What triggers are and aren't
And what trigger warnings should look like
Sometimes when I see trigger warnings, I could be wrong, but something about them makes me think the person giving them doesn't understand what trigger warnings are, what triggers are, or how they work.
In particular, trying to trigger warn without saying what is being warned about, or just avoiding a potentially triggering subject entirely in all contexts, doesn't really work.
Definitionally, being triggered isn't feeling proportionately uncomfortable, in the same way that two people can be looking down from a great height and one has this visceral terror and cannot shake the idea that they're for some reason going to climb over the railing at any moment and jump or maybe just get sucked over the edge against their will, and the other feels kinda nervous and alert, and the first reaction might be acrophobia and the second is...a proportionate response to a situation that has some danger. So, "this thing is going to be an uncomfortable read for most people" is not by itself a reason to give a trigger warning.
(Although, this is why "content warning" might be a better term. People can legitimately want to choose when they do and don't expeience mild to moderate discomfort too.)
It makes sense to give trigger warnings for the most common PTSD triggers, such as a visual or graphically written depiction of physical of sexual violence. Video of someone getting shot? Say it's a video of someone getting shot.
It also makes sense for things that might cause a person's profound grief to resurface, like mentions of death of a relative or of a pet.
It is not possible to 100% avoid triggering people by accident. People can be triggered by music, specific (ordinary) sounds or smells, etc. Triggers can be very personal and context-dependent. (Holidays are a common grief trigger -- all the pure fluff fics that come out around Christmas are triggering to a lot of people because Christmas is triggering to a lot of people.) That doesn't mean it's not worth trying to warn people about the things most likely to trigger extreme emotional responses, but it does mean that failing to anticipate, and warn for, every potential trigger is inevitable and not, y'know, bad. So it's good to have a finite, limited list of ones you're personally going to go for. Personally, I stick to physical and sexual violence and mostly warn in the text of the posts rather than the tags. If there's something else like, idk, ableist slurs, I make a judgement call on whether the post is worth sharing at all, and sometimes I pass on reblogging it.
I used to have a long post linked in my bio explaining what is and isn't going to be on the blog. I'm not sure that link is still there. Sometimes tumblr randomly breaks stuff, and I haven't checked in years. Anyways.
This post was inspired because the other day I was reading a Reddit post by someone who was in crisis because she'd had a bad encounter with a friend that she'd just recontextualized as sexual assault, and she had a friend that she might talk with about it, but apparently felt too nervous to even ASK the friend if it might be ok to talk to her because she "didn't want to trigger" her friend. Because I guess acknowledging the existence of rape is likely to cause just as bad a reaction as what she was currently going through or something.
And I mean, probably it was something more complicated, like "my situationship is already not giving me the emotional support I want, if I asked my friend and she said no I'm not sure I could bear it" but what she actually said was she didn't want to trigger her friend, and like, I'm not going to say it's impossible to trigger a really bad reaction by acknowledging the existence of rape, but I will say that that's not actually a super common trigger among rape survivors, especially not compared to in detail descriptions or visual representations.
(It's also the case that the friend might not know ahead of time if she'd get triggered. This is also common. Generally people find out what their triggers are by walking into them a few times. It sucks but it happens. Never encountering a trigger ever isn't a realistic goal, and people shouldn't aspire to never accidentally triggering someone ever. There's a difference between going "I won't feed dairy to my friend that I know is lactose intolerant, because I know she doesn't want to eat dairy," and "I won't feed dairy to anyone who might conceivably have a lactose intolerance." There's also a difference between going "I will make sure my lactose intolerant friend has dairy free options when we visit" and "I won't let my lactose intolerant friend eat dairy even when she's decided it's worth it." Does that make sense?)
Because... it is also not the case that those things -- descriptions and depictions -- are automatically bad for rape survivors. Sometimes hearing other people's stories is actively healing. So yeah, I think the Redditor should have actively given her friend the option to say yes or no. (I mean, she doesn't have to, people get to be private about their personal horrors, but it wouldn't have been a social justice fail, and treating victims of traumatic events like they need to be wrapped in bubble wrap without even asking them what they want is condescending and weird (bad).)
The purpose of a trigger warning isn't to protect people who have been hurt from things that will definitely hurt them more, it's to return some agency to people who have been hurt, let us choose what we experience and when.
And about a post I just read, which was trigger warning for "ableism" or something, and like...it's good you can identify that, but "ableism" covers a lot of things, up to and including murder, and if someone is currently up for a bit of clueless language or someone being a Karen about an invisibly disabled person using a handicapped parking space, but wouldn't be up for a story about a wheelchair-using protester being dragged out of their chair by the cops, or a law requiring hospitals to take ventilators from disabled people who use them full time to give them to an otherwise healthy patient who needs a ventilator due to temporary illness, or an abled parent murdering their disabled child and getting a slap on the wrist at the trial...then a warning about "ableism" (very broad category!) isn't going to tell them whether they should avoid the article or not.
Again, the point is to give agency to people who might get triggered, and to do that they have to know what the trigger IS. When people are trying so hard to avoid triggering other people that they're not even willing to name the potential trigger, that makes actually useful trigger warnings impossible. You can't warn about a hazard if you can't name the hazard.
