Triggers and Smoke Alarms
Jun. 16th, 2026 08:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_lee(based on a conversation I was having with my friend elsewhere)
Rogan: Okay, so as time has gone on, I've grown to really dislike how people talk about triggers and heartbreak.
A trigger is like a smoke alarm. Its sole purpose is to (obnoxiously, unpleasantly) draw your attention to a problem that needs dealing with. That’s it. That’s all it does. We generally don't notice a smoke alarm unless it saves our life or "goes wrong." Maybe it starts chirping constantly, maybe it goes off and makes you miserable under non-fire circumstances, whatever. It's become a pain in the ass, and I feel like the main ways people behave about it are:
Of course, when I write it flat-out like that, it seems obvious that OF COURSE you fix the smoke alarm. The idea of never entering a room again because of a smoke alarm is absurd! And yet, a lot of people treat their own minds and bodies this way! “Well, I have a trigger around oral sex, guess I’ll never get to lick peach or suck sausage ever again!” Why is this?
A lot of it, I suspect, is that people just don’t know that triggers can be healed, or how to do it. Which is fair, it’s difficult info to find, because to be blunt, our society doesn’t value that kind of healing. I didn’t include trolls in my bullet list because the asshole who sets your house on fire just to snigger at you clearly doesn’t have your best interest at heart, but right now there’s a whole culture war acting like getting over something just requires mocking you to “toughen you up.” (It doesn’t work. It has never worked. I have a decently thick skin these days, but that’s because I healed, not because someone kept jabbing their fingers into my wounds and sneering, “man up, snowflake!” The bullies even know that. If you heal, you aren’t nearly as fun to bully. They NEED you to stay hurting for them, otherwise they’d need to find a better grift!)
So how DO you do it? Well, I explain my homebrew way of doing it in my Memory Work Essays, and Staci Haines’s “Healing Sex” helped me (I would link, but Cleis Press’s website seems to be down?), but the short version is: building the internal trust and pain tolerance to be able to embrace the trigger, sit with the agony and discomfort, and listen to what it has to say. Triggers are created to forcibly get your attention. The only way to deal with them is to GIVE THEM THE NECESSARY ATTENTION.
(This is also why avoiding the smoke alarm room can backfire. Your hurt requires your attention, so avoiding or ignoring it JUST MIGHT MAKE IT LOUDER. Life can become an endless obstacle course of trigger-dodging, no good at all.)
Depending on the trigger, and the complexity of the heartbreak behind it, the required attention work can take YEARS. (We are at a dozen ourself.) Our society doesn’t like that, because it may stifle one’s ability to work. We have known people who have managed to hold down a job and this work at the same time... but we also know people who have a revolving door of short-term jobs they keep collapsing out of, and we ourself kept trying to make it work until we ended up in the mental hospital and realized that we had reached the end of the road. We could either make our peace with poverty and homelessness, or we could die. It SUCKED, and I would really like to help people avoid that fate if possible, preferably BEFORE they reach the end of that road!
Healing is scary, both to individuals and society, because it is so much goddamn work, overwhelmingly unpaid and unbeautiful (at least, on paper). That’s why so many people want to believe you can mock someone out of it, because it’s so much easier! But at least some of the work can be done with very little: learn how to listen to yourself, be trustworthy, and treat both others and yourself equally well. These things can make working EASIER, because you can be honest about what you can or can’t do, which makes you more reliable, and you waste less energy second-guessing yourself. And you can do that work while waiting in line, for a bus, or before falling asleep, just by asking, “what feels good that I’ve done? What feels bad? Why is that? Who do I want to be, and what things have I done that felt in line with that?” You do not need a lot of money or free time, so much as a willingness to ask those questions and listen to the answers. (And before I encounter the inevitable person saying that some people are so heavily-laden they don’t have the energy for that: well, those people surely don’t have the energy to read this blog post either.)
Because healing is hard work, some people overcorrect in the opposite direction, treating trauma and triggers... well, in the way abstinence-only education treats virginity. “You had this precious purity, and then you lost it, and now you’re dirty and tainted and FOREVER LESSER.” It’s gross. Life changes you, sure, life is ALWAYS changing you, but there’s no need to be a judgy mouth-breathing pastor about it. Some people even act like if a heartbreak is healable, it’s not REALLY heartbreak, and those people are really just as bad as the set-your-house-on-fire guys, who at least have the trollish decency not to assume a malfunctioning smoke alarm means that your entire house must now remain a frozen irreparable ruin forever. Fortunately, I think most of those folks just haven’t figured out how to deal with their smoke alarms yet, and creek willing and the god don’t rise, they’ll grow out of it. I did!
Rogan: Okay, so as time has gone on, I've grown to really dislike how people talk about triggers and heartbreak.
A trigger is like a smoke alarm. Its sole purpose is to (obnoxiously, unpleasantly) draw your attention to a problem that needs dealing with. That’s it. That’s all it does. We generally don't notice a smoke alarm unless it saves our life or "goes wrong." Maybe it starts chirping constantly, maybe it goes off and makes you miserable under non-fire circumstances, whatever. It's become a pain in the ass, and I feel like the main ways people behave about it are:
- "Welp, I guess I can just never go in that room, ever again." (This is when people treat the trigger as an immutable, unchangeable, permanent part of life.)
- "Oh, is it chirping? I'd just tuned it out." (Completely shutting down feelings, willing oneself not to notice, completely ignoring any red flags...) (Also: we knew a household of people who did this completely non-metaphorically. We sat through a housing interview with them, the smoke alarm chirping constantly the whole time, and when we were finally like, "are... y'all gonna fix that...?" they were like, "Oh, is it not supposed to do that?"
