A reader recently asked me what I thought about trigger warnings. The question was a thinly veiled accusation, more than a genuine query. She’d just finished reading Banksia Close, and whilst she did love the book, and has since gone on to recommend it to her book club, she didn’t feel she could do so without warning them herself, even if I didn't. She wants to ensure a safe reading experience for her friends. After all, what’s the harm in being considerate, and protecting people from content that might be confronting?
As the writer of the book, I was well prepared to receive these questions, and it wasn’t the first time. I’ve had readers tell me that they had to put the book down at several points due to overwhelm, but they all kept reading it. As a writer, there is no higher compliment. Making people uncomfortable is a good thing, because when you’re confronted, you’re learning. You’re challenging yourself. You might even change a little bit. I don’t know why other people write, but such mental responses are creative paydirt for me. It’s half the reason I do it. Why would I dilute the experience with trigger warnings, and what would such a caution even look like?
Warning: this book contains themes of domestic violence, matrimonial rape, child abuse, suicide, grief, extreme bigotry, adultery, antisemitism, and immersive experiences of Covid-19 lockdown.
See the problem?
The common complaint from many authors is that such warnings give plot points away. It’s hard to argue with this, but this is also a motivation of self-interest. Many writers, including myself, don’t want to include them, because they work their guts out penning stories with surprising twists, character traits, and events that they don’t want the reader to be aware of, and trigger warnings, whilst they don’t explicitly give plot away, do tell readers what to look for, and this does diminish the reading experience. It’s also very hard to unsee. It’s not like a movie, where you can to go looking for the specifics of a rating if you choose to. It’s written right there, in text. Even people who don’t want them, are inadvertently exposed, and I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t write for snowflakes, and warning them beforehand, won't segue to forgiveness after the fact, so what's the point?
Here, we move into the clear conundrum of hypersensitivity. Anything can be triggering, and as time goes on, that list gets longer and longer. In some situations, the inclusion of trigger warnings on works of literature has become so ludicrous, that it reaches the point of woke parody.
Take the University of West England for example, who placed over 200 trigger warnings on the works of Shakespeare, preparing students who may have had no prior bias, for everything, from bad weather and drunkenness, to popping balloons in a production of The Tempest. This, at a University: a place where you are supposed to be challenged and pushed. A place where you are supposed to learn and evolve. If my kid wound up in such an institution, I’d be telling them to apply elsewhere. God knows how we all read Shakespeare for 400 years without warnings!
The debate continues to rage, and opinions are like arseholes, right? Everybody has one. What is problematic about this topic, is the fact that no one looks at the research, or the psychology behind the negative impacts of trigger warnings.
It’s ironic really, that the scientific discipline most able to assist the people who need these warnings, could simultaneously be so critical of them. I’ve recently delved into deep research on this myself, expecting to be challenged on my position, but it has only been reinforced. So, what has psychological study found in its research on the notion of trigger warnings?
The word is overused considering its origin.
The word triggered itself, is clinical in nature. Its origins exist in the discipline of psychology, where it was once reserved to describe an involuntary cognitive response to stimuli, that transported a sufferer back to a past event of traumatic challenge. This is no longer the way we use the word, and having it so socially and ubiquitously available to anyone who simply feels a little uncomfortable, not only serves as an insult to those truly afflicted, but it fosters an environment where everyone thinks they are afflicted.
This reappropriation is unhelpful for overall health, and causes people to become hypersensitive to stimuli that may not have previously been bothersome. After all, popping balloons might be unpleasant, but it’s a far leap to assert that they are cognitively triggering of anything. We really don’t need to be encouraging a society of people who believe that jumping at loud noises, is a damaging psychological event.
All this aside, research reflects that trigger warnings aren’t even helpful for people who are clinically afflicted, and if they don’t need them, then it’s quite easy to argue that they aren’t helping anyone.
They can increase anxiety.
A recent meta-analysis found that trigger warnings don’t change how people respond to trauma, and nor do they assist with emotional preparation. In fact, trauma survivors had increased anxiety when a trigger warning was shown, also known as anticipatory anxiety, or the Nocebo effect.
This makes sense when you think about it. Every day, we wake up and walk out into the world with little awareness of how our day is going to unfold. If there was, however, a scenario wherein a person told you that you were going to encounter some negative experience, you’d be walking around paranoid all day, looking for signs and hazards that will have little impact on how you are going to deal with the event itself. You may even choose not to go out at all (or decline to view content), but the anxiety still spikes, negatively impacting your life. This is not a neutral response. It’s an adverse one, and it wouldn’t exist, without the trigger warning.
They present problems with identity confirmation.
