Connecting Through Comics: Co-creating creative digital tools for expressing complex emotions, with and for trauma-impacted youth

An estimated 20-48% of youth in the United States have been exposed to multiple types of trauma in their childhood. This developmental trauma can have significant long-term consequences on youths’ development, including on emotional development, causing youth to have difficulty understanding what they feel, where these feelings come from, how to cope with them, and how to express them. Because many of the traumas they experience are interpersonal and involve their earliest connections, youth also struggle with trusting others and developing social connections. Trauma early in life can also cause delays in cognitive development, impacting youths’ ability to express themselves through language and making it harder for them to express how they feel to others and build relationships.

Integrating principles from expressive arts and narrative-based therapies, we work with young people impacted by developmental trauma to design technological systems that can support youth with identifying, processing, and expressing their emotions and feeling a sense of commonality with others. We do this through three phases:

In Phase 1, we conducted a series of  9 workshops with 54 trauma-impacted youth and young adults which explored various creative digital modalities for expressing emotions, including music, abstract visuals, drawings, and comics. This collaboration culminated in the design of a novel, collage-based digital tool that makes it easy for young people to visually express their emotions and resonate with the visuals shared by others. Our findings suggest that this system can offer a unique avenue for trauma-impacted young people to process their experiences, more easily communicate their emotions, and connect with supportive communities.