal relationships. But I think this is where we have to be really cautious because of the potential harm of these tools

You're bringing up for me. So I think it was maybe last season we talked about the loneliness epidemic and even for adults, how much that's increasing with online access and doom scrolling and all of the things. And I think about it, I know adults in my life, friends in my life who use these sort of online tools as a method of connection, maybe feedback almost in a mental health way. And so it's interesting, it's even an issue for adults not being able to adequately engage and maybe contributing to the loneliness factor without realizing it. So of course it's going to happen to youth, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, it's hard to know how to sort of navigate it and it's folks like you that we have who we can sort of look to help us figure out where are the spaces in places where this can be helpful, and how do we build tools to make people more resilient knowing that they're going to use them, right, no matter what,

And how do we build systems that can support young people or anyone in using these tools in ways that are helpful for themselves?

Yes, absolutely. You see so many of those that are stop scrolling on stuff and it's hard to disengage when that's what your brain is craving. Well, so that is fascinating to me, and I would love to know a little bit, what's one thing that you're either working on right now or researching that you are really excited about?

Ooh, that's a good question and a hard question. I have to pick something. I think the topic that's been most central on my mind is youth agency as it relates to both technology and supporting healing. So I think I'll talk about that a little bit. So I think traditionally when we think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we think about you have to address basic needs first of safety and connection, all these things before you get to exploration, growth, developing sense of purpose. But I think that's completely wrong, and there's other scholars that agree these things are really important to be supporting in young people from the very beginning. So my work recently has been especially focused on how we can be supporting young people in feeling a sense of agency, both in their engagement with technology, so feeling like they're not just passive consumers, but they're using these tools in the ways that they want to support their goals, and also feeling that sense of agency in their life. So feel it's like using tools to support them in tangibly working towards those goals that they have and seeing that as part of mental health care. So not saying, okay, that falls outside of what we think about is important for supporting youths mental health and wellbeing, but seeing this as a holistic picture. Yeah, maybe I'll stop there, but I could get into more detail if you have follow up questions.

Yeah. You're bringing up some kind of experiential, maybe values threads that I see from how you're describing your work to how we think about some of our work around creating resiliency in organizations and teams and thinking about really trauma responsive leadership as a core competency to leadership. All leaders should be thinking about how we build resiliency in our teams and our organizations. And one of the ways we know in the research you do that is through purpose making and purpose seeking. And one of the reframing ELO that we often talk about when we're sort of talking to other leaders is we were always taught to think that purpose was kind of like this thing we stumbled on. It existed out there in the world, and we had to kind of go discover it. And what we've realized in the actual research about purpose is we have much more control over what our purpose is.

We actually get to curate it, we get to create it. And I think when you frame that reality around this concept of agency, it becomes so much more achievable and exciting. And so I love that we sort of share this love affair with choice and agency. There's just something really beautiful about what happens in people's lives when we give them that opportunity for choice and agency, whether that's thinking about resiliency or design, sort of whatever space we're in. So that's exciting. And I noted for you that I'm a parent, so raising a 7-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy in America, Lindsey also is the parent of two kids, and we talk a lot about how our work intersects with our day-to-day lives. Of course, in our work, we see how technology can be a tool for harm and particularly in the youth that we're engaging with. But also as a parent, I worry about this and there are lots of pop culture examples, I think immediately of adolescents and the conversations that sparked about the intersection of technology in young people's lives. But for me, I'm curious, given this is your area of expertise, what's a principle you think caregivers, parents, other supportive adults or informal teachers in use lives, what principles should we be thinking about when we're considering the safety or the opportunity for connection in a digital space?

That's a big question and one that is honestly, I think you as a parent are an expert in answering that for your young person or for your child. So the question to just reframe it back to you is what would you encourage caregivers to do or say to support young people in engaging safely online?

And I think it's like, maybe I'll even tweak the question a little bit as I'm thinking about it out loud. I think a lot of the messaging we get as parents is limit time, put a screen, and it's like, does that actually increase safety being fully if we're not a co participant in what they're engaging in? So I think it's like if there was a principle that we should be thinking about that embodies all of these values that you're really embedding into design for youth and technology, what are some of those principles we should be really thoughtful about?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for that clarification.

I'm all over the place, so hopefully it makes

No, that was great. And when you talked about restriction, I think that was a trigger for me because that's a big thing that is taking place, especially in supporting youth in the child welfare system. Restriction is the first response, even before harm takes place, online technology use is heavily restricted. And then when there is harm that's taken place, then it's like, okay, the response is we take the out and the young person is then safe, but in reality then the young person's going to turn 18 and then what's going to happen? And then they're given full access, or at whatever age they're given full access, they don't have the experiences and the skills to be able to navigate situations online and use the tools towards their goals as opposed to using them in ways that are detrimental. So what I would recommend is supporting young people in having experiences of decision-making and exploration with digital tools in supported environments.