Giving people perpetual choices to avoid triggering content, can reinforce their identity as a trauma victim. By opting out of potentially challenging content, people can develop a consistent habit of avoidance, which does nothing to assist the underlying cause of the trauma, nor encourage growth patterns to overcome it, thereby strengthening victim narratives that are detrimental to overall health. They perpetuate the idea that the world is dangerous, cannot be trusted, and is loaded with harm. It also creates a sense of instability and alienation, wherein the warnings themselves evoke a sense of fear and high alert, irrespective of the context. The word triggering, can itself, become triggering.
They offer little incentive to develop coping mechanisms.
Trigger warnings are ultimately about avoidance, and just to be clear, avoidance is not a healthy way to deal with trauma. This, of course, does not imply that traumatised people should launch themselves into triggering content deliberately in order to deal with it, but trigger warnings do assist people in opting out of experiences that may otherwise offer incidental challenges. Just like in life, the things that we do, and consume can - and should - throw us random opportunities to face ourselves, and the way we interact with our pasts. Creating a world of hyper-sensitivity, where people can consistently choose to circumvent these challenges, is coddling. It’s not a good thing to do with kids, and it’s not a good thing to do with adults - adults who may ultimately wind up raising children to rely on the world to protect them, when they should be learning to be resilient in the face of inherent challenges. There is heavey generational price to pay when you send such a message. A price that exists beyond the current narrative, which will be burdensome when things inevitably swing back to an expectation of resilience.
They foster a pattern of entitlement that is unrealistic.
This world has eight billion people on it, all of whom have their own neuroses, and past traumas to deal with. It is worth noting, that trigger warnings are a very Western concept. An evolving culture of mental health awareness over the last 20-30 years is the most likely cause of this, and whilst that awareness is a very positive, and human response, it has gone too far when people believe they have a right to be warned.
It is not the job of creative professionals, be they musicians, directors, authors or otherwise, to protect you from your own potential responses to their content. Advocates for trigger warnings often boast about their progressive elements, which is really just a fancy way of saying it's new and inclusive, so it must be a good idea. It’s not a critical assessment of the situation, and nor is it a correct assumption for cultures that often have the highest rates of mental disorders globally. The United States, Australia, Canada, and Britain consistently reflect poor mental health stats, with the USA coming in first on most data sets.
This won’t improve with trigger warnings, and with the aforementioned studies indicating that these warnings can increase rates of anxiety, victim narratives, and identity reinforcement, there is a good argument for them to be completely scrapped. People with trauma-based psychological disorders need therapy - not avoidance mechanisms.
It inhibits free expression in artists.
Whilst it can easily be said that trigger warnings do not impact the creative process when they don’t apply to you, the opposite is the case. This is especially true when such concepts begin to become mainstream expectations. It can be difficult to write about certain subject matter without wondering if you’re going to push the reader too far. Most writers do not go out of their way to write disturbing content, however, most writers are also pretty dark, and for some of us, writing can be a bit like our own brand of therapy.
Many authors might not need to consider putting trigger warnings on their content due to genre assumptions. Horror writers don’t have to warn readers about torture themes, and crime writers don’t have to state the obvious on murder, but many genres are more complicated. Fantasy can be difficult, because they have a license to push boundaries to alternate places. Romance can also be tricky, if it involves real-world themes, but the worst genre to tackle as a writer, in my opinion, is historical fiction.
When Shakespeare is not safe, I suppose no one is. Many historical fiction writers receive so many bad reviews on the inappropriate themes in their books, that it completely tanks their stats. There is usually nothing wrong with the story, or the writing, but people still seem incapable of comprehending the context of such narratives. Things like gender and race inequality are repeatedly slammed as insensitive, out of touch, and unnecessary.
Say what?
It's almost as if a woke story set in the early 1900's wouldn't be completely unrealistic, and pointless. I'm honestly surprised that people so lacking in foresight, or intellect, even know how to read!
As for contemporary fiction, which is what I write, the expectation that such stories should be written under a woke lens, is very high. After all, times have changed, right?
Not really. Woke is a movement, and it has a place, but I'm disinclined to believe that people intrinsically change that much. They just like to be righteous, or enlightened, or perceived as evolved. Not necessarily a bad thing, until it becomes obnoxiously overbearing on those of us who simply strive to be critical, and balanced. Like most movements that become extreme, it will swing back, and then settle somewhere in the middle. When it does, we are going to look back on the time that we slapped Shakespeare with trigger warnings as one of horrific embarrassment.
In the meantime, the pressure still exists, and presenting highly relatable, yet flawed characters in a world that is trying to be less of both, can bring a heavy burden if you let it. I try not to, but it’s still there.
