CW: suicide statistics, discussion of trauma, violence, and abuse
To begin, I want to share a bit of background on my expertise in this area. I am not a clinician. Rather, I am an educator, primarily working in higher education, who studies and teaches about trauma awareness in education. I study and teach about learning. How humans learn. How humans might teach with the knowledge of how we learn at the forefront. I come to this work with a combination of extensive education and training, as well as my own lived experience with trauma.
This post is not advice. It’s not telling anyone what to do. What do I know about what someone else should do? I’m trying to keep my own side of the street clean. Rather, I’m sharing what’s true for me, questions that I am asking myself, and ideas that others might want to consider. It is not advice.
Everything that I write and teach is always an invitation; please take what you need and leave the rest.
I get asked a lot about trigger warnings, so the algorithm likes to taunt me with suggestions for articles on this topic. I recently read a piece about how people are not owed trigger warnings. I’m not going to link to the piece because I don’t think I need to. It was a thoughtful piece written by a thoughtful writer whose work I respect and will continue to follow, and I see it differently.
They argued that since victims of war (the piece was about showing war related violence, but could be about any type of violence) don’t get trigger warnings when they’re under attack, neither should we, or at least that’s how I read it. I’m going to argue that we can take action to create a more peaceful world while still aiming to do the least harm.
I have a few offerings on this topic that I hope will be of benefit.
There are all sorts of wars taking place in our world, whether we call it war or not. In the United States last year, nearly 50,000 Americans died by suicide. This is the highest number in eighty years. Over 100,000 Americans died of a drug overdose last year. Over 140,000 Americans died from alcohol related emergencies. These numbers are staggering and unacceptable. I hope that it’s apparent that they are also rooted in trauma, living in a deeply dysfunctional society, and lack of access to correct care. There is a war on the human spirit in this country claiming countless lives every day, and learning to care for each other’s spirits while still taking action against genocides, greed, and oppression - that is the work of our era. The sensitive souls we are losing in these wars are the very souls we most need to help us create a more peaceful world.
Terror is a terrible motivator. In the short term, terror works to compel us into immediate action to save our lives, certainly. But we are not meant to live in a state of permanent terror. To claim terror as a useful tool to motivate people to change is simply not in alignment with the science of how our nervous systems work. Terror, trauma, and horror are destructive to bodies and minds. They quite literally shut down the learning process in our brains. What works to motivate people to learn, act, and make sustainable changes for the greater good? Care. Correct care. Health care. Mental health care. Culturally responsive care. Caring schools. Caring communities. Caring families. Caring voices in the sea of chaos.
Violence begets violence, despite our best intentions. One of the saddest statistics I learned about in my trauma training is that while not every abused child becomes an abuser themselves, all abusers have been abused. In other words, many abused kids break the cycle, most often through building a connection with at least one caring adult. But all abusers have an abuse history. Violence begets violence. Ask any adult child of an alcoholic how many times they promised themselves they’d never be like their alcoholic parent, only to dive headlong into that first drink that brought sweet relief from their pain. Pain begets pain. Healing begets healing. I am vigilant to heed Nietzsche’s warning: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
Violent images are upsetting to many of us. To those who live with mental illness, trauma, and/or PTSD, they can be triggering. A trigger is not about being upset or “stressed out.” Rather, the person with PTSD, for example, is actually brought back into their previous trauma as if it is happening in that moment. They don’t experience that trauma as an upsetting memory, but as a terrifying present reality that includes both physical and mental symptoms. To be triggered is excruciating. What we know from trauma research is that the old adage “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” is total bullshit. To be triggered is to be harmed. To be triggered is to be sickened. To be triggered is to be disabled. To be triggered is to lose our agency and ability to help others. Gentle, thoughtful, incremental exposure to triggers done in partnership with a trained clinician can help people heal, but we should not be out here triggering each other if it’s something we can avoid.
adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism argues that we have to make doing good feel good. I concur, and the science of motivation and change aligns with brown’s arguments. This isn’t to say that our goal is to make horrible acts of inhumanity feel good. They shouldn’t feel good, ever. But what can feel good is to do small things in loving communities (brown also writes, “small is all,” and it’s one of my life mantras). Rather than terrifying people, ask them, “What is the next, smallest thing you can do to help? Who can you do it with?” That is how we both honor the needs of our exhausted nervous systems and create change on behalf of the greater good.
