About Us
Lingwell is a trauma-informed communication tool designed to help people express themselves clearly and safely, especially in moments when words are hard to find. It was built by people who have spent decades working in language, care, and crisis, and it has been shaped by the voices of those who live and work on the front lines of trauma. This is a tool that listens, speaks, and supports when it matters most.
Our Story
Lingwell began with poetry and listening. In 2009, founder and poet Matthew Leavitt Brown moved to Nashville, TN, and started hosting writing groups for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Those gatherings revealed something powerful. When people are given space to speak about what they have lived through, especially in their own words and on their own terms, something starts to shift. Pain becomes shareable. Language becomes a tool for healing.
The groups expanded, the model spread, and the work deepened, moving into shelters, clinics, prisons, and hospitals, where survivors of trauma were using words not just to recount what happened, but to reclaim a voice for what comes next while also finding new ways to cope with the embodied experiences of living after exposure to profound traumatic stress.
To understand why the process worked, and how to make it work for more people, Brown pursued a PhD in language studies, focusing on therapeutic expression and trauma. This research, combined with years of fieldwork, eventually led to a partnership with Vanderbilt University’s Center for Innovation and support from the National Science Foundation. The goal was to build a tool that could take everything learned in those rooms, groups, and sessions and make it available more broadly, through the help of a customized artificial intelligence.
What emerged is Lingwell. An application designed to listen like someone who has been there and knows how to support what users need to process.
Our Approach
Whatever the challenge – grief, injury, illness, trauma, burnout, change – how we understand and respond to it depends first on how we describe it. We do not experience the world directly. We experience it through language: the stories we tell, the labels we use, the metaphors we adopt, the words we reach for when we try to explain. Language is the filter through which every memory, emotion, and moment becomes meaningful. And when our language is overwhelmed, outpaced, or underdeveloped, we suffer in silence that can often feel like screaming.
Lingwell was created to change that.
Our method draws on years of research and real-world practice across expressive writing therapy, narrative medicine, cognitive linguistics and trauma studies. It integrates evidence-backed techniques into guided communicative experiences designed to help users find their words, and in doing so, reshape how their experiences live in the body and the mind.
We believe that whatever the problem is, it is language first. And so is the solution.
Our tool is not here to fix people. It is here to give them a way to listen to themselves, and through that, to begin the slow and powerful work of metabolizing what they are carrying. Because language does not just describe experience. Language is experience. And better language creates better outcomes. Every time.
Who We Are Now
Lingwell is a growing platform created by a small team with backgrounds in healthcare, education, linguistics, user experience, and community advocacy. We are building this because we have seen what is possible when people get the chance to speak freely and be met with understanding.
Lingwell is not meant to replace care. It is meant to extend it – to more people, more often, when they need it most.