Your Triggers Are Your Responsibility: Why Policing Content Doesn't Work

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I have strongly mixed feelings about policing other people’s social media content. I certainly see the value of pointing out racist, misogynist, or other discriminatory content. It’s important to point this out when we see it, but lately, I’ve been seeing posts asking for compassion in our content based on other people’s triggers.

The recovery community does this often. I’ve seen posts asking people who drink not to post photos or status updates normalizing alcohol consumption, lest it trigger someone recovering from addiction. I recently saw a post asking those who post about fitness not to post related statistics because it could be triggering to those with body image issues or disordered eating. We’ve gone beyond posting trigger warnings about our content and have begun asking people not to post content we could find triggering.

There’s an obvious problem here. We may be missing the point of triggers if we’re asking people to remove content that could hypothetically trigger someone. Knowing our triggers is for us, not for other people. Recovering from trauma or addiction doesn’t mean avoiding triggers for the rest of our lives. Instead, we’re meant to become aware of them and to work toward healing them, not avoiding them entirely.

It’s impossible to create a world that never triggers us. I often find that I don’t realize something is triggering until I am triggered by it. A strong, visceral reaction can be a clue that we’re reacting to something much deeper than what’s happening in the present.

When I uncover a trigger, I don’t try to remove the cause of it. Instead, I address the trigger itself. I ask myself where it’s coming from, and it usually provides me with information about an area that isn’t quite healed. I don’t expect life to be trigger-free. I expect that I will continue finding unhealed places and working on them for the rest of my life.

We can be mindful and compassionate without losing our authenticity. Instead of spending time policing other people’s content, we could benefit from dealing directly with the triggers we uncover. Self-awareness is a first step, but it’s far from the only step.

Therapy

Therapy can be a great way to learn to heal from the trauma that creates our triggers. We can learn strategies for coping with our triggers, but we also have the opportunity to heal what’s causing them in the first place. I am a fan of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), which helps rewire our brains to heal our trauma. Going to therapy can help us learn to manage our triggers and address their causes.

Self-Help Books

Therapy isn’t always accessible or affordable. Reputable self-help books can help us learn strategies for managing the feelings brought on by triggers. We can take a step beyond awareness and learn coping skills while also addressing the root cause of the triggers. Reading more about our recovery can help us self-regulate when we find content triggering a strong emotional response.

Build Stronger Coping Skills

It’s important to build our coping skills — particularly when we struggle with our mental health. Noticing a trigger can help us assess our ability to cope. If a trigger challenges our recovery or creates stress in our bodies, this may be a sign that we need to work on our coping skills.

We can learn to respond rather than react to our feelings, but we need coping skills to manage this. Deep breathing, positive self-talk, and grounding are strategies that can be used to cope with the immediate stress of a trigger. It also helps to learn effective communication skills and healthy boundaries to address how we’re feeling while we’re feeling it.

In the early stages of recovery, avoiding triggers could be recommended until we learn the coping skills to manage them. When I worked as an addictions counselor, I often recommended that clients avoid the people, places, and things associated with their addiction. This is a good strategy in the beginning stages of recovery. During this time, clients would build stronger coping skills to later face those same triggers. Recovery is a process, and we eventually learn to confront our feelings head-on, using triggers as guideposts of where we still need healing.

Acknowledge, Don’t Avoid

Avoidance isn’t a good long-term mental health strategy. Eventually, we’ll need to face our feelings and feel them if we want them to go away. The only way out really is through. Instead of asking the world around us to shield us from our triggers, we may need to take a proactive approach. We can certainly remove accounts from our view that could frequently trigger us, but we can also use the triggers to explore our feelings and help us heal.

I believe we should talk about our triggers. Communicating about them can help promote more sensitivity and empathy within our interpersonal relationships. It can help explain why some of our reactions might, on the surface, seem like overreactions. It can help a partner or friend understand why we feel the way we do about certain behaviors. Discussing our triggers can help us understand one another better.

There’s a difference between discussing our triggers and expecting the world at large to help us avoid them. Policing other people and avoiding triggers may not be helping our recovery. If it’s all we ever do, we may be prolonging the process of healing.

Originally published on Medium