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Yes, but you do that with therapist in setting where potential meltdown has no consequences to you or other people. The therapist is also supposed to decide your progress based on how it is going.

My dog was afraid of taking a bath. I fixed this by rewarding her for coming into the bathroom. Once she was comfortable, I got her into the tub and rewarded her. After 15 minutes of "exposure therapy" she loves jumping into the tub and it's easier for both of us when she's stinky. I'm pretty sure people work similarly but it's hard to reward them with dog food.

People aren't dogs to be trained. To an extent, to be human and to recognize other people's humanity is to accept and accommodate their irrationality where doing so isn't particularly onerous to you.

Training works on people; people are animals. To a certain extent, this is what therapy is: helping people train parts of their brains to behave differently.

My point wasn't about whether or not you can train people. My point is that you shouldn't, in general, think of human beings as things upon which you perform training.

There may be certain contexts in which training is an acceptable thing for a person to do or have done to them, but that typically doesn't apply to normal interactions between adult human beings.

I don't think OP meant that we are expected to train other people, unless you are a licensed therapist whose job is to do so.

I believe their implication was that we can and should be training ourselves, which is something we already do every day.

The difference is that we have therapists who are licensed to do this, and who are better at judging progress and when it might be appropriate to progress you.

Your average lecturer or teacher is not trained in this way, at least specifically regarding trauma.

The average lecturer was managing a class, but now they need to prescreen individuals for experiences that make them too weak for normal classes?

Just about 10 years ago cutting edge therapists were implanting false memories of childhood trauma.. If someone does not seem to need a therapist based on actual behavior then I don't think schools should be inviting lecturers to create pre-screening based on students reactions to trigger warnings, etc.

Bad ideas like every lecturer learning pop psychology "safety" and then reading tea leaves to tell people under their authority to get help is how you create a generation with psychological problems.

I don't think lectures need to do all that much work. They just need to think for a bit and warn people "Hey, this could be disturbing." That's pretty much it.

Its not like trigger warnings impose an onerous responsibility on teachers. There isn't any suggestion that they tell their students to get help. Its literally just a "heads up, I'm about to talk about X".

I'm not on a campus, and when I was in was in physics and math classrooms, but its hard to imagine this is that big of a deal.

I think the article covers why simply announcing trigger warnings is not helpful but more importantly why it is not a steady state system.

As I see it this is basically recreating the weaker sex etiquette argument with bias based on experiences instead of gender. All the outrage.of speaking in front of the wrong people, special new requirements, plenty of signalling that you are better than others because they manage the necessary risks to do their job.

"Hey, this book contains a graphical description of rape" is very low effort, just like how telling somebody that a food you made yourself contains peanuts is very low effort.

The only time lecturers wouldn't know when something might trigger someone is if they haven't actually read or looked at the content that they're about to present, which I find pretty hard to believe.

With a peanut allergy you have it and don't eat the food.

With the trigger warning what exactly? It's easy to announce something you are going to do and do it. The article addresses how pointless and possibly counterproductive that is.

With a peanut allergy you have it and don't consume the food to avoid the adverse effects.

With a trigger warning you simply don't consume the content. Ideally, this is posted on the syllabus, so that the amount of time wasted arguing about this is minimized.

The article doesn't really "address" anything, it just makes value statements. For example, this paragraph:

> Consider a meta-analysis of 39 studies in 2007 by Sam Houston State University in Texas that found a ‘clear, consistent association’ between using avoidance-based coping strategies (that is, staying away from upsetting stressors or avoiding thinking about them) and increased psychological distress. For a more concrete example, look at the findings from a study, published in 2011, of women who witnessed the Virginia Tech shooting of 2007 – those who tried to avoid thinking about what happened tended to experience more symptoms of depression and anxiety in the months that followed.

You could say that the association is that people who avoid their traumas are more depressed and anxious, but you could also say the reverse, that people who are more depressed or anxious try to avoid the traumas that caused those things in the first place. It's an association with no causal link, so you don't know which direction the association runs in or even if one is directly caused by the other.

Trigger warnings are an avoidance mechanism, period. The only difference between this and a peanut allergy is that people don't feel the need to moralize about how we're enabling peanut-avoiders like it's a bad thing.

> The only difference between this and a peanut allergy is that people don't feel the need to moralize about how we're enabling peanut-avoiders like it's a bad thing.

Er, no. Most people are doing a rough calculation of frequency of real allergy to self diagnosis and quack practitioners.. Substitute another food like wheat and you get a different result. Then people start asking why perception of allergies is spreading when actual prevalence is unchanged and you get back to the proven science understanding of psychology, placebo.

https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Tests/all...

Yes, it may, particularly if it's an unavoidable trigger.

That should be done safely and consensually within the context of a therapy session/plan with a professional guiding it.

It's like surgery. Entirely acceptable in certain scenarios, but you'd object if your English lit prof decided to DIY it during class.

Aren't the trigger warnings a DIY treatment themselves? In the absence of specific professional advice, I'd think the default would be to treat people normally. Why are we so eager to put trigger warnings on things without any evidence that they're doing more good than harm?

No, they’re not a treatment. They may aid someone who is in treatment, though.

I know an abuse survivor who has been in therapy for many years working on the impact of it. We avoid movies with abuse depictions as it causes severe disassociation and setbacks in that treatment.

Someone for whom it’s triggering but less severely so might just opt to watch said movies with a trusted friend on a day they’re feeling emotionally sound.

They allow folks to choose the level of exposure to optional, potentially damaging things. Just like an R rating on a film might make you pause before bringing an 8 year old to the theater.

It includes exposure, yes, but the idea is to encourage the patient/client to decide to seek out triggering stimuli themselves.