Hello {{first_name}}. There is a small, awful moment I want to name, because almost everyone who gathers stories for a living has lived it and almost nobody talks about it.

It is the moment in an interview when the person across from you starts to cry, and somewhere underneath your concern, a quieter voice thinks:

'Good, this is the bit we needed.'

This edition, written for the 3,400 of us here, is about that voice, and how to do storytelling that never feeds it - how to capture and tell the stories of people who have lived through something hard without re-traumatising them, your team, or the people who read it.

Last week I asked what usually happens when a political moment touches your cause. Your answers split three ways: some post quickly, some talk it over until the moment passes, and some stay out of politics on principle. Same trigger, three completely different reflexes.

Here is what stood out. Two of those are real decisions. The third, letting the moment pass while you deliberate, is a decision made for you by hesitation. So the takeaway is simple: agree your position before the next moment lands, not in the heat of it. Decide once, calmly, and you are never caught flat-footed again. That is the same move this week's edition asks of you, applied to the people whose stories you tell.

I have sat in a lot of rooms where someone was about to tell me the hardest thing that ever happened to them. As a photographer, as a charity founder, as a support worker, and as a person who has spent nearly twelve years telling one painful story of my own. So I want to be honest about something the sector rarely admits.

The way most charities and social impact leaders gather lived-experience stories is mildly extractive by design. Not because the people doing it are unkind. The opposite, usually. It is because the entire process is built around what the organisation needs to publish, and the person's wellbeing is treated as a box to tick on the way to the quote.

We have talked about consent before, in Edition 7, and about whether a story should be told at all, in Edition 10. This is the layer underneath both.

Consent answers 'are we allowed to tell this?'

Trauma-informed storytelling answers a harder question: will the telling of it harm the person who lived it, the person who gathers it, or the person who reads it, and how do we make sure it does not?

Most harm in story-gathering is not dramatic. It hides inside normal, well-meaning practice. Three patterns do most of the damage.

The first is the tearful-testimony ask. Somewhere it became received wisdom that the best impact story is the one where the person breaks down. So we steer for it. We ask the question we know will land hardest, we wait for the wobble, and we feel the interview "worked" when they cry. We are, in effect, mining someone's worst day for a reaction. A story can be powerful without taking the person back to the floor of their lowest moment.

The second is the camera in the safe space. An organisation builds months, sometimes years, of trust with people. A room becomes the one place they feel safe. And then we bring a camera, a stranger, a microphone and a deadline into that exact room, because it is convenient and the light is good. The space that was safe because nothing was being extracted from it stops being safe the moment something is.

The word doing the damage in that sentence is stranger.

I have sat on both sides of this for years, as the person holding the camera and as the person telling a hard story of my own, and the difference is unmistakable.

When the person gathering the story is trained in trauma-informed practice, experienced in the space, and known by the community to be one of them, someone who understands their story, who is with them and on their side rather than an outsider looking in, the room does not close in the same way.

The harm is not the lens itself. It is a lens in unpractised, untrusted hands, arriving on a deadline. If a camera does belong in a place that people trust, make sure the person carrying it has earned the right to be there.

The third is the story reopened years later. Someone shares their story once, at a point when they are ready. Then eighteen months on, a new campaign needs content, and we go back to the same person and ask them to tell it again, on camera this time, with more detail. They have moved on. We are asking them to move back. Consent given for one moment is treated as a standing licence to return to the wound.

If you recognise one of these, you are not a bad organisation. You are a normal one. The point is that "normal" has a cost, and the person paying it is rarely in the room when the content is signed off.

Trauma-informed practice did not start in communications. It comes from healthcare, social work and frontline support, and it rests on a simple recognition: a great many of the people we work with are carrying trauma, and the way we treat them can either steady them or set them back.

Its core principles are often given as safety, trust, choice, control, collaboration and empowerment.

The leap I want you to make this week is to apply those six principles not to your services, where many of you already do, but to your storytelling, where almost nobody does. The same person who is handled with enormous care in your support work is often handled with startling carelessness the moment they become "a case study".

Let me be clear about what trauma-informed does not mean, because it is easy to over-correct.

It does not mean sanitising a story until no feeling is left in it, or treating every tear as a failure. Emotion is human. When someone tells you about something that mattered enormously to them, feeling belongs in the room.

The goal is not to avoid emotion, it is to make sure that any emotion which surfaces is held safely, met with care, and never engineered.

The line between the tearful-testimony ask and trauma-informed practice is not the presence of tears. It is intent and aftercare: are you steering someone toward distress to get your clip, or are you prepared, with real support in place, for the moment feeling arrives on its own?

Here is the part that matters for funding, because I know that is the pressure you are under. You do not have to choose between ethics and impact.

The most moving stories I have ever helped tell were not the ones where someone was taken apart in front of a lens. They were the ones told with restraint, by a person who was clearly in control of their own account.

Audiences feel the difference. They can sense when a story has been pulled out of someone, and it makes them trust you less, not more.

I learned this from the inside out. When I now tell the story behind our charity, I am telling it from a place where I now stand steady, by choice, on my terms, having decided what I will and will not share. That is what makes it land differently from what it did 10 years ago.

It would help no one, least of all me, if someone had cornered me into it on a bad day and pressed record. Ask yourself whether the person in your next story is being given that same standing, or whether you are quietly hoping they crumble.

The goal is not a story that makes people cry. It is a story that makes people act, told by someone who is safe, and stays safe, long after you have hit publish.

Take the six principles of trauma-informed practice and apply each one to a specific stage of storytelling. Run a planned story through all six before you gather anything.

1. Safety, before you ask. The person should feel physically and emotionally safe, and so should the staff member gathering the story. Choose the setting with the person, not for them. Never bring the camera into the room that earned its safety by being camera-free.

2. Trust, name what happens next. Be transparent about exactly where the story will appear, for how long, who will see it, and what it is being used to achieve. No surprises later. Surprise is the opposite of trust.

3. Choice, make "no" genuinely available. Offer real options: anonymity, telling the shape of the story without the worst details, reviewing the final piece, telling part of it, telling none of it. A choice only counts if every option is one you will actually honour.

4. Control, they steer the depth. The person decides how far they go, not the interviewer. Stop steering for the breakdown. Agree in advance the questions you will not ask, and a word or signal that pauses everything, no explanation needed.

5. Collaboration, tell it with them, not about them. Share the draft. Let them change wording, remove a detail, correct the emphasis. Their story is not raw material you process; it is a thing you build together.

6. Empowerment, and a door marked exit. They must be able to withdraw consent later, and know how, without guilt or friction. Pair the story with aftercare: a check-in afterwards, every time, and a named person they can reach if publishing it stirs something up.

Complete this with the storyteller before any recording, filming or interview begins. One page. It is the difference between gathering a story and extracting one. It sits alongside consent, it does not replace it.

If this edition landed for you, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to whoever in your organisation gathers the stories: the comms lead, the fundraiser, the frontline worker with the phone and the good heart.

Run the Pre-Interview Safety Plan together once, on a story you are about to gather. It takes ten minutes and it changes how the whole thing feels for the person on the other side.

And if you are sitting on a story you suspect was gathered the extractive way, it is not too late to go back, check in, and offer the person the choices they were never given.

If they want to join the list properly, they can do so here: www.impactstoryteller.org

Until next week, please take care.

Warm regards,

Matt Mahmood-Ogston
Award-winning impact storyteller, photographer and charity CEO.
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