First Person: Frame by Frame

Vicarious Trauma and the Invisible Toll of Forensic Work

Written in April 2025, this piece meets the present through GLP memory. What looked like delayed trauma is whole-memory return: not disorder, but coherence—frames held intact until language, time, and safety finally arrive.

Preface

The following piece was written in April 2025 for a forensic audience, in response to a formal call for scholarship on vicarious trauma in forensic science. It was written carefully, rigorously, and in good faith. It was also written from inside the work—from the long, unremarked labour of watching, replaying, clarifying, and carrying images that do not end when the case file closes.

It was declined without comment.

That silence, in its own way, completes the argument.

First Person: Frame by Frame is not an abstract exercise in theory. It is a situated account of what it means to be tasked with bearing witness through technology—alone, repeatedly, without language or ritual for what that witnessing does to a body over time. It describes a form of exposure that remains structurally invisible in many professional cultures: mediated trauma, absorbed not in the field or the courtroom, but in the quiet rooms where evidence is handled, refined, and made legible for others.

The manuscript sits at an uncomfortable intersection. It speaks about trauma without flattening it into metrics. It names neurodivergence not as a variable to be controlled for, but as a way of processing memory, time, and repetition that profoundly shapes how traumatic material is held. It questions whether institutional notions of “support” actually support those whose minds and bodies do not translate cleanly into talk-based disclosure or procedural check-ins.

If this work does not quite fit the conventions of forensic publishing, that too is part of the story. Forensic science—like many technical disciplines—has been slow to account for the humans who do its quietest work, and slower still to reckon with difference among them. The costs of that omission are not theoretical. They are cumulative, embodied, and, too often, fatal.

I am placing First Person: Frame by Frame here because The AutSide has always been a repository for what institutions cannot yet hold. This is not a retreat from rigour, but a refusal to let lived knowledge be erased by form letters and closed doors. The work remains what it always was: an attempt to name what was unnamed, to trace the imprint of repetition, and to insist that care is not ancillary to forensic work—it is foundational.

Read it, then, not as a rejected depersonalised manuscript, but as a record that found its rightful archive.

Abstract

This article offers a first-person narrative of vicarious trauma experienced during the early stages of a forensic science career. Assigned to retrieve and process analogue video evidence in a 2003 capital case in Los Angeles, Ca.—the murder of Officer Matthew Pavelka—I reviewed the fatal shooting captured on VHS more than 500 times. The critical identification imagery was located in the underscan area, requiring careful extraction and repeated playback. This was my first death penalty case, and the victim—a police officer from a neighbouring department—was also the son of a co-worker, a department detective, adding institutional pressure to “get it right.” Whilst post-incident mental health check-ins were standard departmental practice, they proved ineffective for me as an undiagnosed autistic person and gestalt language processor. It was only years later, through body-based therapy and trauma-informed support, that I began to recognise and address the psychological imprint of this exposure. I later served on the Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC) Human Factors Subcommittee, where these early experiences informed my contributions to systemic recommendations for trauma-aware practice. Grounded in current literature on secondary traumatic stress in forensic science, this case narrative advocates for inclusive, neurodiversity-affirming mental health systems within the forensic community.

Introduction – Bearing Witness Without Language

In 2003, what we now refer to as Digital / Multimedia Forensic Analysis was still in its infancy, known then simply as Forensic Video Analysis—or FVA, as we called it. There were no formal standards, no field-wide guidelines, and certainly no formalised accreditation. Those of us who found ourselves doing the work often came from unusual places. I came from the art world and from the theatre, not from policing. My position within the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was that of a civilian civil servant—a seconded city employee, not a sworn peace officer. I wasn’t a detective or a crime scene responder. I was, in essence, a kind of communication electrician, charged with a hybrid role built around audiovisual systems, evidence retrieval, and technical documentation. It was a strange niche in the early digital age—technical, artistic, forensic, and yet not quite any of those things in isolation.

