From the department of "Yeah, Pretty Much:" Triggers
sentso on "triggers":Today’s topic, children, is Triggers.
I see that word pop up in some (read: almost all) blogs I’ve been haunting lately. And when I say “pop up” I mean “the word appears more often than the comma in a paragraph.”
....Really? You turn into a fountain of tears because some zipperhead swatted your ass while at a concert? Invalidated your space, reduced you to a body part? Bernice Worden was hung like butchered pig by Ed Gein. She was reduced to body parts. The skin of her face was found in a bag in the frontroom. Eminem’s lyrics are full of hating women and you can’t hold back the horror and rage? Ted Bundy hit one of his victims in the mouth so hard, two of her molars were embedded in the cinderblock wall of her dorm bedroom. Those are just 2 of the popular ones, the shit you can google up. I’m not even getting into interviews I’ve had with forensic pathologists, FBI, crime scene photos I shouldn’t have gotten my hands on, or things I’ve seen done to animals and children.
I remember reading a blog where the author was taking the TV show LOST to task because the female castaways never showed a permeating fear of being raped by the male castaways. The post went on to say how it was a dishonest portrayal of male/female dynamics. That even if all the men never showed violent tendencies toward them, the women should be shown being afraid of the possibility that the men might turn on them. Forget that the show isn’t about that, it’s dishonest, dammit!
It of course came with a trigger warning and was lauded as “yes! Finally someone said IT!”
You know who isn’t concerned about gender dynamics on a TV show about time travel, right now? Women brutalized because of the Virgin Cure Myth; and maybe Euna Lee and Laura Ling while they get tried and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor on fraudulent charges of spying on North Korea.
I've talked about this myself too. And the thing is that yes, kids, I do in fact have PTSD. Things do trigger me, by which I mean not make me want to cry because the world is so unfair, but actually mean make me flash back to experiences that were violent, profoundly physically invasive, and probably life-threatening and re-experience them.
And I freely admit that, although I was abused emotionally and physically and have been physically violated in ways that horrify most people I tell about it, I have not been sexually violated. So I find it easy to imagine that I might write off some triggers that really do cause full-blown, shaking terror, oh-my-god-he's-hovering-above-me-right-now-and-I-feel-his-breath-on-my-neck flashbacks in survivors of that form of violence. So yeah, I might not know entirely what i'm talking about. And also, my PTSD, as horrible as it makes me feel, has been relatively mild compared to that of some people I know, and has thankfully been very amenable to lessening over time.
And yeah, what is more, PTSD is a mental illness. It's not necessarily neat and cute about when it induces panic.
But I do think -- and have said for a long time -- that in the feminist blogosphere and the general blogosphere of Do Gooder Lefty Leftists, the word "trigger" has become watered down. A lot of people seem to use it to mean "trigger understandable upset feelings" rather than "trigger a flashback." "Trigger warnings" and "trigger cuts" seem to me to be, more often than not, not so much about the violence of content so much as about courtesy. It's a kind of "well, we'll talk about such things behind the curtain, and Marge can decide for herself if she wants to walk into the conversation."
I actually think, in many cases, that this is a perfectly fine thing when considered to be a courteous gesture. Courtesy is always good. But the watered-down use of the word makes it sound as if all women have this totally fragile mental health and are transported into war zones the moment something distressing is mentioned, and that's just false and creepy and kind of demeaning, IMO. Or it means that PTSD really isn't a thing, and it's just that women -- or at least, good leftist women with the proper feminist sensibilities -- faint dead away at some of these awful things men say and do, don't you know.
It's reducing PTSD to "hysteria" all over again, and as I've said before, I really don't like it. I don't have the vapors, or the Need to Clutch Pearls After That Comment Thread. I have a legitimate mental health issue, thank you very much.
And that's something else, too. I don't want to get horribly medical-model-y here, but to me, my PTSD is, in many ways, an illness. When I am triggered, that means that I am responding in the wrong way to the things I am seeing. I am not responding as I should. I am responding as if something else is happening, something that is not actually happening, and something that is very distressing.
When we act as if putting trigger warnings and the like on posts or topics are little more than general courtesies, we're implying something like "any woman of good politics would be offended by such barbarity!" We're talking about offensiveness, and what it's reasonable to be bothered by. But the nature of PTSD involves responding not just with offense, but with physiological distress, dissociation, etc. And it often involves these things happening in response to something that is not actually threatening, simply because that nonthreatening thing bears some resemblance (a similar look, smell, feel, sound) to the original trauma.
I think it does people with PTSD a disservice, too. Because at least for me, part of my healing has been about understanding that some of my reactions are misfires. Some of my anxiety is unwarranted. All of my "it's 1997 again" is untrue. I should not blame myself for mental ill-health brought on by other people's mistreatment of me or violation of my body, no... but neither should I be putting up this shield by which I have PTSD and therefore courtesy dictates I should never have to face any consequences of responding in unwarranted ways to situations that do not actually threaten me. And I think the whole emphasis on "triggers" makes it easy for people to hide from the fact that, yeah, it's understandable that they have PTSD, but that doesn't mean the world must immediately rearrange itself so as to ensure they have as few flashbacks as possible.
