Trauma-Informed Content Consulting

20/08/2026

The 2026 ProCopywriters Survey asked 70 copywriters who said that they regularly write for vulnerable audiences how confident they feel doing it.

They said 8.71 out of 10. That is the highest self-assessment anywhere in the survey, higher than confidence pushing back on unethical briefs, higher than feeling respected at work and much higher than confidence talking about money.

64% of them have had no training for it.

The easy conclusion is that untrained people are overconfident and should book a course. I sell training, so that conclusion would suit me nicely. It isn't what I think.

I have been doing this work for a long time. Guidance for spiking victims now used by 81% of police forces. Universal Credit journeys. Cancer Research UK. Emergency grants in a pandemic. If you handed me that question, I would score myself in the middle, and I would want to argue about the question first.

When it comes to trauma-informed content design, I consider myself an explorer, not an expert. That is despite doing keynotes on it at international conferences and being a featured author on trauma-informed content design.

That’s not modesty. Content design runs on assumptions. Every persona and journey map is an assumption wearing a lanyard. That works fine most of the time, because the error bars are tolerable and the reader recovers when we get it wrong.

With someone in crisis, the assumptions get far less reliable and the cost of being wrong goes up. Two people receiving the same diagnosis on the same day are in entirely different cognitive states, shaped by histories neither I nor the client will ever see. No one writes in to say that the arrears letter made them stop opening post. The failure is silent and it looks exactly like success from the client side.

So when I see "trauma-informed content" as the third bullet on a capability list, between brand voice and SEO, I flinch. Not because the person hasn't thought about it. Because stating it flat claims a level of knowledge about other people's inner lives that I do not believe anyone has earned.

The honest description isn't "I write trauma-informed content." It's "I work in a way that assumes I will be wrong about this reader, and I build for that”.

Which is also why the accountability belongs with the organisation rather than the writer. If no individual can be reliably confident here, no institution discharges its duty by procuring one expert. It needs testing with people in the moment rather than the composed account of it afterwards, a route for disclosures, some way of finding out when content has failed, and someone senior who owns the consequence.

Training's real function is not to raise your confidence. It is to install the doubt that experience alone will never supply.

Mine still isn't at 8.71. After all this time, I am fairly sure that's not a gap in my training.

30/05/2026

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 on Thursday. The headline claims more conservative scoping, more honest acknowledgement of uncertainty and higher scores on alignment with user interests. It supposedly won’t make claims when it’s not sire of the facts. Sounds great in theory.

Rembrandt Editor, the trauma-informed content review tool I’ve been building, currently runs on Claude Sonnet 4.6, an older model from the same family. When the model maker releases an upgrade claiming exactly the qualities a content review tool depends on, including careful scoping, honest acknowledgement of limits and prosocial alignment, you have to investigate. So I did.

Yesterday I ran the same three pieces of content through both models: a police survivor page, a contractor timesheet email and an NHS-style breast cancer information page.

The result was clearer than I expected. I’m staying on Sonnet 4.6.

Opus 4.8 is genuinely more honest. It scopes regulatory and accessibility flags more conservatively, sticking to the criteria that actually apply rather than stretching to fit. It models the reader’s emotional state more sharply on stakes-high content: “a survivor reading this in distress is likely to be running a parallel internal process: was what happened to me real enough?”

Sonnet 4.6 catches more specific structural things. A naming collision where “invasive breast cancer” is used as both general category and specific subtype on the same page. A 43-word sentence that buries the action under escalation language. Two date references the reader has to reconcile in opening sentences.

They’re complementary, not interchangeable. Opus is stronger on psychological reader-state observation. Sonnet is stronger on structural analytical pattern detection. Across the mix of content Rembrandt actually reviews, Sonnet’s pattern detection earns its place more reliably.

There’s also a 67% cost premium on Opus 4.8 at standard pricing. That matters less if you’re running a few reviews a day, more if you’re operating a tool at any kind of scale.

For trauma-informed content design specifically, I’d expected Opus to be the obvious upgrade. It does add something. Just not consistently enough across content types to justify the cost premium or strong enough to defend “Pro runs on Opus” as product substance rather than marketing positioning.

Rembrandt Editor was created with input from experienced content designers. The free version is available now, with a Pro version launching in June.

https://www.rembrandteditor.com

Trauma-informed content review for readers in living experience. UK lens: FCA Consumer Duty, ISO 22458, GDS, WCAG 2.2 AA. EU and US lenses available.

