Why is everyone 'triggered' these days?

[Mylifeisamesssuchamess]

Why does everyone seem to be 'triggered' these days? Surely being genuinely triggered would be rare and would usually happen if you've experienced severe trauma. Surely for most people it's just that they feel pissed off about something, scared or upset and it's not as extreme as being 'triggered'.

I wonder if you’re as condescending in real life?

That is absolutely not what I was saying and if you read my post again you will see that

Isn't anxiety what you feel when you're anxious?

But surely the point is that you are both at risk of being triggered because you have PTSD. So you are having a 'reasonable' and I'm sure very difficult response to certain circumstances. Noone is suggesting you should pull yourself together.

But there are people who get a bit upset about something and say 'I've been triggered' which devalues your experience.

There is a difference between feeling anxious and having anxiety as a mental health problem

One is normal and manageable and the other destroys lives

What we seem to have is people muddling the two , and then assuming that because they feel anxious they are not able to manage because they think they have full on anxiety - which becomes a little self fulfilling

No. Nearly everyone feels anxious sometimes but far less people have the debilitating condition of anxiety.

Like in another post, how people with the slightest bit of desire to be neat call themselves OCD, or how everyone and their uncle is now 'neurodiverse' because they do something different to their friends, or how you struggle with spelling 'definitely' (my pet peeve) and suddenly you jave undiagnosed dyslexia...

I said elsewhere how I feel bad for people with genuine ailments as their real issues are being watered down by attention-seeking narcissists.

People want to feel special. The thing is, everyone is different, so it's the fun paradox where if everyone is different, then we're all different, and therefore we're no longer different.

100% this. Everyone wants to have a label these days.

I agree. I have complex ptsd and I’m not normally triggered by the things that have trigger warnings. I’ve been a victim of child sexual exploitation and it’s not rape scenes or abuse scenes that get me. Triggers are often not as obvious as that.
I had a flashback the other day watching a lovely old tv sitcom. Couldn’t tell you what the trigger actually was. Trigger warnings for me are useless.

Oh yes, I've witnessed people doing that too. Alongside, anyone who voices their opinion too strongly or who gets emotional in response to others insults/ shit behaviour - they " must have a personality disorder ". Disgusting.

This. ^ Everyone has to have a label these days. 🙄

I know someone who has self diagnosed as 'dyspraxic.' No health professional has told them they have this condition. They have just decided they have it.

I also know a number of people who have labelled themselves (and their children) with certain conditions. (They have never been diagnosed officially.) I won't say what conditions. You can probably guess.

Because people are often idiots who like to pathologise perfectly normal responses.

See also Anxiety, Depression, OCD, 'a bit autistic', and a plethora of other things.

People who are actually 'triggered' have a serious condition. They deserve reasonable accomodation to help them live with their PTSD,

People who say 'I find this triggering' are generally hyperbolic and in a different time would say 'that upset me' or 'that reminded me of [fill in horrible event]'.

It's ridiculous. People need to learn to be more stoic about things. I have an extremely bad background and quite a few things 'trigger' me, but it's part of life and I reframe it and move on. I haven't even had the much lauded 'therapy' (that's another one). Just grit your teeth and march on through life being grateful you've survived this far. I'm ND so perhaps that's provided some resilience and been able to facilitate viewing things more philosophically.

I'd recommend looking into stoic philosophy for those interested. It involves actively thinking about and meditating on the ideas and reframing bad experiences so they're at least manageable. Treatment for ptsd can be sought if this fails. You can't run away from life though and you can learn things about the world and yourself through bad experiences. This can provide wisdom and a greater understanding of things that happen which leads to growth. Stumbling around in a cossetted fog of comfort and blandness keeps you in an infantile state and stops you from being able to cope with any adversity, or even slight discomfort, in the worst cases. Do you want to be the person shaking in the corner where others are able to get on with it in times of emergency or crisis? And before anyone says 'ptsd' and you can't help how you react. Seek treatment and know that you're not shellshocked from being in the WWI trenches. Your nervous system isn't permanently damaged in anything other than the most extreme of cases.

Exactly. I'm 52 and have been triggered three times in my adult life, as far as I can remember. I could point to the triggers retrospectively, and one I should probably have predicted (because of the subject matter of a film), but another I could never have predicted, didn't see coming, and as a result I ended up crying hysterically, frozen rigid and barely able to breathe in the middle of a major museum, and had to be taken into a first aid room by staff, where I eventually got it together. Another one happened in a job interview, which sabotaged me professionally.

