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

    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.