- They fix the smoke alarm.
Of course, when I write it flat-out like that, it seems obvious that OF COURSE you fix the smoke alarm. The idea of never entering a room again because of a smoke alarm is absurd! And yet, a lot of people treat their own minds and bodies this way! “Well, I have a trigger around oral sex, guess I’ll never get to lick peach or suck sausage ever again!” Why is this?
A lot of it, I suspect, is that people just don’t know that triggers can be healed, or how to do it. Which is fair, it’s difficult info to find, because to be blunt, our society doesn’t value that kind of healing. I didn’t include trolls in my bullet list because the asshole who sets your house on fire just to snigger at you clearly doesn’t have your best interest at heart, but right now there’s a whole culture war acting like getting over something just requires mocking you to “toughen you up.” (It doesn’t work. It has never worked. I have a decently thick skin these days, but that’s because I healed, not because someone kept jabbing their fingers into my wounds and sneering, “man up, snowflake!” The bullies even know that. If you heal, you aren’t nearly as fun to bully. They NEED you to stay hurting for them, otherwise they’d need to find a better grift!)
So how DO you do it? Well, I explain my homebrew way of doing it in my Memory Work Essays, and Staci Haines’s “Healing Sex” helped me (I would link, but Cleis Press’s website seems to be down?), but the short version is: building the internal trust and pain tolerance to be able to embrace the trigger, sit with the agony and discomfort, and listen to what it has to say. Triggers are created to forcibly get your attention. The only way to deal with them is to GIVE THEM THE NECESSARY ATTENTION.
(This is also why avoiding the smoke alarm room can backfire. Your hurt requires your attention, so avoiding or ignoring it JUST MIGHT MAKE IT LOUDER. Life can become an endless obstacle course of trigger-dodging, no good at all.)
Depending on the trigger, and the complexity of the heartbreak behind it, the required attention work can take YEARS. (We are at a dozen ourself.) Our society doesn’t like that, because it may stifle one’s ability to work. We have known people who have managed to hold down a job and this work at the same time... but we also know people who have a revolving door of short-term jobs they keep collapsing out of, and we ourself kept trying to make it work until we ended up in the mental hospital and realized that we had reached the end of the road. We could either make our peace with poverty and homelessness, or we could die. It SUCKED, and I would really like to help people avoid that fate if possible, preferably BEFORE they reach the end of that road!
Healing is scary, both to individuals and society, because it is so much goddamn work, overwhelmingly unpaid and unbeautiful (at least, on paper). That’s why so many people want to believe you can mock someone out of it, because it’s so much easier! But at least some of the work can be done with very little: learn how to listen to yourself, be trustworthy, and treat both others and yourself equally well. These things can make working EASIER, because you can be honest about what you can or can’t do, which makes you more reliable, and you waste less energy second-guessing yourself. And you can do that work while waiting in line, for a bus, or before falling asleep, just by asking, “what feels good that I’ve done? What feels bad? Why is that? Who do I want to be, and what things have I done that felt in line with that?” You do not need a lot of money or free time, so much as a willingness to ask those questions and listen to the answers. (And before I encounter the inevitable person saying that some people are so heavily-laden they don’t have the energy for that: well, those people surely don’t have the energy to read this blog post either.)
Because healing is hard work, some people overcorrect in the opposite direction, treating trauma and triggers... well, in the way abstinence-only education treats virginity. “You had this precious purity, and then you lost it, and now you’re dirty and tainted and FOREVER LESSER.” It’s gross. Life changes you, sure, life is ALWAYS changing you, but there’s no need to be a judgy mouth-breathing pastor about it. Some people even act like if a heartbreak is healable, it’s not REALLY heartbreak, and those people are really just as bad as the set-your-house-on-fire guys, who at least have the trollish decency not to assume a malfunctioning smoke alarm means that your entire house must now remain a frozen irreparable ruin forever. Fortunately, I think most of those folks just haven’t figured out how to deal with their smoke alarms yet, and creek willing and the god don’t rise, they’ll grow out of it. I did!
no subject
Date: 2026-06-16 11:22 pm (UTC)After I had a bad experience in therapy and had a stretch of being triggered by therapy positivity, I had good luck with self-paced exposure. Like limiting exposures was useful for me, but total avoidance would have been incredibly restricting. (For one thing, there was no way the entire internet was going to trigger warn for therapy positivity, and if I asked for that, a lot of people would have thought I was trolling.) And "expose enough that this brings up the bad feelings, while not being so immersed that I can't think", and "expose myself to trigger-adjacent material that lets me think about the topic" both helped build up tolerance. Now I don't have to drop fiction I otherwise like because the character is Getting Therapy in a positive way, and I don't have my day derailed because someone decided to talk about how great they think therapy is. There's still a sporadic response, but it's much milder, like "Oh, I got a bit irritable and moody about the topic", instead of "multi-day mental health crash" or "curled up in my bed shaking" level responses. I think a lot of people fall into avoidance because they see the benefits of not constantly having someone pick at the open wound and don't realize that's only the first step.
no subject
Date: 2026-06-17 02:55 pm (UTC)I’ll have to think about that a while.
And yes, having an uncommon trigger for an extremely common thing SUCKS. At least the bizarro ones tend to be comparatively rare!
no subject
Date: 2026-06-17 05:05 pm (UTC)It certainly can do that!
no subject
Date: 2026-06-18 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-18 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-18 06:29 am (UTC)