That year, I was assigned to retrieve and process analogue video evidence in a capital case—the murder of Officer Matthew Pavelka (CBS LA, 2012). At the time, I didn’t know this would be my first death penalty case. I only knew the atmosphere had changed. The victim was a police officer from a neighbouring department, and the son of a detective in ours. The pressure to “get it right” was everywhere, though never stated outright. The source material was a multiplexed VHS tape from a hotel’s security system, and the key identification imagery wasn’t within the visible frame—it was located in the underscan area, beneath the standard viewing boundary. Extracting that evidence required isolating the relevant frames, enhancing them for clarity, and replaying the footage again and again. In total, I would watch the moment of the officer’s death more than 500 times.

At the time, I had no language for what that would do to me. There was no discourse around vicarious trauma in the forensic lab—certainly not for those of us behind the screens, pulling details from video frames in the hopes that we could anchor truth in pixels. I was also undiagnosed as autistic, and I didn’t yet know that my way of processing language and experience—gestalt, script-based, nonlinear—had a name. I simply knew that the weight of what I had seen stayed with me in ways I could neither explain nor escape.

Years later, I would serve on the OSAC’s Human Factors Subcommittee, helping to shape national guidance for forensic science practices. But that journey began here—in silence, in repetition, and in the quiet toll of doing a job that no one realised could hurt you. This article is an attempt to name what was unnamed at the time: the cost of bearing witness, frame by frame, and the need for systems of care that recognise not just trauma, but difference.

The Case – A Job That Couldn’t Be Just a Job

I didn’t know, at the time, that this case would follow me for decades. The assignment itself seemed straightforward in the beginning—retrieve and process video evidence from a hotel’s surveillance system in connection with a fatal officer-involved shooting. That sort of work was already familiar to me. I had worked with analogue sources before and had become something of a problem-solver when it came to coaxing useful imagery from unstable or degraded tapes. But this one was different from the moment it arrived. The recording had been pulled from a multiplexed VHS system—a format that interleaves feeds from multiple cameras into a single composite recording. This approach preserved more footage but sacrificed clarity, and it demanded careful work to isolate each camera’s contribution. There were no guidelines for this at the time, no best practices. You simply figured it out.

I knew the officer had died in the line of duty. I also knew, very early on, that he was the son of one of our department’s detectives. This wasn’t just a homicide—it was a rupture inside the institution. It touched every hallway and every team. Nobody said it directly, but the stakes were obvious. The department had to get this one right. That sense of gravity passed silently between people, like a weight that couldn’t be set down.

The most significant imagery on the tape came not from the main visible frame, but from the underscan area—the narrow strip of signal information usually cropped out by standard playback devices. I had to work carefully, not just to extract that data, but to ensure that it was documented in a way that could survive scrutiny in court. Every frame was a task. Clarify. Export. Play back. Compare. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

All the while, there were near-constant interruptions from the chain of command—checking on progress, asking to see preliminary images, requesting updates for briefings. The pressure wasn’t just technical; it was procedural, political, performative. At one point, I was asked to prepare material for a press conference: stills, clarified video, annotated views. Every version had to be vetted; every copy accounted for. The same footage passed through my hands in different forms, for different audiences, but always returning to the same moment—the officer’s death, rendered in ghostly low-resolution frames.

By the time the process was complete, I had watched that moment more than 500 times.

What I didn’t yet understand was that this kind of exposure—repetitive, silent, mediated through a screen—was still a form of witnessing. And witnessing, even indirectly, has consequences. The research would catch up later. Studies now confirm what many of us felt long before it had a name: that forensic professionals, particularly those working with traumatic digital material, are not immune to the psychological toll of their work. Levin et al. (2021) found that even lab-based forensic scientists, once thought to be buffered by their distance from the crime scene, experience measurable levels of secondary traumatic stress—especially those who testify in court or handle graphic evidence. Schiro et al. (2023) expanded on this, noting that a significant proportion of non-sworn forensic professionals reported symptoms consistent with PTSD. The further one dug into the literature, the more it became clear that trauma exposure wasn’t limited to the scene or the interview room—it seeped into the lab, the video bay, the quiet hum of a monitor at 2 a.m.

And yet, in 2003, none of that had a name. I was not a detective, nor a sworn officer, and the nature of my work—while vital—was barely understood even within the department. The expectation was that I would do the job with technical precision and emotional detachment. And I did. But the detachment was never real. It was a mask I put on so that others would feel confident that I had things under control. Inside, something very different was happening.