I’m writing a book right now. Clover Hill. A love story technically, although I can’t call it a romance, because it doesn’t follow the prescribed formula that romance readers expect. It does entail a twenty-three-year-old dating an eighteen-year-old, a musician who doesn’t care if he’s bedding underage girls, and a child abuse situation that is highly descriptive.
Some might ask why such descriptions are necessary, and the answer is quite simple. It is because characters, like people, often need to be imperfect to be interesting. I like to push moral boundaries, and explore the innate darkness that exists inside all of us, and this is rather hard to do, when you're constantly worried about what other people are going to think.
I am often uncomfortable as I write, but push through it, because I have to. If I’m
uncomfortable, then the reader will be uncomfortable. I believe it was Robert Frost who said it best: No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader, and I can be pretty detached. If it makes me squirm, then the odds are in my favour.
This channelling used to be easier for me. I have an ability to turn my morality off and go to dark places. It’s where all my best ideas live, but the writing process definitely comes with more consternation than it used to. I wince when I write certain scenes now, feeling the pressure of woke expectation and trigger warnings bearing down on me. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether I put a trigger warning on the book or not. It’s still there, lurking in my subconscious, impacting the way I write, and it shouldn’t. This is my art. My space. I don’t want it adulterated with subliminal expectations of what a snowflake might think if they pick it up, and can’t handle it.
Enabling versus helping.
Trauma is a very real affliction, and I understand it well. It comes with many debilitating comorbidities, including anxiety, and sufferers do deserve adequate assistance and help when entertainment content of any kind, negatively impacts them. This is why I love resource panels. You know the ones. They have phone numbers, and links on them, which provide people with tangible pathways to get help for a myriad of psychological problems. They also usually come after the content in question has been viewed.
At my university, where I study postgraduate psychology, they make these resource panels readily available, and have in-house anonymous counselling hotlines - much like corporations have employee assistance programs. These initiatives offer people a true opportunity to address their response, without suggesting that they should opt out of having one. This is how you foster learning, and such learning should be a ubiquitous opportunity that is expected, and embraced.
Trigger warnings don’t offer this. If anything, they cause to further alienate people who may already be feeling isolated and alone. They work only to remind people that they are trauma victims, and suggest that because they are so, perhaps they shouldn’t consume. This perpetuates the overall problem. Instead of enabling people to remain cloistered by their trauma with stagnant warnings, we should be encouraging an environment of active recovery participation, and professional support.
Building resilience.
The world is a marvellous, beautiful, dark, and fucked up place. This will not ever change, but if you want to be in it, then you must learn to adapt to it, and if you aren’t going to do this, then you’re expecting too much when you want people to help you avoid it.
Proponents of trigger warnings will say they are an evolved attempt to protect the fragile in the face of injury, but since when does being evolved, equate to being protected?
It is easy for us to forget, what with all our tunnels, bridges, and tall buildings, that we are, essentially, animals wandering around in our own kingdom. We do have advantages. We have laws to stop other people physically hurting us, we have medication to heal physical ailments and illnesses. We have shelter, and cars, and air conditioning. Beyond that, we are on our own. This may seem like a cold perspective of the human experience, but it is, nonetheless, a fact.
In reality, you can’t rely on others to protect you. You have to do that for yourself, and such a notion does not involve predators warning you about their advance. It involves defending the advance, when you organically face it. Resilience is the word usually used. If you can’t do this, then you’re not going to survive. At least, you’re not going to survive happily, and then what happens? You remain an eternal victim to the forces that attacked you in the first place. If one is not going to face their past, then you may as well give it a leash to tie around your neck. Trauma can own you, and you can either chew through it, or you can slowly suffocate.
Not an easy dog to fight.
It is important to acknowledge that trauma is very hard to overcome, and can often come with other issues, like depression, and you know people are hurting when the mere prospect of a story, or even an image, can evoke the kind of response that gives credence to the notion of trigger warnings, but the trauma spectrum is both wide, and niche.
For me, it’s images of the last days, once etched into the pages of the bible stories I read as a child, which now replicate in the smell of any old book. Evangelist ministers, repeating themselves angrily behind podiums (AKA Paula White Cain). The rich, woody smell of pews and stale church air that can inhabit the community halls where my kids go to scouts. The bland, dense taste of communion bread that often re-emerges in certain sourdoughs.
When these things happen, I feel my anxiety spike, but it spikes much less than it used to, because I have learned to deal with them. This could be a character thing, but I don’t think it is. It’s a choice, and choices aren’t about character. They are decisions. Everything is a decision. Some people attempt to hedge around their trauma, unable to cope with the very real challenges that the world throws at them. Others face the challenges, and wind up becoming CEO’s, lawyers, psychologists, and even writers.