22/05/2026

Thanks to the experienced content practitioners who've spent the past few weeks putting my new trauma-informed content review tool Rembrandt Editor through its paces. The feedback has been more useful than I had any right to expect.

Plenty of people will tell you that any Al writing tool is, by definition, another lump of slop that strips out the critical thinking, compassion and human element good content depends on. It's a reasonable suspicion. It's also why I cared what experienced practitioners thought once they'd used Rembrandt Editor on real work, rather than reacting to the category.

A selection of what came back, names off because the testers were generous enough already:
- "This is fabulous! Super useful, a really interesting and genuinely transformative tool."
- "I was really impressed by what it flagged and the suggested improvements. I think it is genuinely an incredibly useful tool."
- "The first Al writing tool that is genuinely helpful for a writer who is already a professional. Rembrandt revealed to me the handful of places where I had gone too far in trading clarity for reassurance. Also, the copy suggestions were more nuanced than other writing tools I've used."
- "Oh, it is GOOD! I really like how it tells you ways to tighten your copy and calls to action."
- "The 'specific issues' are well considered and offer useful tips. I especially like how the 'try instead' callout opens with the frontloaded instruction of how to improve the content."

That's the bit I find most encouraging, testers describing the tool as something that surfaces trade-offs and sharpens judgement, not something that does the thinking for them.

Which is the design intent. Rembrandt flags plausible concerns. It doesn't adjudicate compliance, replace a content designer or pretend to have judgement it doesn't have.

If you volunteered to test and haven't got round to it, your feedback is still much appreciated. Have a go. Tell me what's wrong with it. The next round of changes will be shaped by what testers find, not by what I think the tool should do next.

10/05/2026

I have spent months trying to create a credible working version of my trauma-informed content analysis tool, Rembrandt Editor. It now reviews content, gives detailed feedback and suggests a rewrite as an experienced trauma-informed content designer.

I'm opening a closed beta to a small group of practitioners and would value your feedback.
DM me if you'd like to take part. Run a couple of pieces through (text only or PDF at this stage) and tell me whether it sounds like a trauma-informed content practitioner or a generic content tool, whether the framework is visible in the selected language and jurisdiction and anything that surprised you. You can send me feedback in the tool or reply here.

There is no deadline. Even a quick reaction is useful. Thanks in advance.

28/01/2026

The UK government just published comprehensive AI skills research. You may have seen headlines about a related government announcement offering everyone a 20-minute training session to learn how to write basic AI prompts. But there's a lot more to it.

The research covered 139 literature reviews, surveys of 1,189 people and 801 employers, and multiple work packages. This required serious work and serious money.

Their findings are that 73% of people think they've used AI, but only 17% can explain it. Two-thirds distrust AI products. Women are less confident and get less training. Employers can't identify use cases, but are deploying systems anyway.

Their conclusion is that workers need more AI skills training. I think that this is fundamentally wrong. The distrust isn't a deficit, but a rational response to observable harm. When people see AI hallucinating medical advice and biased hiring tools, it's not a failure to understand AI. People understand it perfectly.

The real problem isn't that workers lack skills. It's that organisations are deploying systems without checking if they work, who they harm or what alternatives might serve people better.

Workers aren't the problem. Workers ARE the economy. But this research treats them as inputs to optimise rather than people whose lives matter. This is the classic move of parking moral questions in technology projects. Instead of asking "Is this good?", they ask "How do we skill up for this?"

My analysis is now available online.

Analysis of UK government AI skills research reveals how worker "skills gaps" frame masks organisational deployment failures.

26/01/2026

I've just written about the government's new digital roadmap for modernising public services.

I worked on my first government digital transformation project in 1987, years before the internet. After all these years, I've learned to read these documents for what they're designed to deliver versus what they promise.

The roadmap has genuine strengths, including real transparency commitments, an honest assessment of outdated systems, and a focus on building expertise rather than relying on consultants. But there are structural blind spots that worry me. We're measuring efficiency and satisfaction, not outcomes for the people most likely to need help. We're treating digital inclusion as a training problem rather than a design principle.

My article breaks down what works, what's missing and what trauma-informed design would actually look like.

You can read my article at https://www.workplaceinsights.co.uk/government-digital-roadmap-2025-critique/

A trauma-informed critique of the Government Digital Roadmap, including gaps around vulnerable users risk turning transformation into structural exclusion.