Frame by Frame – The Work of Repetition

There’s a particular kind of stillness that descends when you watch the same act of violence unfold hundreds of times. Not in real time, but frame by frame—paused, scrubbed, reverse-searched for just one more sliver of light, one more clue in the noise. I wasn’t present at the scene of the shooting. I didn’t hear the gunfire or see the chaos that followed. But I was present for every replayed second of it. Over 500 times. Each time, I scanned for a new detail. Each time, I zoomed and clarified and marked coordinates. Each time, I watched a man die.

At first, I was focused—committed to the integrity of the work. There’s an odd kind of comfort in the mechanics: open the file, set the in and out points, apply filters, check luminance levels, document the result. But as the viewings mounted, something shifted. I stopped noticing the technical process. My eyes began to skip the violence even as I viewed it. The part of me that might have felt it—some empathetic reflex—grew quiet. I told myself I was fine. I was doing the job. But I wasn’t fine. And the job, as it turned out, wasn’t something you could do and walk away from untouched.

We grow up in the Global North watching action films. We’re conditioned to see gunfire and chase scenes as entertainment—punctuation marks in a story arc that resets with every new film. And our brains, even from a young age, learn to filter that out: this isn’t real, this is just a movie. But this—this was different. I’d been to the scene. I’d seen the blood on the ground, the marker cones laid out, the grief in the air. I knew the name of the man who died. I didn’t yet know the name of the man who was accused. I wasn’t watching a story—I was replaying a death that actually happened, over and over again.

I later learned there’s a term for this: mediated witnessing. It’s the act of seeing violence through a screen and being affected by it all the same. Birze and Regehr (2022) write that professionals exposed to video evidence often experience a kind of “emotional proximity” to the violence, especially when the imagery is high-resolution or repeatedly reviewed. Though mediated, the witnessing becomes embodied. Your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between what’s fictional and what’s forensic. It only knows what it absorbs. And it absorbs everything.

Even now, I can still see the moment before it happens—the body language of the shooter, the flicker in the officer’s movement, the low quality of the night-time footage failing to mute the clarity of what came next. I remember the framing more than the event itself: the back corner of the parking lot, just outside, the splash of overexposed halogen light, two figures waiting beside a parked car. It was later determined to be an ambush. Some moments became etched in my memory not because of their clarity, but because of their repetition. I could not unsee them, and I could not stop seeing them.

What complicated the trauma was that I wasn’t alone in the room. I was the one doing the technical work, yes—but others came and went. Supervisors, detectives, command staff. They wanted to see it too. Sometimes it was for confirmation, sometimes for briefing prep, sometimes just curiosity. And in sharing the footage—by necessity—I found myself unintentionally spreading the emotional weight of it. Regehr et al. (2022) describe this as trauma contagion—the way distress can ripple outward in institutional settings, especially when visual evidence is shared across roles. Barbash (2023) documents similar patterns in judges, who report PTSD-like symptoms after viewing graphic video in court. The courtroom doesn’t protect you from what the screen delivers. Neither does the lab.

What I experienced wasn’t exceptional. Shortland and Crayne (2024) have shown that professionals who repeatedly view violent video evidence experience not just vicarious trauma, but also emotional blunting, fatigue, and eventual burnout. Over time, the imagery seeps into your dreams. It affects how you see the world—how safe it feels, how noisy it becomes, how flat things can suddenly appear. You become detached, then irritable, then exhausted. Eventually, you forget what feeling normal was like.

But in 2003, I didn’t know any of that. There were no debriefings about emotional residue. No naming of what it means to become an involuntary archivist of someone’s final moments. No one asked how many times I’d watched it. No one wanted to know. And I wouldn’t have known how to answer anyway.

Misaligned Support – When Therapy Doesn’t Fit

After the case wrapped and the trial preparation moved forward, I was sent to the department psychologist for a routine check-in. It was policy. Any time an employee was exposed to a traumatic incident—especially one involving the death of an officer—there was a mandated wellness appointment. On paper, it was a show of support. In practice, it felt like surveillance.