As an educator, I often run into the mindset of teachers/professors who push back on kindness and care in the classroom. “My job is to prepare them for the real world,” they tell me, to justify harsh grading practices or refusal to accept late work. I disagree. My job is to co-create a better world with my students. Our desire to create a better world is the real world too.
In dysfunctional family systems, change happens when one member of the family says, “Enough.” They refuse to participate in the continued harm. They refuse to pass the violence, neglect, abuse, addiction, and trauma down to their own children. They get help. They access correct care. They heal. Sick systems aren’t healed through harm, but through care. By refusing to do more harm. By making the very real choice to do the least harm, whenever possible, even as harm is being done all around us.
If your goal in your social media activity is to teach others, then I invite you to spend some time considering how humans learn. Isn’t that your goal, to teach?
I agree that it is important that we speak up on behalf of those who can no longer speak for themselves. I agree that we must bear witness to the lives permanently damaged and lost to violence. I agree that there is a time and place to share and view what handfuls of the worst of us can do to the masses of us. This is but an invitation to mitigate harm whenever possible, whether through trigger warnings or other acts of mindfulness in our social media travels. I remain firm in my belief that the revolution will not be terrified; it will be a grounded in mutual aid, care, love, and a righteous rage with the courage to say, “Enough.”
I appreciate the generous spirit you bring to this post, Karen. I have had my own recent education in trauma, and am more aware of the importance of faculty members educating themselves in this area. Even with my own experiences in mind, I'm still conflicted about trigger/content warnings.
As you know, mine was a medical trauma. As you might expect, in the months after I came home, I was very much triggered by the sight of hospitals. But during the eleven weeks I spent on life support, a television was often on my room. I was under light sedation the whole time (I think?), so my memories are foggy, but I do remember seeing two things all the time: reruns of The Big Bang Theory, and commercials for Weather Tek, some kind of floor liner for cars.
I had to recover at home for several months after I was released from the hospital, during which I couldn't do much more than read or watch television. If I was just flipping around between television stations, and would happen upon either that television show or that commercial, the memories of that ICU room began flooding back. (Side note, I don't experience this as actually being in the room; I experience this as a deluge of memories and I can't stop them from cascading. So maybe that differs from person to person.)
For sure, if I was in a classroom and the professor showed an image of a person on life support with tubes running in and out of their body, I would have been unable to concentrate for the rest of that class. But that would also have happened if the professor showed an image of a meme based on the Big Bang Theory. And I don't think is a unique experience. As a trauma happens, all kinds of incidental things are lodged in our memories along with the actual traumatic events. The memory of those things can be just as triggering as the traumatic event itself.
It's for this reason that it seems futile to me to try to create all of the content warnings a teacher would have to include to make sure that nobody gets reminders of their traumas--because those triggers could potentially include everything and anything in the world.
It thus seems to me that the better solution is to focus less on content warnings and more on creating the most inclusive and welcoming classroom environment as possible and then respond, when a student reaches out to you, with the same generosity of spirit you showed in this post.
But I would be very interested to hear if you have any additional thoughts based on these reflections.
"There is a war on the human spirit in this country claiming countless lives every day, and learning to care for each other’s spirits while still taking action against genocides, greed, and oppression - that is the work of our era."
"Terror, trauma, and horror are destructive to bodies and minds. They quite literally shut down the learning process in our brains. What works to motivate people to learn, act, and make sustainable changes for the greater good? Care."
"My job is to co-create a better world with my students."
This is all very helpful armor against a system that tells us that rigor is defined by toughness and objectivity. And a society that emphasizes productivity and hustle above all else. Thank you!