That's still unlike thinking about this. We was just having a conversation about Fortnite with one of my young ones. It's this whole, I as a caregiver, don't know enough about it. I grew up as did Bridgette in an age where we were sort of on the forefront as technology and those digital spaces were created. And so I think we had a lot of access to potential spaces where harm could happen anyway, it just feels, it's all very overwhelming trying to navigate it and help them make decisions when I don't necessarily always know I can't see the future in terms of what's going to come up and we're going to have to navigate it together. But it's a good,

Yeah, I mean it's easier said than done of how you create a safe container for, or a safe enough container. And similar with playground design, thinking about like, okay, there's some amount of danger that is healthy so that a young person can know how to navigate and grow, but the danger should be falling onto a squishy ground, not experiencing significant harm.

And then you think about for maybe young people who don't have access to a trusted adult in their life, to sort of navigate those conversations about what is safe or how do you even have the feedback in real life that becomes very challenging.

Yeah. I just wanted to flag that I am now envisioning that what you described ELA as the supportive people in relationships, that's the squishy ground right metaphor. If we go with that, it's like in these digital spaces that they will access, where do we create the squishy ground for them to come say, Hey, this thing came up and it didn't feel good, or this felt unsafe, or to have those conversations about being sort of alert of things that might not be safe.

Totally. And I think there is onus on the tech systems to, even if they can't prevent all harm, to be creating the safe enough environment so that they can be exploring because we can't just have people there that you expect the young person to go check in with. The tools also have to be providing that squishy ground.

So one question that we have been asking all of our guests this season is, what's one thing about trauma or about healing that the public might not know or understand and what would change for them

If they did? That's good question, and I'm excited to hear the answers of the rest of the guests when I listen to all of them. The thing that comes to mind for me is that we often think about trauma as isolated life-threatening experiences, and this reflects in our definitions and treatments for PT PTs D, which focus on supporting individuals in processing those isolated experiences of trauma. And it's often supposed to happen post the trauma, even in the name PTSD, post-traumatic stress Disorder. However, it's really common for individuals to have chronic experiences of trauma. So whether those are about danger or they are just not having your needs met, we see 20% of young people having four or more ACEs or adverse childhood experiences in their childhood, which is a huge percentage. So I think changing our conception of what trauma is, I think will help then support young people who are navigating those experiences and trying to overcome challenges that they've had.

So I think about, for example, with young people transitioning out of the child welfare system, sometimes a choice that may seem like a choice to give up or an impulsive decision or staying in a toxic relationship right now, sometimes those are seen as faults of the young person or like, oh, they're just making bad decisions. But if we think about the ways in which their decision-making and perspectives are shaped by the experiences that they've had as well as the context that they're currently in, sometimes you stay in a relationship because you don't have anyone else. But if we understand where this is coming from, I think we can do better at providing support and also understanding to make sure that we're not just giving up on young people because we say that, oh, this is their choice now, this is not because of what you've been through

That is so powerful. We talk a lot in our work, Heather seems to be this arbitrary line when people are viewed as innocent in how they've experienced harm, then all of a sudden they sort of lose that perception from the public of like, okay, now you're just making decisions and there's some level of blame in the way that you're experiencing this. So one of the things that you got me excited about is Lindsey and I have been reflecting on how we take these really powerful conversations we get to have with cool folks like you and then create a similar shared language for a younger audience. And so really trying to think about that reframing of trauma is not the event, it's how we experience it. So whether that's poverty or forms of oppression that folks have to navigate through on a daily basis in their world, how do we create for young folks how to have a conversation about that, how to sort of name it, but also be supportive to a loved one or a friend who's going through that. So this is something exciting that we're talking and thinking a lot about. And as we close out here, Ila, I just wanted to ask, what are you feeling excited about for the future or sort of a hope around how trauma responsive technology is going to be meaningful for young folks? Anything you want to leave that sort of gives other folks something to be on the lookout for or to also feel just excited about?

Yeah. Well, I'm excited about expanding how we define trauma responsive technologies or systems. So I think as I started to mention earlier, it's not just trying to support them and expressing themselves or connecting with others or building sense of self as ways to overcome challenges they've faced and support with healthy development. It's also supporting them in pursuing their interests and goals. And this doesn't just mean supporting internal work towards this end, but also supporting them with things like accessing and controlling vital documents after foster care or supporting youth in connecting with childhood loves of drawing or dancing and supporting young people in overcoming obstacles that are making it tangibly difficult for them to pursue their goals, like supporting with able housing, economic safety nets. So I'm excited to expand what we think we need to do for young people to support their wellbeing.

That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join us, but really thank you for what you're doing every single day and just the moment of pause to really reflect on it so we can all get excited and cheer you on. Thanks again and we're really happy to have you join us today.

Thank you. It's been so nice to have a conversation.

We are grateful that you're joining us for season four of Traumatized. And as you listen to season four, please be sure to subscribe, rate and review the Traumatized podcast wherever you listen.

Thanks for joining us, and we hope that you'll join us for more of another season of untangling.

This episode of TraumaTies is over, but this podcast is just one of our many resources. Vore welcomes all survivors of crime and their supporters. So please visit us at V-O-L-A-R-E empowers.org to learn more about how to access our trauma education and how to partner with us to create empowering experiences for survivors.