The psychologist was polite, professional, measured. She worked for the department. That detail sat in my gut like a weight. Though we were assured that what we said would remain confidential, I never quite believed it. How could I? Her office was inside headquarters. She answered to the same chain of command as I did. And there was something else: I didn’t have the words.

What I was feeling—what I had absorbed from those endless hours of footage, that proximity to grief and violence and pressure—was bigger than language. Or perhaps smaller. It hadn’t crystallised yet into something I could name. I sat there in that office and nodded when prompted. I gave the answers I thought I was supposed to. Not because I was trying to hide anything, but because I didn’t know how to begin. I didn’t even know how to be a person in that space. It felt like a performance I hadn’t rehearsed for.

Years later, I would write about this—about what psychoanalysis gets right, and what it still misses entirely (Hoerricks, 2025a). That I lived for decades without a name for the kind of language I used (or didn’t use). That I thought I was broken because I couldn’t spontaneously discuss my “feelings,” because I needed scripts and scenes, because my emotional reality didn’t translate into tidy sentences across a couch. That piece of writing, and others like it, came much later. At the time, I only knew that I left that office feeling worse, not better. Emptier, not lighter. They called it support. But to me, it felt like a checkpoint. An administrative necessity. Something to tick off a form.

Being autistic and a gestalt language processor meant that traditional talk therapy was, quite literally, inaccessible. I needed metaphor, movement, time—things that the format didn’t allow (Hoerricks, 2025b). Research now supports what I experienced: autistic adults often struggle in therapy that isn’t adapted to their communication needs. Mazurek et al. (2023) found that outcomes improved significantly when therapists were autism-informed, while Pappagianopoulos et al. (2024) noted that open-ended, abstract dialogue can be particularly difficult for clients like me. But in 2003, none of that research had been done. I wasn’t even diagnosed yet. I simply thought I had failed at being helped.

There was also the growing sense that these debriefings, even for those who could engage with them more easily, weren’t particularly effective. Addis and Stephens (2008) documented how mandatory police debriefings sometimes resulted in worse PTSD scores. The intervention, stripped of nuance and imposed without consent, didn’t always meet people where they were. Plant (2001) reached a similar conclusion: when officers don’t feel safe to be vulnerable—when therapy is institutionalised rather than human—it doesn’t matter what credentials the provider has. The barrier isn’t clinical; it’s cultural.

For neurodivergent professionals, those barriers multiply. Curnow et al. (2025) describe how autistic employees often hesitate to disclose their needs or diagnoses for fear of being sidelined. When they do disclose, the systems they work within are rarely equipped to accommodate difference. And so, the burden of translation falls to us—to those already overwhelmed by the work, the culture, the trauma, and now, the need to explain ourselves in languages not made for us.

I left that session knowing I would not go back. Not because I didn’t need support—I did—but because the kind of support I needed did not exist in that building. It would take years, and a trusted referral, to find something that could meet me where I was. But that comes later. First, I had to find my way out of the silence.

Finding My Own Way – Qi Gong, Healing, and Martial Memory

It was a dear friend who finally pointed me toward help that could actually reach me. She was the founder of a major public speaking agency; someone I’d met during what I think of as Act II of my life—the chapter where I worked in personal protection. I’d been her grandson’s bodyguard back then, back when I made my living with vigilance and silence, standing just out of frame. We’d stayed in touch through the years, our lives moving in different directions but still circling one another. One day, knowing something of what I’d been carrying, she said, “I think I know someone you should meet.”

She told me about a client of hers—Karl La Rowe—a speaker and therapist who specialised in helping professionals exposed to suffering (La Rowe, 2005). Someone who worked with police, social workers, nurses, and frontline responders. Someone who understood what it meant to witness harm over and over and not know where to put it. She didn’t push. She just offered his name and a feeling: “He gets it.” You don’t have to explain everything to him.”

That was all I needed to hear.

I reached out, and Karl and I hit it off straight away. We began a long-distance working relationship that would grow into a friendship that continues to this day. He understood the invisible toll of helping professions—not just police or forensic workers, but nurses, therapists, chaplains. He called it compassion fatigue. I had never heard the term before. It struck me with the force of truth. I hadn’t just seen too much—I had absorbed too much. I had carried too much. I had no rituals for letting it go, and no one in my world had ever suggested that I might need them.

