A while back, I went down a Twitter #WritingCommunity rabbit hole of trigger warning discussions, and…yowsers. Nothing I read surprised me much, since I’d briefly dipped into the OCD community a bit, then backed off when I discovered the deep desire on social media for trigger warnings, avoidance, and enabling compulsions.
That deep desire to avoid discomfort is something I can understand on a visceral level. In social media, as in real life, people like to be protected. I’ve known that ever since Shadows of War earned a few 4-star reviews for being too intense, too dark, too triggering. As I put the finishing touches on Shattered Honor, a book that includes torture, murder, and the brutality of war, a book I knew was more intense than the prior two, I wondered over and over…
Should I include trigger warnings?
And ultimately, I chose not to. Here are just a few reasons why.
Life is a trigger
This sounds trite, but you can’t avoid triggers, and you can’t possibly know what will trigger others. Think I’m wrong? One list of trigger warnings includes the following, among others:
- Swearing
- Rape and Sexual Assault (noncon)
- Abuse (physical, mental, emotional, verbal, sexual)
- Corpses, skulls or skeletons
- Needles
- Discussions of -isms, shaming, or hatred of any kind (racism, classism, hatred of cultures/ethnicities that differ from your own, sexism, hatred of sexualities or genders that differ from your own, anti-multiple, non-vanilla shaming, sex positive shaming, fat shaming/body image shaming, neuroatypical shaming)
- Any time slurs are used (this includes words like “stupid” or “dumb”, which are still widely considered to be socially acceptable)
- Dismissal of lived oppressions, marginalization, illness or differences
- Kidnapping (forceful deprivation of/disregard for personal autonomy)
- Discussions of sex (even consensual)
- Slimy things
- Anything that might inspire intrusive thoughts in people with OCD
Swearing? Slimy things? Simply discussing sexism? So. Many. Everyday. Things. And that last potential trigger to avoid?
Anything that might inspire intrusive thoughts in people with OCD.
Here’s where I get vulnerable. Want to know what kinds of things have inspired my intrusive thoughts in the past?
- police cars
- street signs for sheriffs’ departments and local jails
- driving on a military base
- the TSA
- interior Border Patrol checkpoints
- walking out of the store and setting off the alarm
- single-stall restrooms
- renewing my vehicle registration
- The Weather Channel
- a parking ticket someone else got while driving my car
- renting a car
None of which are on any list of triggers!
Want to know what doesn’t trigger me?
- murder
- rape
- abuse
- torture
- anything on the long list above.
Am I asking for an award? Of course not. Just pointing that that triggers are personal and specific and predicting them is nearly impossible. A parking ticket, guys. Renting a car. You would never in a million years expect an author to give a trigger warning for a character watching The Weather Channel, but that was once an OCD trigger for me.
Trigger warnings are triggers in their own right
Guess what? When my OCD was at its worst, by the time I read “TW: main character, prison”, I was already triggered. My mind had spiraled downward, and I was off doing whatever compulsions I used to do to help with the anxiety. The warning was absolutely useless. Even now, they can be harmful. One study even found that trigger warnings can lower mood, corroborating suspicions that they can trigger anxiety in people without PTSD.
Trigger warnings can put one at risk for severe reactions
I can only imagine the pain of going through life with something like PTSD, and I’m completely sympathetic to wanting to protect yourself. But here’s the problem: if you expect the world to protect your from your triggers, you have put yourself at a very high risk of being slammed by a trigger when you least expect it. Avoidance feels like a fantastic way to cope with mental illness—until your safe, avoidant world is shattered by a random coworker who didn’t know the deodorant he chose that morning would bring on a flashback for you. The solution is better mental healthcare, not trigger warnings.
And that unfortunate coworker brings me to . . .
Putting the burden on others hurts relationships
I can’t in good conscience allow my disorder to dictate the behavior of others. This means I stop reassurance-seeking, I don’t ask friends and family to protect me from things that might inspire an intrusive thought, and I certainly don’t expect them to take part in my compulsions. It’s annoying for them, unhealthy for a friendship/marriage, and even worse, doesn’t help the anxiety.
Because . . .
The most unpopular point of all
The treatment for numerous mental health conditions is facing triggers, not avoiding them.
Many people who know my story know that my treatment consisted of exposure and response prevention therapy, where I consistently exposed myself to my specific triggers without allowing myself to engage in the compulsions that lowered my anxiety. It sucked. But two years later, I have close to zero symptoms—something I was preventing back when my coping mechanism of choice was avoidance.
In the literary world, let’s say we have a reader who runs across a list of trigger warnings for a book. Nope. I’m not going to read that, they think. It’ll upset me. They click away, toward another Amazon page, set the book back on the shelf in the bookstore.
Healthy, right?
No. All they’ve done is reinforced the theme as “dangerous” and something to be avoided at all costs—when in reality, it’s nothing more than fiction. In other words, trigger warnings prolong anxiety!
Am I telling all writers to avoid using them? Of course not. I think the science has proven they’re useless at best and harmful at worst, and I know they’re unhealthy for me, but again, my disorder cannot dictate other’s behavior—though if you enable my compulsions via trigger warnings these days, I will distance myself from you for my own mental health. Obviously, use them as your conscience dictates.
But you won’t find them for my books.
Further reading:
‘Trigger warnings’ may do more harm than good, study finds
Study: Trigger Warnings Are Basically Useless, Even if You’ve Been Through Trauma
Another Study Finds Trigger Warnings Are Useless, or Even Harmful
Nicely done.