This is such excellent commentary.
I was once asked to please tag cats. And I was like “Oookay, bud, I’ll try, but like, ¾ of my life IS cats, so I can’t promise anything…?” Because that just seemed really weird to me.
And then, even though they didn’t have to, they actually wrote back and said, basically, “Hey, the reason I’m asking is because I had to witness people torturing cats in a situation I couldn’t escape, and now I just … can’t.”
So I said “Hey, holy fuck, I’m sorry. Do you need me to tag all cats, or just housecats? What about cartoon cats? I just want to help you out, friend.”
And again, even though they didn’t have to, they came back and said “Cartoon cats aren’t too bad, but what I really can’t handle is seeing kittens.”
And I’m not gonna lie, that fucking hurt and chilled me to read. Just … the story there. I don’t want to know it. It makes me sick just imagining it. So I now tag for cats.
It’d be easy to say “It’s stupid to be triggered by kittens.”
But, uhh, I really don’t think that situation is “stupid” at all. I think it’s fucking tragic. And that person had the guts to ask, knowing that they might get made fun of for it, and then they were even kind enough to explain, and I’m grateful to them because it taught me something I intellectually but did not yet viscerally understand.
A healthy person, or even just someone with different triggers, can’t understand the significance behind triggers. And triggers can be really fucking weird or even seemingly inappropriate.
So I got to make a choice. I could say “If you can’t handle cats, seriously, I’m not the blog for you.” Understandable, I suppose. Or I could say “JFC that sucks, and the rest of the goddamn internet is flooded with untagged cats. Maybe … maybe I can do this one thing so that they will feel safe reading my blog? Maybe I have the power to actually … help a little?”
And obviously, I made the latter choice.
Recovery is a process, and eventually a lot of people move away from needing trigger warnings. They are a helpful tool to protect yourself during a certain stage of healing. That healing might take a really long time, and it might never be complete … or … it might only be necessary for a few months or years.
So you aren’t “coddling” people by tagging for [x thing you think shouldn’t be a trigger], you’re enabling them to engage on their terms. Engaging on your own terms is literally the only way to make progress, therapeutically, so asserting that trigger warnings hinder progress is just not factually a correct statement at all.
You personally may choose not to tag for anything, and that’s fine. You are absolutely allowed to run your personal space however you want, and people shouldn’t bug you about it.
But what you don’t get to do is decide what a “stupid” trigger is (hint: there isn’t one, there’s only fucked up situations that leave fucked up scars) and whether or not someone is experiencing severe or mild discomfort. You can’t know that. Their reaction isn’t even a good guide to how they are feeling inside. They may seem only mildly uncomfortable. You don’t see them losing their shit later because something hit them way worse than they thought it would, and they thought they were okay at the time but … hahaha, nope.
I guess … a lot of people seem to think that there’s this whole category of “special snowflake” people wandering around saying “I know how to get sympathy and validation: I’ll ask a total stranger to tag for cookware because I’m ‘triggered’ by spatulas!” Just as if that’s liable to elicit the kind of validation truly lonely and desperate people need.
Or maybe … maybe they think there’s all these people who are so unacquainted with “real” pain or fear that they think their mildly uncomfortable feelings about Furbys compare to, and this is so often the example used and I think that is so wrong, combat vets who can’t handle fireworks.
What it comes down to, it seems like, is trying to extrapolate a story from the trigger so that you can say “Stop crying, you don’t have it that bad!” Which is ridiculous. As someone above pointed out, triggers can seem nonsensical even within the context of the instigating trauma. I remember the eggs post. The things that stick with you about trauma are not always just the things you expect. You can’t actually guess anything about a trauma from a seemingly inexplicable trigger beyond “Wow, fear of paintbrushes, plastic cups, and raisins … I bet that’s a story.”
And if that story that they imagine doesn’t match what they think is a “valid” trauma narrative, then they feel justified in dismissing it. Completely missing the fact that there’s no such thing as a “valid” or “invalid” trauma narrative, because trauma is a really strange and subjective thing. Also completely missing the fact that it’s not okay to try to make that judgment to begin with.
A lot of people seem unwilling, for some reason totally alien to me, to make that empathetic leap and say “Okay. I don’t need to know more. I believe you.” They want to police other people’s experiences. And that’s just one of the worst impulses of humanity. It’s really nasty, and it gets applied in so many horrible ways to mental illness of all kinds. It needs to stop.
Ultimately, it costs you nothing to be cool about it. It costs you nothing to take what people say at face value, or to believe strangers and not comment on their mental health issues. It costs you nothing to say nothing, even if you don’t believe them. Because you are inevitably going to be wrong, and why risk making yourself look like a clueless, deliberately oafish asshole?
I’m really confused as to why this is an issue, except certain segments of the online community take great pleasure in being critical of other people’s attempts to cope, because they have invested a lot of their self-image in being “smart” and “discerning” and “no-nonsense” and “not gonna be fooled” … and they really enjoy tearing down people who are saying “these things are unfair” or “these things are hard for me.”
“You aren’t really hurt/traumatized/oppressed!” is a truly unpleasantly common thing to hear these people say. Often they will even say it outright. Other times, it comes across indirectly.
It’s not at all surprising for anti-feminists to also be anti-trigger-warning, and I think this is probably why. I know it was the case for me for a very long time. Then I kind of … grew up, I guess? Enough bad shit happened to me and to people I know that I acquired sympathy. And realized that, actually, my own traumas have left me with some pretty weird issues, things that make me uncomfortable but which other people are unlikely to consider inherently threatening. So I had no room to judge.
It’s sad, because it’s actually a whole lot less effort to believe people when they talk about their experiences than it is to sit there, smoldering with disdain and resentment over the person who really can’t abide milk, of all things, and asks that it be tagged for.
If you’re angry about trigger warnings and are lashing out about it, just … go ask a mutual friend for a hug or something. Go do something self-affirming. Because the trigger warning thing is not about you or for you. You might as well spend your energy doing something nice for yourself. You’re lucky not to have to wrestle with a fear you very well know is ridiculous. Enjoy that and move on. Don’t waste your time thinking about how many people are wrong to feel the way they feel. Just let it go.