The whole point of reading is to expand your life experience, see new perspectives, and possibly reframe your prior thoughts, feelings, issues into something different and more useful.
By reading about the thing that triggers you but in a different context provided by somebody else’s recollection or portrayal of their life, you have the opportunity to reprocess it, understand it in a different way, and grow.
A trigger warning is just trapping you into continued fear about that trauma and robbing you the opportunity to grow. Like a parent who teaches you to be afraid of everything, you trustingly continue being afraid and limited. Sometimes the fear may be a healthy fear of snakes, or it may be a nonsensical fear of ladybugs.
But once you see something like ‘trigger warning: abuse’ and it’s something that you’ve lived through, then your mind just got automatically set up to be stressed by whatever you’re about to read. But if you read it openly and without any such expectation, you read and see the full picture, maybe get to experience that ‘abuse’ for a second time around, but now you can do it in a safe space training ground, and discover that this time you have skills to handle it. That for example, you don’t fear leaving the situation, or being more assertive, or whatever
However you read it, you begin to understand more details of context and allow your subconscious mind to draw links together and become stronger from it. It brings peace and acceptance rather than ptsd flashbacks. Unless the content itself is just smut or something else of negligible substance, in which case well cry me a river
The obvious objection to all this is simply, well my trauma is different to yours, it’s worse and harder to handle and super serious. Well, more power to you. You know your limits better than I do, I’m just saying…
The maybe slightly less obvious objection is, I am super stressed out anyway and don’t have the emotional capacity or mental clarity to deal with these things right now and just want to relax and unwind. Shit it’s a pretty good argument to be honest, but crime takes no vacation and neither does trauma. All likelihood is you’re gonna have to deal with it sooner or later, you can only run so far before it catches up. Wouldn’t it be nicer to have experienced it once, in a safe space, and knowing at the level of your nervous system that you have what it takes to handle that challenge, rather than being caught unawares and only getting even more stress to your already stressed state?
So yeah trigger warnings are stupid and do more harm than good
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That assumes you use the presence of warning to avoid certain things. Some people do, but others appreciate not being startled or caught of guard by something they do watch or read or whatever.
A trigger warning in true crime shows and podcasts is just ridiculous. Like, what did you think it was going to be about? Kittens and ice cream?
Just don’t be bothered by things, sumple
When I see such warnings, I always image some blue haired young person with a nose ring and a fist full of self diagnosed mental health issues, $10K worth of tattoos, and $85K in student loans spent on a degree in gender studies with a minor in folklore. They mine as well write, “Pay attention because I need attention. Hands up who likes me?”
People from genuinely difficult life backgrounds don’t mention things like this nor try to harvest them for attention like the above. They deal with them matter-factually and in a dignified way.