There is a certain, albeit arguable case to be made for repression. It’s a survival mechanism, and many people could be dead without it, but if you need trigger warnings, you either haven’t done that good a job, or there is something left, and there usually is.
Children are much better at repressing than adults, due to their developmental stage, but this often only occurs with extreme trauma. The kind that your mind can’t process. Most of us don’t have that problem. Rather, we have garden variety trauma, and it sits like a weed in our brain. Growing. Dropping seeds. Spreading into comorbidities like depression, anxiety, and substance abuse disorders.
People with repressed trauma get these lovely gifts too. They simply might find it harder to untangle why. It doesn’t really matter what kind of trauma one has. It’s still a form of imprisonment, and avoidance keeps you there.
Perspective through storytelling.
Creative content is often made by people who use unique gifts to overcome their own trauma, utilising a variety of media. Musicians and composers give us lyrics and melody. The film industry gives us brilliant performers, directors, and screenwriters. Authors give us books, and poetry. Artists give us stunning visuals that somehow mean something different to each of us.
My good friend, Elizabeth Gleeson, is a brilliant muralist. I don’t want to say that her artwork is as beautiful as it is, because she’s traumatised. Talent is accountable for that, but her vision for each piece comes from an honest inner perspective that could only have been achieved by her ability to face her past. Goodness knows what she’d be painting otherwise. The generosity in her work, is a reflection of self-work. Of course, it is not easy, but is treading around the roots of our triggers really any easier?
Some might say it’s a cliche to state that creative people all have trauma, but in my experience, they often do, and none of them avoid it. The trauma, is where the goods are. I can’t channel a complex character without going to dark places within myself, and conducting research into subject matter that’s affronting, is often par for the course. When I inevitably come across content that is too overwhelming, which I often do, I like to know that my choice to take a break, or to walk away, has come from a place of organic resistance within my individual psyche.
The mind knows its limits, and when that limit is reached, it will let you know. Sheltering the mind from the opportunity to challenge those limits, is not giving it the credit it is due as the complicated piece of mental machinery that it is. An organ that is capable re-wiring neural pathways, reflecting, and evolving to protect itself in the most wondrous ways.
It is especially important to remember, that in the field of entertainment, and creative purge, the good usually does outweigh the bad. Most artistic offerings, whether they are heard, read, watched, or stagnantly observed, do have something positive to offer in the consideration of trauma; characters who overcome adversity and become stronger. Vengeance stories which, whilst not often realistic, can be escapist and healing. Perpetrators suffering for the consequences of their evil actions, but the most liberating benefit of consuming content that may be uncomfortable, is the transcendent perspective that it offers. It can place you in a narrative that is not your own, or may even be worse, and such an experience can transform victims into more critical, complicated thinkers, who are capable of seeing their unique backstory as something to be dissected and understood, rather than avoided and feared. When you can do this, you are liberated.
Fiction reading, for example, has been shown to positively impact trauma, and it’s not because clients are given material that evades it. I always have this in mind when I write my work, attempting to offer the reader hope within the darkness. I see it as a kind of repayment for the risk that they take, when they open one of my books. The characters might drag them through hell, but the light is always consistently there, even if you have to look for it. This is the essence of healing: being able to see the positives in abundant negatives. Flawed people, looking for ways to understand their experience, and response to the world, in beneficial ways. I’ve written more about this here.
Bibliotherapy is a fascinating offering in the therapeutic space, where psychologists prescribe stories to prompt insight, discussion points, and self-growth opportunities to clients. Much of this content would be considered 'triggering', but research reflects that there are great benefits to clinical traumatic exposure.
Snowflakes Melt.
It is sad that we are living in a world where it’s become en-vogue for people to avoid their trauma. Fierce debates will continue to erupt over the lengths that society must go to, in order to protect the most fragile members of the group. Whilst the motivation is pure, and the empathy is refreshing, it really does boil down to a case of ‘good intentions’ going horribly wrong.
The default standard should be to encourage growth in the face of trauma, be it to create something to offer the world, or even just to exist without feeling entrapped every time you browse Netflix. The benefits, in the long run, will outweigh the risks for the vast majority.
It’s like I tell my son, who suffers from acute anxiety. Nothing gets better when you don’t face the demons. We biologically don’t survive when we allow the world to tear us up. People who live to ninety don’t do so because they defined themselves by the worst things that ever happened to them, and the worst things, statistically, happen much less than the best things.
In the end, birds can’t fly when their wings are clipped. Cats get stuck when you trim their whiskers, and snowflakes melt.
Don’t be a snowflake!
C.L.
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