concerningwolves:
“Real life doesn’t have trigger warnings”
Well maybe it should. Or at least, our...
“Real life doesn’t have trigger warnings”Well maybe it should. Or at least, our fiction and media should. We’ve already got general age brackets - YA, Mature, 18, 15, 12, PG, U, Adult, Teen Fiction etc - but are they enough? I’ve been debating this with myself in circles so it’s probably time I put the question to more people.
Should the media we consume have trigger and/or content warnings?On the one hand I’d be thrilled. If a book said it had a panic attack in, I could mentally prepare myself for it. But then again, I feel for some people this may count as a spoiler or be a “turn off” from continuing and I can see why. Yet others seem to think that age ratings alone are enough, to which I’d reply “But you can find common triggers such as depictions of extreme anxiety all the way from Teen to Adult and beyond.”
It’s a tough line to walk and I’m struggling to figure out whether I should say “fuck it” and just add trigger warnings to When Dealing With Wolves anyway or not. And if I do, how? Chapter by chapter? In the blurb? A special page that goes in after the dedications?
I’d really like to see some wider opinions and open discussion about this! Feel free to reblog or tell me what you think in the ask box.
Thank you x
Okay so I’m going to tackle this one because it’s not something I’ve never talked about on this blog, but it is something I’ve thought a lot about, and as a student in graduate school for psychology, I consider it an issue I should give a lot of thought.
Disclaimer, @concerningwolves I’m answering this question because I think it’s a legitimately good question, and one writers should be talking about, and if I ever say ‘You’ or ‘They’ in this post, I’m not talking about you personally, I’m just talking about people in general. I’m in no way attacking you or posting this because I think you did something wrong, I just think you asked a really good question that I’ve wanted to talk about for some time.
The first question is, do trigger warnings help people with triggers? And that is a very complicated question. The first thing I will say is, no they won’t help everyone, and you could make a solid argument that they wouldn’t help even most people with triggers. The reason for this is, while there are some common triggers that many people share, there are just as many people with seemingly random and unpredictable triggers. For a vet., a bag blowing across the street could be a trigger. For a child who was physically abused, the feeling of dish soap on their hands could be a trigger (that is a real life example from my work with kids with PTSD).
So the summation of that: In my opinion, trigger warnings can be helpful to some people, but they are by no means all encompassing and could just as easily be useless spoilers to half the population that have anxiety/PTSD with very specific triggers.
That being said, should we still have trigger warnings for those with anxiety/PTSD and triggers that are ‘common’? This is where the argument “real life doesn’t have trigger warnings” comes in, and as much as that is a very insensitive way of saying it, I can’t deny the truth in that statement. However, there are some individuals that are so affected by their triggers that they do need to be sheltered from them/ be able to mentally prepare for them. It’s never meant to be a lifetime thing, but when it comes to learning to cope with anxiety/PTSD/literally any mental or physical disorder, everyone is at a different stage in their treatment. It’s not fair to assume that a person with PTSD intends to shelter themselves from certain stimuli for the rest of their life just because they are sheltering themselves from it right now. They might be working on it, they might be at the very beginning of their journey, they might just be having a really shit week and can’t deal with it right now.
The solution???
Here’s what I think: if an author wants to provide warnings for their work, or if we even want to take it farther and say TV shows and other media should start doing it too, there should be a place to put it that people without triggers won’t need to see it unless they go looking for it. Maybe don’t put THERES A MURDER TODAY FOLKS, #TRIGGERWARNING as the heading of your work, unless you want to I guess. Rather, have it somewhere were people who are worried about their triggers can look, but people who aren’t worried about triggers won’t read it on accident.
Is it fair for consumers (readers/viewers) to get mad for a lack of trigger warning on the content they consume?
Frankly, no. LET ME EXPLAIN. I already covered this, but frankly trigger warnings can only be effective to people who have *heavy quotations* “normal” triggers. But it’s not “normal” to have triggers in the first place, so to suggest theirs a laundry list of triggers that people can have makes no sense and isn’t true. A trigger can be something completely innocuous and seemingly random. In other words, not something you could predict and label your work as. #dishsoaptriggerwarning
I’m going to say this, and I might get hate for it, but here we go: there are a lot of people with legitimate triggers, and I would never suggest that this isn’t a serious thing. It is very serious. I have seen a kid get triggered by a seat belt sliding across her wrist because it reminded her of shooting up. That being said; Feeling uncomfortable or nervous about a topic because of past experiences is not a trigger. Maybe it’s a sensitive spot. Maybe you don’t like reading/viewing about it. But we need to stop throwing the word trigger around when things make us uncomfortable. Again, I’m not saying that the majority of people requesting trigger warnings are phonies, or even that most people who are ‘phonies’ realize what they’re doing. But I think it’s important they do start to realize it, because all they’re doing is belittling a real, serious issue by crying wolf about things that they don’t like or make them feel uncomfortable
For people who legitimately do not know (and no, I am not shaming you, if you aren’t familiar with psychology or haven’t been diagnosed specifically, it’s not surprising that you wouldn’t know) a trigger is defined as: a stimuli that ‘triggers’ a flashback or memory of trauma. Flashbacks can be full blown I-think-I’m-somewhere-I-once-was, or they can be partial; having feelings, memories or images flood the scenes unexpectedly.
Your discomfort is valid and you have a complete 100% right to talk about why something is not okay to you, but
let’s stop saying ‘I feel triggered’ when what you mean is ‘I feel uncomfortable’. It’s not fair to people with PTSD.