What made Karl’s work different was that it wasn’t about talking. It was about breathing. It was about movement. He introduced me to Qi Gong—a practice rooted in cultivating and circulating life energy through slow, intentional motion and breath. For me, it was like coming home to a language I hadn’t realised I spoke.

I had spent years training in martial arts: Sambo, Systema, Tai Chi, wrestling. In a past life, I had worked as a bodyguard. I knew how the body held stories. I knew how breath could centre you or save you. But no one had ever explained that these same tools—stance, flow, breath—could help heal what the job had taken from me. That the movements I had used for survival could also be used for restoration.

Karl had a method he called Flow Motion, a way of resetting the body after exposure to others’ pain. It was intuitive to me. As an autistic person, movement had always been part of how I made sense of the world. I stimmed, I swayed, I paced when language failed. I moved to regulate, to release, to return to myself. But neither Karl nor I understood, at the time, that my resonance with his method was rooted in neurodivergence. We just knew that it worked.

Where talk therapy had failed—where it had left me adrift and wordless—this met me exactly where I was. Not in the story, but in the rhythm. Not in the telling, but in the trembling that came before words. Karl taught me how to exhale again. But more than that, he helped me remember something I already knew—something my body had learned years earlier through Systema. In that discipline, you’re taught to become aware of where tension lives in the body and to move breath—energy—into that space. It’s a principle so fundamental it had once been instinctive to me. But the trauma had severed that connection. I had forgotten how to listen inward. With Karl, it wasn’t learning anew—it was remembering, and returning. He helped me find the thread again. How to notice where I was holding. How to soften. How to come back into my body, gently and without judgement.

Looking back now, I see how much of what helped me has since found footing in research. Somatic Experiencing, a body-based approach developed for trauma recovery, has been shown to significantly reduce symptoms of PTSD and fear-based immobility (Andersen et al., 2017). Kuhfuß et al. (2021) reviewed the field and found that these embodied practices helped people not only feel safer, but also regulate affect and rebuild trust with their own bodies. And for neurodivergent people, these practices are especially powerful. Pahnke et al. (2022) demonstrated that autistic adults benefitted from approaches like NeuroACT—a blend of mindfulness, acceptance, and embodied awareness—particularly when verbal reasoning wasn’t the entry point.

I didn’t have the language for any of this back then. I just knew that, for the first time since the case, I felt like I was breathing in something clean. That I wasn’t carrying the death with me in every muscle. That maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have to keep watching it—if I could learn how to move through it.

Karl never asked me to relive the story. He didn’t need the details. What he needed—and what he offered—was presence. A model for what regulation looked like. A permission slip to feel, to shake, to exhale, to begin again. He met me in the body, not in the explanation.

There’s a kind of liberation in that. Especially for those of us who have always felt trapped by the assumptions of language—by a world that insists on verbal clarity before it will believe our pain. With Karl, I never had to convince anyone. I just had to move.

And in moving, I came back to myself.

Integration – Human Factors and the Long View

In 2014, I was appointed to the OSAC Video Image Technology and Analysis Subcommittee—VITAL, for short. It was an honour, of course, but also a responsibility I felt deeply. OSAC’s mission was to develop consensus-based standards across forensic disciplines—to bring clarity, consistency, and scientific rigour to fields that had, in many cases, grown up without formal pathways or recognised benchmarks. For forensic video analysis, it was a pivotal moment. The field had long relied on borrowed tools from television, film, and photography. We were artisans more than academics, learning by doing, by necessity. OSAC offered us the opportunity to define our own discipline: what practitioners should know, what they should be able to do, and how their work should be evaluated.

I served two full three-year terms, eventually becoming Chair of the Video Taskgroup. Throughout my time with OSAC, I took part in countless conversations about standards—many of them practical, some philosophical. One conversation in particular stuck with me. A colleague outlined what they believed should be the trajectory of any forensic scientist: a bachelor’s to do the work, a master’s to supervise it, and a doctorate to testify in court. It was a clean, aspirational model—but it didn’t fit our field. No such degrees existed in forensic video analysis at the time, and many of us came to the work through non-traditional routes. I had entered through the arts, and later, through police service—not as a sworn officer, but as a civilian specialist.