I'm a cool, not particularly emotional person, generally fairly well-regulated. Each of these was terrifying. I briefly turned into something between an animal and a young child.

Some people on here claim that even seeing the word 'spider' triggers them, let alone seeing a photo of one. Seriously? Nah mate, you need to get a grip. How do they even live in the world, being like that? This is absolutely not something to be proud of. Mindsets are also contagious and before long, everyone is being this way. Next, it'll be being triggered by flowers or kittens or cotton wool balls. Stop it.

Triggered warnings are helpful.
I really don't think it's a big deal and if the trigger warnings don't affect you then you're very lucky.

In all honesty many people don’t know what triggers them, because it’s a subconscious reaction to embodied trauma. Advice to avoid triggers is pretty much useless because of that. Generally speaking if someone is making a direct link between X and Y ahead of time it’s unlikely to be a trigger as such because they can consciously make the link. It’s not the case that any discussion of rape will trigger a rape victim, it’s much more subtle and random than that, which is why it’s so awful to deal with.

Rather than posting meaningless trigger warnings, the person needs help to identify when they are triggered ie what a triggered response looks like for them, and learn strategies to cope with that.

I disagree- anxiety is a noun and anxious is an adjective. Both describe a normal human emotion. Neither describe an illness.

This ^

If you're anticipating the trigger, it's not a trigger. Unexpectedly jumping three feet into the air at a loud bang because you've survived a war zone is a trigger.

Unexpectedly jumping three feet into the air at a loud bang because you've survived a war zone is a trigger.

Most people would jump at that, someone triggered however might then be unable to calm their emotional reaction, may feel disconnected from other people, experience heightened emotions, tearfulness, have a fight, flight, freeze reaction - which are all part of a trauma response.

I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing that people recognise triggers that have prompted an emotional response more than likely to be negative. It means that they can analyse why they feel that way and moderate a response to that, surely it's a good thing that we are trying to become more of an emotionally aware and responsive society.

@Mylifeisamesssuchamess

The dictionary definition of anxiety is: a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome. Everyone experiences this- it's totally normal.

What you, and others, are talking about is generalised anxiety disorder (GAD). https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/generalised-anxiety-disorder-gad/

I think if that’s what was happening @Bakedpotatoes that sound be a good thing but in my experience the language of triggers tends more to limiting what people talk about, avoiding challenge and generally becoming less reflective about our emotions. “Being triggered” becomes a get out of jail free card, which is deeply disrespectful to people who have experienced significant trauma and are very genuinely triggered in their daily lives.

I think I'm being overly optimistic as most people lack the reflection part.

As others mentioned, trigger means something that sets off a medical condition. It's still widely used without this fuss for many conditions, like my DD saying the recent poor weather has triggered the eczema on her face.

We have an odd mix of a society that has become over-pathologised so medical terms get overused and warped in common meaning, a 'be kind' force that uses that triggered is connected to disabilities to enforce them well beyond their scope to simply anything that causes an unpleasant emotion, and the bootstrap brigade which mocks displays of unpleasant emotions or disagreeing with them as 'being triggered'.

I'm not sure significantly more people are triggered in the mental health sense, it's just being used a lot more in many other ways.

Triggered warnings are helpful

No they aren't.

Content warnings like we've had on movies and video games for ages can be useful for anyone to make an informed choice.

Trigger warnings often unhelpfully vague (it's not uncommon to see 'trigger warning or TW with no additional information), cannot be entirely inclusive in an open group as others mentioned mental health triggers can be anything the brain makes an association with trauma, they have created the issue that bolsters the bootstrap brigade as trigger warnings are nearly always just things we socially determine to be difficult content which erases many people who have experienced being triggered by other types of content, and we've now had studies giving strong evidence that they're used to self-harm - some people when in a poor mental health state will deliberately look up content with trigger warnings to set themselves off further.

I'm not triggered by anything in particular so I consider myself lucky. I'll never know everything everyone has been through or how their childhood shaped them to be able to deal with that - or not.

Other people being triggered has no impact on me. What I don't understand is why people are so offended by people potentially being triggered. It's like resilience is a badge of honour on here and putting down people who for whatever reason don't have the same coping skills makes some people on here feel smug and superior.