[tunesmith]

It wasn't so long ago that "trigger warning" wasn't even a common phrase. I remember thinking about this in college, though, because I was in a relationship with someone who would get angry at people for expressing input that was too closely related to recent private trauma she had been through. I didn't really understand it because I had always trained myself to judge the producer of input by the intent of the producer, rather than by how it affected me (an effect the producer would have had no way of knowing ahead of time). It should always be fine for an affected person to remove themselves from a situation that feels unsafe to them, but it shouldn't necessarily mean additional regulation.

I am totally in support of educating people to speak sensitively in the sense of it meaning not to speak flippantly or hurtfully about charged subjects - for instance, I will still object to jokes about prison rape - but for it to progress to the point of avoiding provocative subjects entirely, that just seems like anti-progress and willful ignorance.

[cheatsheet]

I am sort of on the fence on this. On one hand, I do not like pursuing ignorance. On the other, I do not objectively know the difference between a mind that is repeatedly triggered by random noise that can immediately bring my mind back into a state of flipping between catatonia and hyper-stress/hyper-alert, and a mind that is able to control information flow and pursue it's goals (such as a phd and happiness in life).

I've been in recovery from realizing and recognizing the effects of my trauma for almost 4 years now. You talking about rape does not bring me back into the mental state it once did. But I don't know how I got here, besides through time (and sheer determination to be the best I can be, and not let my past haunt me). But that said, if you reminded me of my abuser, I don't think I could control my reaction so much. And hyper anxiety / reactive shutdown is not something that is easy to remove oneself from.

I think your attitude is very intelligent, but I think you need to add a little more empathetic wiggle room for things you may not understand entirely.

[kyllo]

It's really not a black-and-white issue, so I think it's perfectly OK to be on the fence about it.

I might roll my eyes at the phrase "trigger warning" sometimes but on the other hand I recognize that the whole reason why this concept exists is because there are forms of abuse and violence that have been pervasive in our society all along, they've just been swept under the rug, their victims intimidated, silenced and shut out of the public discourse. It's not a reason to censor the media, but it also wouldn't kill us to have a little sensitivity when discussing these topics.

[dean]

> I think you need to add a little more empathetic wiggle room for things you may not understand entirely.

You may be right that victims of trauma are not entirely understood. Even so, you seem to be suggesting that society _should_ "avoid provocative subjects entirely" and "pursue ignorance", as the parent puts it, to avoid upsetting victims of trauma. In the end, is that a strategy that will actually help any of us?

[cheatsheet]

No, I'm not suggesting that. I'm in a forum talking about things related to my trauma, aren't I? Shouldn't that be triggering me into a horrible downward spiral, if I was suggesting this?

I got better. Some people are still in the process of getting better. I am asking for empathy and compassion for those people, if you have the capacity to recognize that they may need it. Otherwise, just do your best to be a decent human being.

[tunesmith]

I think what you're saying is compatible to what I meant to say. In my last sentence I was thinking later that "censoring" would have been a better word choice than "avoiding". If I'm in a social environment with a friend that I know has had a certain trauma, then of course I wouldn't have a problem with avoiding certain topics. But I wouldn't agree with censoring those general topics from a lecture (assuming the topics would be presented professionally and not flippantly).

[ZenoArrow]

> "I had always trained myself to judge the producer of input by the intent of the producer, rather than by how it affected me"

Then I applaud you, as that is a vital skill, rarely understood. So much miscommunication happens because content is easier to follow than intent, yet understanding intent is what really lets you get to know someone.

[JohnBooty]

Judging somebody's intent is great - but consider how much better it works on some scales than others.

Suppose you and I are close friends. We've known each other for years. We understand each others' intents pretty well. Last year I totally forgot your birthday - and you didn't get mad, because you know I was busy with a family emergency and my intent wasn't to make you feel like crap. Similarly, sometimes you make extremely tasteless jokes: jokes about murder or maybe even racial issues. I laugh at them because I have a similar sense of humor and I understand your intent very well: I know you're a caring human being and they're just jokes, for crying out loud.

And that's how friendships are supposed to work. We understand each other and don't get bothered over the small stuff.

But how well does that work with people that don't know each other well? A heck of a lot less well. You can't possibly know everybody's intents. The guy on the bus? The guy handing out leaflets? The loudmouth in your university lecture hall?

I used to joke about a lot of things that I don't joke about any more, at least in public. In my mind when I made those jokes, I was actually parodying the kinds of people who earnestly believed really shitty things. But to people that didn't know me well, I was at times indistinguishable from the actual bad guys. I felt I had a choice: be more selective with my humor, or hide behind the old "but my intentions were good!!!!!" excuse.

[ZenoArrow]

Sadly I know the judgement side of the equation too, and it's natural to tone down your behaviour in some situations, but aside from that you can't stop people misunderstanding you, but you can try to understand them.

Learning to gauge intent is easy enough to summarise... 1. Listen to the words, then take your time to consider why they were said. 2. Give people the benefit of the doubt to start. It's not always accurate, but it'll lead you the right intention most of the time.