The conversation lingered in my mind not because I disagreed, but because I understood the gap it revealed. The gap between the work we did and the institutional frameworks that were supposed to validate us. And for me, that gap was more than academic. As I progressed in my own higher education, working toward writing curriculum and earning the degrees that didn’t exist when I began, I discovered just how hostile academia could be to someone like me. Rigid systems. Unspoken rules. Communication styles that rewarded extroversion and punished divergence. It was during this process that I came to understand I was autistic—and that my language processing style, shaped by gestalt patterns and scripts, was not a deficit but a difference. That realisation would go on to shape the focus of my dissertation (Hoerricks, 2018), and my ongoing efforts to open the door wider for those who would follow.

Within OSAC, we were encouraged to work with interdisciplinary “bridge committees”—groups that linked across subcommittees to share insight and support cohesive development. I chose to collaborate with the Human Factors Committee, not out of obligation, but because I had lived what it meant to be a human factor in a forensic system. I had worked under pressure, carried trauma unspoken, and felt the quiet erosion of unacknowledged emotional labour. My own experience gave urgency to the Committee’s work on cognitive load, systemic stress, and psychological safety (Dror, 2013; Edmond et al., 2017).

And I wasn’t alone.

By the time I completed my service to OSAC, I had known six forensic video analysts who had died by suicide.

Six.

Each one had spent years bearing witness to trauma—frame by frame, silently, expertly. And each one, it seemed, had done so with little recognition of the emotional cost. We had standards for image resolution, for file handling, for admissibility. But we didn’t have standards for staying human while doing the work.

Civil service forensic personnel—lab analysts, video examiners, digital specialists—often sit in a grey zone: responsible for accuracy, invisibly vital to investigations, yet frequently excluded from the support systems built for police officers. Lombardo et al. (2024) highlight the high levels of burnout, particularly for those exposed to disturbing material without the protections of peer debriefings or wellness programmes. Levin et al. (2021) found that organisational support, more than personal resilience, predicted whether forensic professionals could sustain their roles without suffering long-term psychological harm.

These insights weren’t abstract for me—they were personal. I saw the cracks in the system not just as ethical issues, but as mortal ones. And I began to understand that neurodiversity, too, had to be part of the conversation. I’d met many others like me—unusual thinkers, pattern recognisers, people who struggled in meetings but excelled at catching details no one else could see. Many were undiagnosed. Most were unsupported.

Forensic science needs more than standards. It needs systems that understand the humans who uphold them. Systems that make room for grief, for difference, for care. Systems that recognise that expertise isn’t just what you know—it’s what you carry, and how you’re held.

Because no one should have to carry this work alone.

Conclusion – Systemic Change Starts with Naming It

There’s something particular about reviewing footage frame by frame. You don’t experience the event as a whole, not in the way others might. You see it as fragments—moments isolated in amber. Not narrative, but impression. Not sequence, but accumulation. Each frame asks something of you. Not just attention, but presence. To look again. And again. And again.

That process shaped me. Not just professionally, but neurologically. For me—as an autistic gestalt language processor—those frames didn’t fade when the workday ended. I didn’t have tidy folders in my mind marked “evidence” and “emotion.” There was no boundary. No script. I held those images in my body the way I had always held language: as complete units that returned unbidden, especially under stress. I didn’t remember the story. I remembered moments. The splash of halogen light. The shape of a parked car. The stillness before it all began. The frame where everything changed (Hoerricks, 2025c).

Autistic time isn’t linear. It loops. It pools. It folds in on itself like cloth. And GLP memory—whole, immersive, sensory—doesn’t let go. It doesn’t dull with repetition. It deepens. The more I watched, the more fused I became to that moment. Not as a witness. Not even as a technician. But as someone caught in it, with no language to step out (Hoerricks, 2025c).

And what I know now—what I feel now—isn’t just a retrospective insight. It’s not a tidy “looking back.” My mind doesn’t work that way. For me, knowing is recursive. It runs both directions. The discoveries I’ve made in the present rewrite the past—not metaphorically, but neurologically. The autistic mind operates in the eternal now, where past, present, and future all coexist in layered proximity. When I learn something new about myself—about autism, about trauma, about the language I was never given—it doesn’t just change how I understand today. It goes back and rearranges yesterday’s narrative. It re-authors the script. Retrocausality, but emotional. Structural. Necessary (Hoerricks, 2025c).