It's a really weird twisting up of the actual concept and phenomenology of triggers, and I remain uncomfortable with it.
I see that word pop up in some (read: almost all) blogs I’ve been haunting lately. And when I say “pop up” I mean “the word appears more often than the comma in a paragraph.”
....Really? You turn into a fountain of tears because some zipperhead swatted your ass while at a concert? Invalidated your space, reduced you to a body part? Bernice Worden was hung like butchered pig by Ed Gein. She was reduced to body parts. The skin of her face was found in a bag in the frontroom. Eminem’s lyrics are full of hating women and you can’t hold back the horror and rage? Ted Bundy hit one of his victims in the mouth so hard, two of her molars were embedded in the cinderblock wall of her dorm bedroom. Those are just 2 of the popular ones, the shit you can google up. I’m not even getting into interviews I’ve had with forensic pathologists, FBI, crime scene photos I shouldn’t have gotten my hands on, or things I’ve seen done to animals and children.
I remember reading a blog where the author was taking the TV show LOST to task because the female castaways never showed a permeating fear of being raped by the male castaways. The post went on to say how it was a dishonest portrayal of male/female dynamics. That even if all the men never showed violent tendencies toward them, the women should be shown being afraid of the possibility that the men might turn on them. Forget that the show isn’t about that, it’s dishonest, dammit!
It of course came with a trigger warning and was lauded as “yes! Finally someone said IT!”
You know who isn’t concerned about gender dynamics on a TV show about time travel, right now? Women brutalized because of the Virgin Cure Myth; and maybe Euna Lee and Laura Ling while they get tried and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor on fraudulent charges of spying on North Korea.
I've talked about this myself too. And the thing is that yes, kids, I do in fact have PTSD. Things do trigger me, by which I mean not make me want to cry because the world is so unfair, but actually mean make me flash back to experiences that were violent, profoundly physically invasive, and probably life-threatening and re-experience them.
And I freely admit that, although I was abused emotionally and physically and have been physically violated in ways that horrify most people I tell about it, I have not been sexually violated. So I find it easy to imagine that I might write off some triggers that really do cause full-blown, shaking terror, oh-my-god-he's-hovering-above-me-right-now-and-I-feel-his-breath-on-my-neck flashbacks in survivors of that form of violence. So yeah, I might not know entirely what i'm talking about. And also, my PTSD, as horrible as it makes me feel, has been relatively mild compared to that of some people I know, and has thankfully been very amenable to lessening over time.
And yeah, what is more, PTSD is a mental illness. It's not necessarily neat and cute about when it induces panic.
But I do think -- and have said for a long time -- that in the feminist blogosphere and the general blogosphere of Do Gooder Lefty Leftists, the word "trigger" has become watered down. A lot of people seem to use it to mean "trigger understandable upset feelings" rather than "trigger a flashback." "Trigger warnings" and "trigger cuts" seem to me to be, more often than not, not so much about the violence of content so much as about courtesy. It's a kind of "well, we'll talk about such things behind the curtain, and Marge can decide for herself if she wants to walk into the conversation."
I actually think, in many cases, that this is a perfectly fine thing when considered to be a courteous gesture. Courtesy is always good. But the watered-down use of the word makes it sound as if all women have this totally fragile mental health and are transported into war zones the moment something distressing is mentioned, and that's just false and creepy and kind of demeaning, IMO. Or it means that PTSD really isn't a thing, and it's just that women -- or at least, good leftist women with the proper feminist sensibilities -- faint dead away at some of these awful things men say and do, don't you know.
It's reducing PTSD to "hysteria" all over again, and as I've said before, I really don't like it. I don't have the vapors, or the Need to Clutch Pearls After That Comment Thread. I have a legitimate mental health issue, thank you very much.
And that's something else, too. I don't want to get horribly medical-model-y here, but to me, my PTSD is, in many ways, an illness. When I am triggered, that means that I am responding in the wrong way to the things I am seeing. I am not responding as I should. I am responding as if something else is happening, something that is not actually happening, and something that is very distressing.
When we act as if putting trigger warnings and the like on posts or topics are little more than general courtesies, we're implying something like "any woman of good politics would be offended by such barbarity!" We're talking about offensiveness, and what it's reasonable to be bothered by. But the nature of PTSD involves responding not just with offense, but with physiological distress, dissociation, etc. And it often involves these things happening in response to something that is not actually threatening, simply because that nonthreatening thing bears some resemblance (a similar look, smell, feel, sound) to the original trauma.
I think it does people with PTSD a disservice, too. Because at least for me, part of my healing has been about understanding that some of my reactions are misfires. Some of my anxiety is unwarranted. All of my "it's 1997 again" is untrue. I should not blame myself for mental ill-health brought on by other people's mistreatment of me or violation of my body, no... but neither should I be putting up this shield by which I have PTSD and therefore courtesy dictates I should never have to face any consequences of responding in unwarranted ways to situations that do not actually threaten me. And I think the whole emphasis on "triggers" makes it easy for people to hide from the fact that, yeah, it's understandable that they have PTSD, but that doesn't mean the world must immediately rearrange itself so as to ensure they have as few flashbacks as possible.
It's a really weird twisting up of the actual concept and phenomenology of triggers, and I remain uncomfortable with it.