One further point, when people misjudge you, it can be easy to adjust your behaviour so you validate their opinion, don't do that. It's easy to say, but I promise you'll be better off if you're comfortable with your own intentions, regardless of how they've been interpreted. A little extra patience can sometimes let people catch on, but otherwise no need to dwell on it.

[blumkvist]

Great comments, yours and the "parent's". Very eloquently put. I have had problems with people thinking I'm arguing or attacking their ideas, when I am only looking for a debate and a more thorough view of their ideas and line of thinking.

This forced me to rethink my communication skills and try to change my approach of conversing. I've found that people who understand those concepts can use them to their advantage and benefit immensely in all sorts of settings.

[JohnBooty]

   > I have had problems with people thinking I'm arguing or
   > attacking their ideas, when I am only looking for a 
   > debate and a more thorough view of their ideas and 
   > line of thinking.

Noble intent, poor execution.

Consider that people in oppressed groups (women, victims of sexual assault, ethnic minorities) have had their legitimacy questioned and denied throughout most if not all of history.

And then along comes you, the noble truth-seeker. Probing and questioning their views. Looking for logical holes. What wonderful subjects these people make for your rhetorical sparring!

The reality is that your intentions are good but from their perspective, chances are that you sound pretty much the same as the last few millenia of people that have shouted them down and questioned their legitimacy. Give them room to express their views, even if you think they're wrong, because this is something they are often denied the right to do.

The solution is simple but not easy. Make sure you're listening and reading a hell of a lot more than you're speaking and writing.

I 100% believe your intentions are good, by the way. Just understand that intent is not magic.

[Thriptic]

> Give them room to express their views, even if you think they're wrong, because this is something they are often denied the right to do.

Everyone should have a platform to safely express their opinions, but if their opinions are incorrect then they should be challenged and debated. Statements shouldn't be protected from scrutiny just because they are being uttered by a woman or a minority.

[tunesmith]

So, a couple of things - I enjoy thinking about this subject so I've made some distinctions for myself on this in the past.

First, I like the distinction between dialectic and debate. It's possible to learn more about someone's point of view through asking interested questions and (together) exploring where their beliefs lead, without necessarily challenging them in a debate sense. Debate often means scoring points using non-logical rhetoric. Dialectic is more the spirit of being on the same team, exploring a point together, and I don't see it as less efficient in any sense.

Second, normative conclusions (as most opinions are) are a combination of moral axioms and a bunch of logical syllogisms. I think an opinion can be judged "incorrect" in two ways. First, they are reasoning badly from their premises (valid but unsound). That can be fun to explore in a dialectic sense to see if the logical framework can be tightened up or if the conclusion can be modified. But the other common way an opinion can be "incorrect" is if it soundly, logically flows from moral axioms (values) that you simply disagree with. And those sorts of axioms aren't correct or incorrect by definition. This is usually the appropriate time to agree to disagree, or respect where the other person is coming from.

But either way, this all requires having a certain level of empathy or respect for your counterpart's point of view and intent.

[ticviking]

> Everyone should have a platform to safely express their opinions, but if their opinions are incorrect then they should be challenged and debated. Statements shouldn't be protected from scrutiny just because they are being uttered by a woman or a minority.

Precisely this. Granting special exemption from the normal process of discourse and debate is infantilizing. Treating someone as your equal and expecting that they are capable of defending their ideas is not wrong, particularly when they share their ideas in the public sphere.

[JohnBooty]

   > if their opinions are incorrect

Yes, for things with objective answers. If somebody is, you know, claiming that Mac OS9 was better than Windows 95 because OS9 had preemptive multitasking and Win95 didn't - then sure, correct them.

When we're in the realm of issues like racial inequality, gender relations, etc - I'd be really cautious about deeming anybody "incorrect."

These are issues that have challenged humankind as long as we've been on this Earth, and we haven't exactly worked out any ironclad solutions yet.

[Gifford]

But computer programmers are logical by training and profession, so we can trust that our own analyses are always correct.

[Gifford]

Try putting as much effort into correcting your own mistakes as you do into correcting others. Being correct but in a biased way is practically equivalent to being wrong.

[blumkvist]

Well, I'm making conscious effort to improve, but to be fair I never did quite go so far as to question obviously disturbed people. What I describe is more in line with a heated discussion of politics or history.

In any case, this lead to micro conflicts I wasn't aware of and so poor relationships.

Your solution is spot-on. I had such difficulty following through, that I literary tied up a piece of red string on my left wrist to remind me of conflicts and my unmindfulness. Nowadays the Internet is my battleground for heated debate :)

[JohnBooty]

I'm with you in a lot of ways. Debate/dialectic/etc is how I generally would like to come to an understanding of things. And that's not wrong. It's just... a lot of people don't work that way, and frankly we're being jerks if we try to force it on others.

[jnbiche]

I agree that the GP and GGP both are great points, and I aspire to that state of mind myself (not always reaching it, but trying to).

That said, it definitely bugs me when someone comes to be "looking for a debate", so that may be why people have reacted negatively. I can generally tell when someone's genuinely concerned with an issue, and when someone wants to provoke me into a debate. I prefer not to spend much time with people who do the latter.

