The non-linear nature of crash scenarios has led to many designs being developed through extensive trial and error based on the intuitions of the design engineer. As such, effectively utilizing topology optimization for crash applications offers opportunities to provide major improvements in cost, weight, and passenger safety. Topology optimization is known for creating stiff, lightweight structures, however its application to crash scenarios must be handled carefully. Compliance minimization, the most common optimization objective, can yield misleading designs that prioritize undesirable qualities when developing structures for crash applications. In this paper, the design process of a passenger seat assembly subject to sequentially applied enforced displacement, and crash deceleration loads is discussed. Due to the conflicting nature of compliance minimization and enforced displacement, the design was split into two types of regions; sacrificial, which are regions manually designed to absorb the majority of the enforced displacement and crash energy, and structural, regions designed with optimization tools to maximize stiffness and reduce mass. The recognition of these regions allowed for components that failed during the crash phase to be remedied via the removal, rather than addition, of material in key sacrificial locations through alleviating stresses experienced during the enforced displacement phase. Identifying and using these design guidelines was shown to greatly improve seat performance metrics, and yielded reduced design times as failure mechanisms were clearly defined and designed, mitigating the issue of cascading failures across an assembly as individual failure modes are addressed.