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Trauma

Are trigger warnings helpful or harmful?

Are trigger warnings helpful or harmful?
Surely I'm not the only one that is sick of everything having a trigger warnin and everyone being SO SENSITIVE about everything?!

Well I know i'm not alone because people DM me about it thanking me for saying this, my friends and I talk about it and my clients bring it up to me.
So let's break down what's really happening shall we?

Are there important times when trigger warnings are necessary? Yes, 100%. Trigger warnings serve a purpose when helping someone not to be caught off by a rape story, for example, if they got raped and haven't healed it yet.

 

AND they're going overboard. What I see far too often in my client sessions is people feeling like they cannot speak their truth and that they're a victim of someone else's opinion. Research actually shows that the vast majority of people are afraid to share their truth because of a fear of it jeopardizing their relationships.

When we feel like we have to say everything "consciously" and to be "sensitive of their emotions" and "don't gaslight them" it ca become really exhausting for ourselves. So the result? We say nothing so that we don't upset anyone. 

Here's the thing. We can all co-exist in the same universe with different opinions.

 

When we constantly make other people feel like their opinion is your problem or they need to always add a 'trigger warning' onto anything that could be even slightly sensitive... It actually makes people afraid to share because no good person wants to upset other people.

 

Over time we are going to create a generation of children that are *too* sensitive and who give their sense of power and safety to other people instead of knowing THEY are the powerful and safe ones. 

Social media is great, but the downfall is that people are second guessing themselves, not trusting themselves and outsourcing their sense of truth to tik tocker 30398. Everyone is thinking that there is a major problem if their lover accidentally gaslit them and we're all so afraid of rocking the boat and being cancelled. 

This is the reality:

People now feel like they have to be perfect with their words, behavior, and actions; otherwise, they'll get shunned by someone else.

 

But your triggers are not someone else's problem. When you get triggered by something, it's not the other person's responsibility (unless you're a child and they're an adult) to walk around on eggshells.

So unless you want the people around you to feel like they're walking on eggshells (and you do NOT want this, trust me), then start to see your triggers as invitations to dive into the healing that thing that you're getting triggered by.

 

Whether it is someone's success, money, personal choice, what someone wrote in an email, a topic of a podcast, or someone's opinion of a topic, we can ALL, as adults, have other perspectives and views in our lives and not make it a big deal.