When I say that no one understood what I was going through at the time—not even me—that’s true. But it’s also true that now, some part of me does. And that part is still reaching back to that younger version of myself, the one sitting in a fluorescent-lit room, staring at a paused VHS frame, trying to breathe through something too big to name.

This is what it means to carry memory as presence. What it means to be both inside and outside the moment. What it means to have a mind that doesn’t file things away but keeps them open like windows—some cracked, some wide, some with wind rushing through.

The systems around us were never built with that kind of mind in view. Forensic science, like so many institutions, values clarity, detachment, order. It values outcome. It assumes a clean division between the evidence and the examiner. But for some of us, there is no clean division. The work enters us. Lives in us. Repeats in us.

That’s not a flaw.

But it is a fact.

And systems that rely on us—on our precision, our perception, our patterns—must also be built to hold us. To recognise that the same rigour we apply to our technical standards must be applied to care. That wellness isn’t a retreat or a debrief or a training day. It’s culture. It’s accommodation. It’s the slow, structured presence of others who do not flinch from our way of being.

To those still carrying their own looped frames, I want you to know: I see you. I know the trap of memory that pretends to be time. I know the moment that keeps playing. The scene that edits itself but never ends. The body that still startles even though you’re safe now. You are not alone.

We speak in memory. In echo. In resonance. We speak through scripts we didn’t write—but we are writing new ones now.

And writing begins, as all good analysis does, by naming what others have overlooked.

Frame by frame.

Afterward — When the Past Does Not Stay Put

This piece was written in April 2025, before I had fully articulated what I now understand about gestalt memory, whole-memory processing, and autistic time. The events it describes, however, were never confined to the past. They have continued to arrive—quietly, bodily, without sequence—whenever conditions allowed them to surface. What has changed since then is not the memory, but my capacity to name how it works.

In the months since writing First Person: Frame by Frame, I have written extensively about what happens when memory does not return in fragments, but as a field—dense, relational, already coherent. I have named how, for gestalt language processors, the past does not recede politely with time. It pools. It waits intact. It arrives all at once when something in the present rhymes closely enough to open the gate. This is not trauma misbehaving. It is memory doing exactly what it was built to do.

Seen through that lens, the repeated viewing of the Pavelka footage takes on a sharper clarity. Watching the same violent moment hundreds of times was not merely exposure in the conventional sense. It was recursive inscription. Each replay reinforced a whole—sensation, posture, relational meaning, institutional pressure—compressed into a single gestalt that never dispersed. There was no gradual fading because there was no segmentation. The system did not store “an event.” It stored a configuration.

At the time, this was misread—by me, and by the systems around me—as something like resilience or neutrality. I was functioning. I was precise. I was calm. But what I was actually doing was holding an intact whole without any mechanism for decompression. Language could not follow. Talk-based check-ins could not touch it. The body carried it forward, patiently, until conditions for translation existed. That delay was not avoidance. It was fidelity.

What feels newly urgent now, at the end of 2025, is how often this pattern is still misinterpreted—especially in forensic, clinical, and academic spaces that privilege linear recall and narrative resolution. When autistic professionals report intensity, recurrence, or sudden embodied return, the question is still too often framed as pathology: Why now? Why so strong? Why again? The better question—the one this paper gestures toward, and that my later work makes explicit—is What architecture is this memory moving through?

First Person: Frame by Frame belongs to a longer arc than I could see when I first wrote it. It is not only about vicarious trauma in forensic science. It is about what happens when institutions demand that people metabolise violence analytically, whilst relying on minds that process meaning holistically. It is about the cost of asking gestalt systems to perform detachment, and the danger of mistaking silence for absorption.

I am placing this Afterword here not to correct the paper, but to situate it. The work was never unfinished. It was waiting—held whole, like so many of the memories it describes—until the language to meet it arrived. Now it has. And in that meeting, the past has not been resolved or closed, but brought into coherence with the present.

That, too, is a form of care.

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