I want to talk about this article that’s been floating around my news feed for the last week or so. It’s called "the Coddling of the American Mind"; it was published by The Atlantic, and it talks about trigger warnings in American colleges. And I want to talk about it because, while I will concede that the article makes some good points, it also completely misconstrues the meaning of the phrase “trigger warning”.
The dictionary definition of “trigger”, after the obvious “mechanism to fire a gun”, is “anything, as an act or event, that serves as a stimulus and initiates or precipitates a reaction or series of reactions.” In recent years, the word has been embraced by survivors of traumatic events as something that sets off an extremely negative reaction, including flashbacks or panic attacks, which in turn have their own wide range of physical reactions which I need not list here. A trigger warning is put in place to alert viewers that there may be content in their media that could set off a reaction such as this. If you watch prime time drama television, you’ve seen a form of this in the booming “viewer discretion is advised” panel that plays before every episode. If you play video games, you see a specific version of it geared at epileptics in the warning that appears before your system turns all the way on.
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Sure, plenty of people take it too far, and I agree that sometimes, attempting to trigger for general misogyny, transphobia, and racism (among others) can limit conversations in classrooms that need to happen just because it makes someone uncomfortable. I am, however, furious that The Atlantic would say that trigger warnings are “coddling” our minds. That’s operating on a dramatized, almost anti-millennial definition of the trigger warning.
I want to speak to the article’s point about “exposure therapy” in specific, because it more than anything else made my blood boil. They use the example of a woman with a fear of elevators to illustrate this phenomenon; I will copy it below for posterity.
“You might start by asking the woman to merely look at an elevator from a distance—standing in a building lobby, perhaps—until her apprehension begins to subside. If nothing bad happens while she’s standing in the lobby—if the fear is not “reinforced”—then she will begin to learn a new association: elevators are not dangerous. (This reduction in fear during exposure is called habituation.) Then, on subsequent days, you might ask her to get closer, and on later days to push the call button, and eventually to step in and go up one floor. This is how the amygdala can get rewired again to associate a previously feared situation with safety or normalcy.”
Okay. Cool. As someone with anxiety and a mild fear of embarrassment, specifically regarding talking to people on the telephone, exposure therapy is a cool option for me. Scary, but cool.
But on some level this article insinuates that exposure therapy works for everything. You would never sit a war veteran with diagnosed PTSD down to watch a war movie without telling them first, would you? So would you start a discussion on rape with a rape survivor in the room without telling them?
Here’s another quote from the article.
“Students who call for trigger warnings may be correct that some of their peers are harboring memories of trauma that could be reactivated by course readings. But they are wrong to try to prevent such reactivations. Students with PTSD should of course get treatment, but they should not try to avoid normal life, with its many opportunities for habituation. Classroom discussions are safe places to be exposed to incidental reminders of trauma (such as the word violate).”
Okay, this is just plain wrong. A mere word is not usually a “trigger”. If someone is severely triggered by a single word, they need serious help, not condescension to this degree.
A more common trigger would be a serious in-depth discussion or reading of an incident of rape, and in that case the student has every right to ask to be prepared ahead of time — not so they can avoid the reading, but so they aren’t blindsided by an account of something.
Last semester, I worked on the set of a modern day adaptation of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s first and possibly bloodiest tragedy. There were multiple on-stage deaths, an off-stage rape, and several counts of familicide; the show culminated in a showdown where two extremely loud gunshots rang out. The stage is still faintly stained from three days of fake blood flying across the stage. Half the cast walked away struggling to recuperate from the severe mental stress they were put under by the content and getting into character.
And you’re telling me that putting a small warning in the playbill, even one that just says “Be advised that this show deals with strong content; there will be sudden loud noises and fog” is too much to ask?
I understand the fear of spoilers. I myself hate spoilers — I was told a certain scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey would blow me away; when the scene happened, I was let down and disgruntled due to that fact. I heard an account, during a discussion about this very topic in my Intro Drama class, where the person in question knew the big plot twist of the play because the program gave a warning for “sibling incest” during the show. I get it, okay? But that can’t be the end all and be all for protecting our peers.
Yes, classrooms can’t be Safe SpacesTM in order for them to be places of education. We need to be able to have difficult discussions and people need to be allowed to say things and voice opinions that others won’t agree with. That doesn’t mean that professors can’t take two seconds at the beginning of a semester to tell the class that they may be dealing with serious content in readings or discussions over the course of a semester. That’s not coddling; it’s just plain respect.
