Introduction
After first writing about Social and Racial Justice in Eco-Trauma-Informed Design, I felt that I needed to dive deeper into the mental health aspect of ecology and trauma. After all, the self is at the core of our ecology and our trauma, so if we don’t understand the self, how can we understand others and the many layers around ourselves? We make judgements and decisions based on our understanding of the world. Our understanding of the world is developed through positive and negative reinforcements (trauma), forming our behavior, culture, organizations, communities, environments, and finally our biome through advertent and inadvertent behavior.
In this post, I reference material from Sarah Cantor, moderator of the Greater Good Conference; Sarah Fathallah, Social Designer and Design Researcher; Rachel Dietkus, Macro Clinical Social Worker; and other works cited as mentioned. In sharing what I’ve learned from their work, I share my own thoughts, and hope that you can also benefit and reflect on lessons learned and apply it to your own life. I look at eco-trauma-informed design through the lens of a Design Operations Manager, but we are all creators. Focusing on mental health, let’s be more conscious and understanding creators. If human trauma is a human construct, let’s deconstruct our traumas.