Sometimes people have these kinds of symptoms from: hearing a garage door open. Popsicles and soup broth. Certain common childrenâs toys.
Asking people to voluntarily tag a trigger is good.
Offering to tag for triggers to the extent that you are able is good.
Making sure your fic is well tagged is good.
Using AO3âs filters to filter out tags you find disturbing is good.
Seeing a therapist is good.
Thinking that other people are maliciously doing something because they know youâre triggered by it (when said people donât even know you) is a cognitive distortion.
Yelling at other people who are also trying to help you get access to a space free of your triggers? Is counterproductive.
(Sometimes, also, although itâs very thorny to talk about it, people have triggers around the existence of another type of person. Sometimes people take their triggers as a moral imperative, and decide that some group of people different from them is bad as evidenced by how they personally feel around such people. Other times, they do the work to respect other people and avoid harming anyone, despite their physiological reactions. Mental illness can make ethical responsibility confusing, but it doesnât automatically strip us of moral agency.)
While I am a known stan for the specific right of trauma survivors to write fic without harassment (everyone should have that right, but protect the most vulnerable first), that right depends heavily on the ability for trauma survivor fic writers to have a crowd to blend with. To not have to disclose personal upsetting history in order to write.
Which means that the distinctions between sexual and artistic and cathartic are going to be inherently blurry! Plus also many people need to comprehend their suffering as an experience connected to other narratives and human experiences, in order not to dissociate it forever.
(Everything fictional I write lately is intended as all three, at least a little bit. Sometimes itâs mostly catharsis with a little bit of sex and art. Sometimes itâs mostly sex, art or both, with a little bit of catharsis. All of which is to say, I donât genuinely know whether anon would find my handling of difficult subject matters to be âas kinksâ, in their vernacular, or not - even though, where there is abuse in my stories, I do my best to handle it seriously.)
