Advocates for the use of trigger warnings suggest that they can help people avoid or emotionally prepare for encountering content related to a past trauma. But trigger warnings may not fulfill either of these functions, according to an analysis published in Clinical Psychological Science.
If only past trauma was so easy to deal with. Perhaps a little consideration for others in a social space isn’t too much to ask.
Honestly I’m sick of this shit. It really feels like we’ve stopped having consideration for trauma and are now just enabling it.
Trauma sucks, but you have to get over it. That’s the goal. Not to live in a little bubble wrap reality. Society will not conform to your particular fucked-upness.
Like most healing processes, recovering from trauma takes time. It’s not reasonable to expect that everyone will be recovered from their trauma at any given time. And a society that won’t give people time to heal before dealing with more of the shit they’ve been through is more than a little flawed. Hell, some people deal with their trauma by rejecting empathy rather than acknowledge that they’ve been hurt. I know I did that for decades.
It’s not reasonable (or, I would argue, even HELPFUL) to have society censor itself to cater to the tiny number of traumatized people.
I would say it’s calloused not to. Moreover, estimates put PTSD rates in America at about 6%. That doesn’t sound tiny to me, and that’s not even traumatized people. That’s people so traumatized they can’t handle it in a typical manner and will probably need help to recover, not your run-of-the-mill trauma that we all deal with and move on. Note that even those without PTSD don’t need an extra helping of reality courtesy of random strangers on the internet while they’re dealing with their trauma.
It’s not an extra helping of reality though. It’s a normal helping of reality.