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comment by virginiawoolf
virginiawoolf  ·  3173 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Should Literature be "triggering"?

The author seems to just focus on writing provocatively...but he got the entire concept of trigger warnings wrong, which means that he's mad about...something that he can't even define correctly.

I've been through a lot these past few months. It's hard for me to wake up in the morning, it's hard for me to get through the day, because I experienced a traumatic event this year. Of course, there are many things that make me see horrifying visions, lose sleep, dissociate, start crying, or just want to get up and leave 'normal' conversations. The thing with the anti-trigger people is that they don't understand the kind of living hell people who have been through traumatic events or have PTSD are facing. The event in itself is one thing...but the true horror is living, knowing that tomorrow you're going to think about the same things, and your life is still unalterably fucked and nothing will ever be ok like it was. Your entire world is shaken for good.

It is not worth it to come to class and try to get some work done, get your mind off things, only to discover everyone's going to discuss the aesthetics or thought process of something that has happened to you. I was studying Hamlet the year I had faced another traumatic event. It was fucked up. I would sit in class and brood. And let me tell you, Hamlet, or any play, can never compare to real life anyway -- as much as literature's core function (even more than it is to be 'triggering', perhaps) is to unveil and discuss the human condition. I wondered the same thing Hamlet did: if I faced the murderer, would I take revenge? Hamlet's not left me any richer, or given me a text to relate to. I just remember it bringing up unpleasant memories a lot, and being overall quite disappointing.

My point is not to degrade Hamlet because it brought up something unsavory. My point is, shoving something down somebody's throat when a) they cannot deal with simple things in life because they have been through significant trauma, and b) they are in no position to appreciate it, is clearly a pointless exercise. The advocates for no trigger warnings are mostly belligerent, forceful, and arguing for an abstract merit that literature has (ironically, not having become any more empathetic themselves) to help those 'triggered' become better human beans.

Would I leave a class for something that 'triggers' me or makes me cry? I do it anyway. I have to. I can't focus if I'm emotionally overcome, no matter how great the lesson. I don't want to appreciate violence anyway.

Long rant, but a lot of these issues are abstract to people who don't understand the feeling. I would love to be a whole and uncaring human again, but I can't. I've tried. That's why I don't mind 'missing out' because of a trigger warning.





lifestyled  ·  3172 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Long rant, but a lot of these issues are abstract to people who don't understand the feeling. I would love to be a whole and uncaring human again, but I can't. I've tried. That's why I don't mind 'missing out' because of a trigger warning.

and honestly, I think that the portrayal of "overcoming your fears" in most works of art is the reason people have such a distorted view of trauma and PTSD.

I mean, almost any movie or game you play that has a character with a crippling fear, has that character overcome the fear through sheer force of will and the encouragement of friends.

take, for example, P2: Innocent Sin. one of the main characters has a complete breakdown when witnessing a burning building because she was trapped in a shrine as a child and suffered severe burns when it caught fire.

from the first time you witness this, you can tell it's absolutely crippling. she's screaming for her dead father to save her, thinks her hands are burning, all that.

in the period of what can't be more than a few hours in-game, the party rushes to three other buildings that are wired to explode any second. at the third building, she is magically able to overcome her fears and run through a burning museum to save children and even jump on a suspended airplane in the middle of the fire to rescue an enemy.

obviously there's the issue of time in most works, so if they were to include the years of therapy and multiple relapses that could occur in your average handling of psychological trauma, movies would have to be six or seven hours long and games would still require multiple discs.

but, to me, this seems like what causes some of this misperceptions and outright terrible ideas on how to handle trauma or triggering things. a lot of people seem to be under the belief that someone can overcome these issues if they just dive head first into their fear and really wish themselves to overcome it.

that's completely at odds with reality. I have friends who still have trouble witnessing sexual violence due to being raped as a kid, even though they've been in therapy for years.

granted, this theory is based solely from my ass, but I like to think it makes sense.

virginiawoolf  ·  3172 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thank you for your comment -- it's a valid perspective, definitely, because you mentioned how the media handles such content.

I wanted to add to my original comment that 'triggering' scenes or things that remind me of what happened don't help as much as does literature written by people who understand the loss. So, reading Woolf helps me, particularly a book like To the Lighthouse, that is about loss, and capturing, and turning into art, a section of her life. Similarly, as I am at odds to deal with loss, I like thinking about Georges Perec's experiments with capturing what was happening around him, because the Holocaust had destablized him, and he was forced to recognize the ephemeral nature of everything, including/especially the ordinary.