*Names changed to protect the students.
My sister used to carry around a deck of playing cards and build houses at restaurants or at our kitchen table. She got pretty good at it. My brother and I loved to knock her houses over, though, with a breath or a gesture, when my parents weren’t looking. She got mad, and because we were young and mean, we thought it was funny. All the cards came swooping down, and she was left with a mess on the stained oak. If I felt generous, I’d help her pick them up.
When you experience trauma, your brain is like that. Like someone trying to build a house of cards. Shaking Jacks and haggard Queens. A lesson in patience, in careful breathing. Each new level brings a shuddering rush of adrenaline.
Triggers are words, or images, or stories, which, like a breath or a careless hand, can bring the whole tower crashing down. All that careful patience, flat on the table, and you have to start all over again. It’s exhausting. It’s difficult. And after awhile you start to wonder if you even want to bother with it anymore, or instead just let your trauma swallow you whole and become a ghost-shell over your being.
Dr. Sarah Wright, a counselor at the University of South Carolina’s mental health center, says that trigger warnings are a nuanced topic.
“It’s an attempt to make an unfair situation seem fair,” she says. “And it’s not.” She points out that professors could never imagine the sorts of things that could be triggers. And though trigger warnings can help, in a general sense, each person is specific and individual, and so are their responses.
She does point out that trauma has a physical response in the brain. According to Dr. Wright, when we store memories normally, we store them chronologically. Getting a kitten for Christmas, turning 11, buying your first car. But with trauma, memories are stored in the “fight or flight” part of the brain. “It’s an evolutionary response,” she says. “It’s like when you see a spider, or something that looks like a spider, your brain goes ‘Ah! Spider! Run away!’” When you see something that reminds you of your trauma, your brain still has that same reaction, even though what you see could be a movie in class or a scene in a book, not an immediate threat.
This past August, when the University of Chicago sent out their welcome letters to incoming freshmen, trigger warnings were put in the spotlight:
"Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called 'trigger warnings'... and we do not condone the creation of intellectual 'safe spaces' where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own." UChicago stated that they wanted to provide a space for “freedom of learning.” And I have to wonder, freedom for who?
According to Aileen Hill*, a student at USC who has struggled with abuse, trigger warnings are important to creating a strong learning environment. At a gaming conference, she says that a speaker had a triggering introduction to their speech. There was no warning. “Needless to say, it freaked me out. I was shaken the whole rest of the week and I was so anxious. I just kept thinking of my own experience with sexual assault and the death and rape threats,” Hill says. “It just ruined my week and it was so hard to concentrate or learn anything. I guess that's why I'm really passionate about making sure that places of education are open about these discussions.”
Shay Malone, who works with USC’s Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, says that there is a perceived contention between freedom of speech and trigger warnings.
“I think that as universities have started to realize that these two things are colliding, they’re having a hard time trying to figure out how to combine them, how to make sure students are safe and have a positive learning environment and how we can talk about freedom of speech at the same time,” Malone says. "We’re trying to find a balance. We are a state, public institution, so we are definitely about freedom of speech as an institution, but we’re also struggling to find a way to have that freedom of speech and also not have microaggressions happening in the classroom, or have students walking in and being hurt."
“At the University of Chicago, they were having students walking out of classrooms because of content,” she says. “They would say, ‘Because I have this trigger or because I didn’t get this trigger warning, I’m not participating in this content.’ So people were actually opting out of the learning environments because of the trigger warnings. I think that’s why the University of Chicago went to that extreme.”
She still feels that the letter from the University of Chicago was poorly worded. “As a professional, I was taken aback. I thought the way he worded that letter was absurd. Why would you create that type of environment?”For reference, the letter states, "
Survivors do have a certain right to opt out of material that may be traumatic to them. “My truth, my personal truth,” Malone says, “is that I think students should [opt-out]. I don’t think they should opt-out of the learning, because I think the learning is important, but I’m saying work with the faculty to find other ways to have that learning. I think you have to have that discussion." There is freedom of speech, and academic discussion, but students also have to have the ability to control their own healing. Trigger warnings help with that process. “You can’t withdraw from life,” Malone says, but you need to have that conversation. Be it a disclaimer in the syllabus, or a meeting with your professor before a discussion, trigger warnings can be a powerful tool for healing. They don’t impose on freedom of speech. They don’t discourage discussion of offensive topics. They simply serve as a warning that, for some students, there might be rough waters ahead.
Much of abuse is about power. You can’t control the situation, or what happens. This is why survivors of abuse are in no way responsible for what happened to them. This is why when you’re healing, control is specifically important. When a university takes away trigger warnings, they take away control over your own learning and healing. They take away your ability to implement care techniques or survival skills that you might have learned in therapy, and they take away your choice to discuss other alternatives to that material if you’ve had a particularly hard day with trauma, or are in a delicate spot in your healing process. By denying trigger warnings, they become a careless brother or sister, blowing your house of cards over, so that you have to look at the table, at all your kings and queens and jacks laying flat on their faces. All your progress. And you’re the only one with the power to start again.
