A note about 'triggers' - another rant.
Mar. 6th, 2010 05:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
emanixNote: The following post is NOT likely to be triggering, at least any more so than a toiletry bag, but may offend/upset a few people. It is not, however, a personal attack on anyone, and the blog I am referring to is not on LJ.
I just came across yet another blog in which someone uses the term 'triggered' to mean 'somewhat upset/annoyed me'. I'm not going to link to it, as it's just one example amongst dozens that I've noticed lately. This is not what 'triggered' means, people.
Triggering is what happens in PTSD and similar anxiety disorders. It refers to an event or object, not always predictable* that causes the person to experience a flood of feelings and/or flashbacks that are incapacitating in nature, and in themselves intensely stressful. Misusing this term to mean 'anything that upsets you a bit' is intensely invalidating towards people who genuinely have experienced this.
I don't like to play the victim card, because I don't see myself as a victim. I went through a bunch of crap**, it left a few scars, physical and mental, I was incapacitated to the point of being unable to leave the house for several months, and I still have the odd recurrent symptom. I learned from it, was changed by it, in some ways for the better, took responsibility for my recovery, working through a long slow process of desensitisation in safe environment with safe people, and then moved on. I'm not interested in sympathy for what I went through. I don't think post traumatic stress is a club to beat people over the head with either, but I want to make it clear that I am coming at this from a position of knowing what I'm talking about. This is my lived experience, and I'm telling some of you - I really hope you know who you are - that your use of this term seriously trivializes my experience, and REALLY PISSES ME OFF.
By all means mark your posts about sensitive topics 'potentially triggering', but be damned sure you know what it means before you claim, yourself, to be 'triggered' by anything. In your parlance, it 'triggers' my urge*** to beat you until you understand both that PTSD (&c.) isn't a political tool, and that comparing your feeling of being a bit shocked/cross/angry (possibly the most intense feeling you've experienced in your sheltered life, but still a manageable sensation) to another person's being completely incapacitated by terror and despair is inconsiderate at best, downright offensive at worst.
*I was at one point triggered into an unexpected flashback by the sight of a friend's toiletry bag (ironically said friend is a trained psychotherapist, but of course he had no idea that his bag of shampoo etc. looked like the one belonging to my abusive ex-partner, or that hanging it on the door of a hotel bathroom would remind me of a situation in which I nearly died - then again, who better to have a flashback around than a friend who also happens to be a therapist?)
**Referenced lightly in my introductory post
***I am not a violent person, and merely having an urge does not mean I'm going to act on it, but boy have I had to grit my teeth.
I just came across yet another blog in which someone uses the term 'triggered' to mean 'somewhat upset/annoyed me'. I'm not going to link to it, as it's just one example amongst dozens that I've noticed lately. This is not what 'triggered' means, people.
Triggering is what happens in PTSD and similar anxiety disorders. It refers to an event or object, not always predictable* that causes the person to experience a flood of feelings and/or flashbacks that are incapacitating in nature, and in themselves intensely stressful. Misusing this term to mean 'anything that upsets you a bit' is intensely invalidating towards people who genuinely have experienced this.
I don't like to play the victim card, because I don't see myself as a victim. I went through a bunch of crap**, it left a few scars, physical and mental, I was incapacitated to the point of being unable to leave the house for several months, and I still have the odd recurrent symptom. I learned from it, was changed by it, in some ways for the better, took responsibility for my recovery, working through a long slow process of desensitisation in safe environment with safe people, and then moved on. I'm not interested in sympathy for what I went through. I don't think post traumatic stress is a club to beat people over the head with either, but I want to make it clear that I am coming at this from a position of knowing what I'm talking about. This is my lived experience, and I'm telling some of you - I really hope you know who you are - that your use of this term seriously trivializes my experience, and REALLY PISSES ME OFF.
By all means mark your posts about sensitive topics 'potentially triggering', but be damned sure you know what it means before you claim, yourself, to be 'triggered' by anything. In your parlance, it 'triggers' my urge*** to beat you until you understand both that PTSD (&c.) isn't a political tool, and that comparing your feeling of being a bit shocked/cross/angry (possibly the most intense feeling you've experienced in your sheltered life, but still a manageable sensation) to another person's being completely incapacitated by terror and despair is inconsiderate at best, downright offensive at worst.
*I was at one point triggered into an unexpected flashback by the sight of a friend's toiletry bag (ironically said friend is a trained psychotherapist, but of course he had no idea that his bag of shampoo etc. looked like the one belonging to my abusive ex-partner, or that hanging it on the door of a hotel bathroom would remind me of a situation in which I nearly died - then again, who better to have a flashback around than a friend who also happens to be a therapist?)
**Referenced lightly in my introductory post
***I am not a violent person, and merely having an urge does not mean I'm going to act on it, but boy have I had to grit my teeth.
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no subject
Date: 2010-03-08 08:59 pm (UTC)Yes: my impression is that there's lots of unnecessary competitiveness, loads of misunderstanding around trying to use similar scales for suffering (death vs. Oxford, for example)... I'm not sure about rooting this all in Ultimate Suffering as embodied by the Shoah - it seems more general and everyday, and in particular rooted in peer competition.
It seems to squick me particularly because we have no option but to trust peoples' own truth for themselves, and trust in their good faith in not exaggerating and attention-seeking unnecessarily, and there seems to be so much potential there for removing help and validation from people who really need it. I think the only way to tackle that is to emphasise the need to *not* be unnecessarily noisy about this, and that could silence those who do need help, and argh we're going in circles...
no subject
Date: 2010-03-09 12:47 am (UTC)Gosh yes, and it is hard to not get into these arguments. I hesitated to make this post in the first place, because it was precisely not what I was after. I have no interest in competing with anyone, and in fact often avoid making mention of my own experiences with this stuff because I'm sure there are people who are/have been worse off than myself. I should add that the ex-partner in the 'oxford' anecdote is still someone I care about, and I had no wish to see that innocence taken away (still don't) - only for him to understand that he *was*, in many ways, an innocent. I'm aware, constantly, that there are plenty of things I haven't experienced, and I try to respect that in my dealings with other people.
I'm aware that people react in a diverse range of ways to the same events, and that people genuinely can feel triggered by things others find perfectly innocuous (the reason I included the toiletry bag story as an illustration of this), and indeed will almost certainly draw different lines as to what constitutes 'triggered' and what doesn't. What bugs me isn't that, but people who are using the term in contexts where they themselves make it clear that they weren't in fact overwhelmed in any way, which I feel is unfair to everyone - maybe someday they will genuinely have a reaction that overwhelms them completely, and there will be no word left to describe it because they've overused that one so much.