I thought trigger warnings were old news until earlier today when I became aware of a discussion on social media about the proposition of trigger warnings in theaters as prompted by a recent New York Times article on the subject. The online discussion went something like this: women who are sexual assault victims need these trigger warnings so as not to become a “mess” and to allow them the choice to participate in the theatre or not. In response to this onslaught of support for trigger warnings, one woman came onto the thread and critiqued this position, writing, “In some instances chronic avoidance of anything that one suspects will be upsetting or triggering can become a pathology of its own.” The response to this: “That's almost as bad as Trump saying veterans with PTSD are weak.”
Hold on a minute! Aside from the bizarre upgrade to reductio ad Hitlerium, I completely agreed with this critique of trigger warnings. Indeed, that speaker was correct about there being no proof that they actually function positively and that triggers become their own pathology. I would take this much further and state that trigger warnings are hurting us all.
First to the nitty gritty. In his article on this subject, Harry Chu wrote earlier this year, “A distinction ought to be made between best practices for trigger warnings and trigger warnings as best practice. Although these are not mutually exclusive concepts, empirical evidence has yet to be presented in support of trigger warnings as best practice when it comes to mental health.” And given the paucity of evidence, we have to ask ourselves as a society why we are expending so much energy cushioning the blow of reality for those individuals who have been victims of violence. Lastly, I have to ask why so many of the women in this discussion uniquely view trauma as that of rape and sexual assault. My head reeled from the comments because as someone who has lived around the world, the most common experience of the majority of the planet is dire poverty. And that alone is extremely traumatizing. Yet, not a word was made of this sort of trauma. Not one reference of male victims of trauma from PTSD in military conflicts, to the staggering numbers of men who are victims of male violence, to the many men who are victims of political rape around the world, where in some countries, men are raped in equal measure to the women.
Sexual assault aside, trauma takes on many, many forms and I reject categorically the Oppression Olympics of who suffers more. What I can say, is that westerners need to pull out their passports and travel to witness the incredible poverty of the majority of the world’s population. Women and men in Bolivia’s Altiplano are living in barren deserts with a total lack of hydration and their diets limited to what might grow at 3,700 meters as the marks of malnutrition are readily visible on their cheeks. Go outside any train station in India and you will see people living on the streets, too poor in most cases to have any kind of tent or makeshift shelter, children begging with their families from the time they can walk. And let’s not forget the many thousands of Nigerian women exploited throughout Europe, but mainly Italy, as prostitutes whose humanity has been stripped bare. These are lifetimes of trauma and yet, amazingly, these men and women are able to live their lives without trigger warnings of possible images of sexual violence, narratives that focus on the elite, and so forth.
In fact, it is pretty amazing how working through one’s trauma by exposing oneself to life can in and of itself be incredibly healing. We can’t cushion ourselves against all the potentialities of the world, on or off-stage. It’s not only impractical, it’s a second from insanity. I mean where’s my trigger warning? And yours and his….? I can’t even fathom living in a world where we must be warned about violence or potential distressing subjects. Life is distressing, Truly, don’t turn on your television or you will see the most distressing images coming out of Syria and Yemen. And media brings the most violent and immediate of images to us all the time—not uniquely limited to television sets, but pretty much everywhere from mobile phones, watches, and pretty much every device possible.
This begs the question if we ought not to work through traumatic issues by embracing these traumatic moments of our lives and by facing, head-on, our trauma. By cushioning ourselves from our past and certain codified themes, we are not actually helping ourselves work through trauma but instead are creating a neo-politburo of “topics not to be discussed” or shown. We are forcing society at large to be an unwilling spectator in our trauma as we assume upon them a codified and quite false “protectionism” that proponents of trigger warnings maintain? Paradoxical to this topic and equally troubling is this: trigger warnings work as a means of curtailing free expression since they operate with the premise that the greatest issue is the singular victim, her feelings, her needs. However, this is a highly neoliberal approach to larger social and political problems. Instead of policing the presence of trigger warnings in theaters and classrooms, why are we not discussing the benefits of “being triggered.” Maybe we ought to be triggered more regularly in order to step outside of our comfort zones to include this ever-growing space of individuals who seem to identify as permanent victims? While most humans experience trauma, trigger warning culture is primarily driven by elite, white western subjects who insist that we must bubble-wrap each other in order to lessen the blow of life. Also absurd within this trigger warning culture is the argument that words are literal violence or that seeing an unexpected image might send the individual into a catatonic state. This is exaggeration of the most irresponsible proportion.
What if part of living is confronting a series of challenges in dealing with life’s blows, disappointments, and even trauma with all the discomfort that entails?
True story: six weeks after my child died, I forced myself to return to my yoga classes. I had pretty much isolated myself at home for many weeks as even doctors would tell me that losing a child has been compared to the level of trauma that soldiers with PTSD endure. I still had this amnesiac blur, but still I went to put on my yoga clothes, pull my bicycle off the wall and I head to downtown Montreal. Every day during savasana (the corpse pose), I would lie there and tears would fall for about ten minutes. During one class, the teacher narrated through the post stating, “Think of this pose as how little newborn babies lie down, but imagine a lifeless child.” I have no idea why my yogi chose this image, but the end result was my being a bit jolted by it. Then after much thought, I realized that this imagining was not unhelpful in the least. Weeks before I held my son’s lifeless body and in this moment (and thereafter many more), I would be reminded that I had suffered an incredible loss, a trauma, that would change my life forever.
Are we so attached to our traumas that we need to make them the centre of social debate and focus? Are we so blind to the various ways which people suffer that we must posit women as the only victim? The challenge for our society is that we remain compassionate to people’s medical and mental health issues while at the same time refusing to capitulate to what is merely a thinly-veiled attempt of controlling language while virtue signalling to a wider audience.
At the end of the day, if a specific theme is so potentially damaging to the individual, the real struggle should not be in forcing society to coddle this person, but rather we ought to be working together to address the underlying political and social structures which created the traumatic moment of violence in the first place.