However, I recognize that we may be understanding the term "debate" differently here. To me, the emphasis in a debate is on the debating prowess of the participants. Whereas in a discussion, the emphasis is on the issue to be solved. You may well be referring to what I think of as a discussion.

[dkersten]

To me, the difference between what I read blumkvist to mean by debate and what I read you to mean is that blumkvist's debate is more like your discussion - teasing out the details, attacking the issue from a different angle to find out what the limits are, finding not just the flaws and shortcoming, but also the benefits of whatever is being discussed.

Often this is done by playing devils advocate or by playing dumb and getting the other people to really explain their viewpoint. I do this too when I either don't properly understand what is being presented and I want to encourage others to flesh it out and explain it in a way that I get it, or if I see the ideas as being too vague or risky and I want to make sure all of the pros and cons have been properly considered. Often I will then concede, because the idea really was a good one, but sometimes I dig in if I feel like it isn't being resolved.

I'd say I go looking for a discussion in these cases, but its not up to me to judge - only other people can tell you if I do it tactfully or not. I'll make an effort not to be too confrontational.

[Gifford]

On some topics of debate, as it goes, they say, "the Devil has enough advocates already".

[pkinsky]

I'm a bit of an edge case here, as I'm more-or-less triggered by certain comments on Christianity. Let me explain: I'm Assyrian, a member of a middle eastern minority Christian ethnic group. Fortunately my grandparents emigrated from Iraq before Saddam. Many of us aren't so lucky. ISIS is known for their mass beheadings of Christians and bulldozing of Assyrian historical sites, among other atrocities. Some prominent 'anti-racists' referred to this ethnic cleansing as 'karma' because the victims were Christian, which is of course an official Oppressor Class. So now, despite being an atheist, whenever I see someone flippantly claiming that Christians are never oppressed I can't help but hear it as a dismissal of ongoing genocide.

That said, I would never demand that all critical discussion of Christianity be banned.

[feedjoelpie]

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like you merely take offense. Perhaps the issue has been blurred through popular usage, but the "trigger warning" culture arose around social and environmental "triggers" that might cause someone to have a PTSD episode or to re-engage in self-destructive behavior (think eating disorders as a common case here).

And even so, if the point had been to halt discussion, there would be no such thing as "trigger warning" because the only reason to warn anyone is so that the discussion can still go forward, and people who feel the need can excuse themselves. How often we should promote discussion in which people feel the need to excuse themselves, however, is worth consideration.

When I see this quote in the article, “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” I wince a bit too.

Offending and triggering are not the same thing. And although people within that political sphere are sometimes guilty of using the terms interchangeably, those who criticize that political sphere are often guilty of treating the entire thing as ridiculous. When in so many circumstances it's really not. I mean, you wouldn't dismiss the needs of a solider who had trouble around loud noises.

We just all need to be really careful about distinguishing between offensiveness (a matter of opinion) and triggering (a matter of involuntary mental state).

[WalterSear]

You aren't an edge case - you are an exception. Your distress is being co-opted, to everyone's loss.

[armenarmen]

I've always liked the adage "Offense is taken, not given"

[cheatsheet]

I don't know if people who have not experienced it (or learned how to recognize the pattern of subconscious association) will ever understand it.

It sucks being sucked into your own black hole and I do not believe trauma victims walk into their own black holes willingly. It's a state of mind and it can be learned to be dealt with, but it requires strength.

There are lots of people who live assuming they are in control of every thought and reaction they have. Sometimes this is a rationalization to prove to themselves that they will always have control: it is meant as an affirmation because they fear losing control.

But it denies the experiences, intuitions, and most importantly - the emotional, hormonal, and physically chemical responses of others. We are human. But we are animals too, and as animals we are subject to some 'laws' of our own physicality. People are supposed to learn coping strategies to deal with stress and negative emotions. But trauma victims rarely learn these strategies, and instead learn to pick up on tiny red flags and measure people intuitively on a scale of abuse potential (which is typically heavily biased by correlative relationships).

Do you want to live in a world where everyone is perpetually judged as enemy/non-enemy, but you are constantly told by culture that your intuitions are ridiculous and irrational? Because as a trauma victim, the conditioned response based on experience tells you different even if you are a very smart trauma victim (in which you know that it's based on an outlier from which you can not judge the entire populace). Still, it can be hard to override the physical response to this mechanism - such as hypertension and other indicators of adrenaline release.

[ticviking]

Speaking as a survivor myself.

That is on me.

I can't control my first reaction, the feelings of panic, being trapped and so on. I can however choose what I do once I feel those things.

If I try to push responsibility for my safety onto others, or hold others accountable for MY psychological reactions is to insist that they participate in my treatment. It seems to be that if I need to draft my entire community in my treatment I may be going about it in the wrong way.

[EliRivers]

But sometimes someone does run up to you and ram it into your hands before you even know what they're doing :)

[geographomics]

Of interest, this article has a comprehensive history of the phrase, and reasonably balanced portrayal of its utility: https://www.buzzfeed.com/alisonvingiano/how-the-trigger-warn...

[chernevik]

This "education" has proceeded from a mission of politeness and courtesy to a culture of prohibition.