Triggers and Tolerating Negative Feelings

I used to be one of the admins for an internet community that dealt with mental health issues. A lot of people in that community had dealt with abuse, and one of our goals was to keep it a safe environment for them. So we asked people to use trigger warnings when they brought up certain topics. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me. But while we did our best to enforce this policy, inevitably people ended up reading stuff that was triggering. And we emphasized that while we did what we could, ultimately it was their responsibility to learn to take care of themselves when that happened.

I think triggering is a real thing. I’ve met people with PTSD, and what happens to them when they get triggered is something serious, something not to be taken lightly or dismissed. I don’t want to downplay that. I’m not opposed to trigger warnings when they are clearly warranted.

That said, in the last few years, I’ve been kind of blown away by the way the term trigger has become casually tossed around. Trigger warnings are everywhere, and people are called out if they fail to use them. I don’t think this is a healthy development. Trigger seems to have become a synonym for being upset or angry, for having any negative experience at all. I’m not exaggerating—a recent article on the subject explained, “Triggering occurs when any certain something (a “trigger”) causes a negative emotional response.” Even the term trigger is triggering, the introduction to the article warned.

A couple of years ago, I went to a conference and gave a presentation that was a disaster. I was disorganized, I could tell I wasn’t connecting with my audience and I ended up rambling more and more and making less and less sense. To make things worse, there were people there whom I wanted to impress. Afterward, I felt pretty sick about the whole thing.

I met an interesting person at that conference, and we became Facebook friends. But whenever I saw him go by in my newsfeed, I would be reminded of what a fool I’d made of myself at that conference. It was painful, and for a while I just hid him for that reason. But the thing is—doing that didn’t help me process or deal with my regrets about my presentation. At some point, I had to address and work through those negative feelings.

That’s a minor example, I realize. But I do know what it’s like to get completely overwhelmed by something, to feel flooded by your emotions, to wonder if you will even survive them, to feel desperate, to want to hurt yourself as a way to cope. And at some point in my life I actually did use the term triggered to describe that state. But considering what trigger has come to mean, I’ve come to see that way of framing things as problematic.

For one thing, I struggle with the way triggers are used because they often seem to rest on a premise that we should do everything we can to avoid negative feelings, that they are intolerable. But unless we want to wrap ourselves in bubble wrap, negative feelings are going to be a part of our lives. They’re part of being human—even an important part. And learning to deal with them seems more useful than attempting to control our environment so that they don’t come up.

Even more troubling, I see the word trigger get used in a way that completely avoids responsibility. I get triggered by that topic, someone will say, so you’re not allowed to bring it up. You have to be careful around me, because I am fragile. (In the article linked above, the author explains that other people need to learn what her triggers are—which include things like gravestones and Terry Pratchett novels—so that they can avoid mentioning them.) Maybe it’s true that you react strongly to certain things. Maybe you’re a generally sensitive person. That’s okay. But you have a responsibility to learn to take care of yourself when you get upset, instead of demanding that everyone cater to your idiosyncrasies.

I do think alerting people to the content of things can be useful. It’s nice to know going in what things are going to come up. And you might avoid them because you just aren’t up to dealing with that topic at the moment. I see nothing wrong with that. I get exhausted by certain topics. I get really upset sometimes, and stew for days. Sometimes I’d rather avoid that. But that doesn’t mean I’m triggered. It just means that those topics are hard ones for me.

Part of the problem here, a friend recently pointed out to me, is that people want their suffering to be legitimate, to be taken seriously—and in our culture, the way to do that is to frame it in terms of mental illness. Then it’s not just negative feelings; it’s a disorder of some kind. Thus the DSM grows, and ever more life situations come under its umbrella. But I think a healthier move would be to do a better job of saying that people’s pain matters, that we can be compassionate and empathetic even if it’s not a disorder of some sort. A culture in which feelings are often seen as a sign of weakness, in which people are told regularly that they’re just too sensitive—perhaps that contributes to all this trigger-happiness.

Again, I do think there are situations where the term trigger is appropriate. But that’s all the more reason to stop using the term so casually, to water down its meaning. Labeling and grappling with your negative emotions can be a daunting prospect—at least, I at times find it really challenging. But in the long run, I think you’re much better off doing that than jumping quickly to the framework of triggering.