Let me state one of my most controversial opinions; it’s one that will make you mad, I’m sure. But I don’t believe in shying away from uncomfortable topics, and so I’ll take the hit.

I am a survivor of multiple types of abuse, as I detailed in my birthday post announcing Funeral of Hopes. That book, as one would expect from the title, does discuss a lot of trauma.

While writing it, I thought carefully about how much I could show without hurting anyone in the process. Despite what I’ll tell you in a minute, I do not actually want to upset my readers. My work is meant to be cathartic and healing, not trauma porn; I want to explore the uncomfortable aspects of life from a sympathetic lens.

But, other than what you can identify from the blurb, I don’t include trigger warnings. Here’s why.

Trigger warnings make other people accountable for your mental health.

Your healing is ultimately your responsibility, as are your reactions while you recover. It is neither realistic nor fair to expect others to care for your mental health other than in the way they should for anyone.

This is the same reason I dislike Do Not Interact (DNI) lists. With these, you are asking other people to curate your online experience for you rather than taking charge and preemptively blocking those who may make you uncomfortable.

One time, I wrote a story someone thought was inappropriate. They reached out to me personally and told me that they didn’t like it, with the unspoken expectation being that I should apologize and take it down.

They went on and on trying to justify why it was “wrong” to write that, which I also believe is nonsense; writing about any topic is a good thing when the writing itself is good. We should not be afraid to address uncomfortable things and explore the icky parts of life.

I told them that I would not be taking the story down, and then they asked me if they should block me, which I found absolutely ludicrous. Why are you asking me for permission? Do you want me to beg for you not to?

Yes, you should block me, because you cannot expect others to cater to your personal preferences or experiences. Of course, I was polite as possible about this, but I’m not going to manage someone else’s emotions for them. I have enough trouble handling my own, given that I have bipolar disorder.

Putting other people in charge of your well-being is a dangerous precedent. Suddenly you are helpless, completely dependent on someone else to deal with how you feel. Plus, telling people about your triggers ups the risk that someone will use them against you.

It is impossible to account for all triggers.

As I mentioned in my post about writing trauma in fiction, people can be triggered by almost anything.

I was assaulted during my graduate program. The attacker had smoked a Black & Mild cigar shortly before the assault, so my mind associated this smell with what happened to me.

These particular cigars have a very distinctive and pungent smell; if you have ever been around someone smoking them, you would know. While we can probably all agree that cigar smoke is gross, I do not have the right to tell other people they can’t buy that brand of cigar and smoke it wherever it is legal to do so.

It is my responsibility to manage my own emotions, get treatment for my trauma, and move on with my life. No one else can take control of my responses but me.

Refusing to confront bad feelings is not helpful in the long run.

There is a reason that so much of therapy involves processing and addressing painful events. The gold standard of treatment for phobias is to face them down and become desensitized to whatever the trigger is.

Even EMDR, which is a much gentler form of trauma processing, is not without its triggers. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s scary, and it makes you cry, and that’s the whole point.

My work in EMDR was actually a huge reason I wrote Funeral of Hopes because I was forced to think about things I didn’t want to, and then I could map these feelings onto a character. The book would not exist without my trauma; it also would not exist if I hid from my trauma, either.

No matter how much you try to avoid it, you will inevitably run into your trigger somewhere down the line. If you have not developed coping strategies to deal with it, then you’re going to have an absolute freakout and make everything so much worse.

If a book can trigger you to extreme mental distress, then it is your responsibility to get help.

It is not normal to get so upset about reading something that it makes you spiral. This signifies you have a serious problem, and you need to confront it for your own sake.

Avoiding the problem does not fix anything, nor does it make you feel better. Instead, you’ll find your life getting smaller and smaller as you ruthlessly avoid thinking about the issue, and soon enough you’re thinking about it all the time anyway.

I empathize if you have serious trauma; I do too, though my experiences may not look quite like yours. At many times in my life, I have tried to keep myself from ever dealing with it, and avoidance just made things worse.

The only way out is through. You’ve got to access treatment in whatever way is possible for you, or you will stay stuck in these bad feelings and get even more sensitive to them.

And that is true for nearly everything in life, by the way. Refusing to confront an interpersonal conflict, bad life circumstance, or serious health scare is the coward’s way out. You deserve better than that.

Sometimes things suck and are very unfair. But, ultimately, all the wishes in the world will not make your trauma unhappen. Now that it did, you have the choice for how you deal with these feelings. That is a powerful gift, and I encourage you to take control rather than demanding others control it for you.

So now that we’ve talked about why trigger warnings are unhelpful in general, let’s look at fiction specifically.

Fiction is one of the best ways to deal with your triggers.

You can feel those emotions in a safe environment, knowing that you can always close the book and walk away when it’s too much.

Rather than being confronted with the trigger in real time, where you cannot escape, fiction allows you to take your time and think about it. You know it’s not going to leap out of the book and hurt you, and that it is your past making you feel something.

In fact, this can be the catalyst to great personal growth. Some people, especially those with childhood trauma, may not even realize they have a certain trigger until it appears in fiction. Now they have a better idea of what’s upsetting them and can connect the dots back to the traumatic event.

If something triggers you in a book, then it may be a good idea to bring this up to a trusted confidante or therapist so that you can make an action plan to address it. This way, if it shows up in real life, you have already prepared yourself to face the problem rather than hiding from it.

But you may have not even been willing to do the work if you were told in advance that there might be something you don’t like in a book. You’d dip out and miss out on a golden opportunity for self-improvement.

Trigger warnings can ruin the suspense.

One of my favorite books has a rapist in it – who is set up to be a sympathetic character until we find out about his past. That would be Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, which is an absolutely masterful book.

Sorry for spoiling it for you if you haven’t read it, but the book is two decades old now so I think the statute of limitations has passed. You should read it anyway. It’s amazing.

The reveal is not graphic, but it is very distressing. If I had been told ahead of time that there would be rape references, then I may not have picked it up, and I would have been primed ahead of time to hunt for who may be the perpetrator.

Frankly, a trigger warning would have ruined the whole book. Mieville is an incredible writer and handled it so deftly that it came like a punch to the face. But because Mieville is such a virtuoso, I also didn’t feel triggered; I just felt disgusted and hurt and betrayed, which was what he wanted.

Having an intricate list of trigger warnings makes readers guess things ahead of time. They won’t be surprised if a certain theme comes up, reducing the ultimate impact and making reveals feel cheap.

If reading about something is very distressing to you, then don’t finish it.

But, sometimes, we just have to throw in the towel, especially if the specific depiction is awful.

There have been many books I did not finish because they made me uncomfortable. I remember one particular book that included a graphic rape scene between the protagonist and her uncle. This scene was a flashback that was wholly irrelevant to the story; it could have been removed with no issue.

The writer was too clunky and inexperienced to figure out how to incorporate this without showing it in a flashback. And the writing was terrible, rife with the beginner mistakes I despise. And I didn’t like the themes. So I just stopped reading it.

Did it make me feel gross and bad for a while? Sure, I was pretty triggered. But because I have always maintained that my feelings are my responsibility, I practiced coping strategies, ranted about it to people who love me, and moved on.

So close the book, DNF it, maybe write a review warning others if you’re so inclined. Unless you’re in school, you’re under no obligation to read anything you don’t want to.

It is possible to write stories about distressing events without triggering people.

Not always, of course. If you’re writing something like Hiroshima by John Hersey, there’s really no way to get around the horrors of nuclear war.

People will be upset because they’re supposed to be; the whole point is to make people understand how terrible these tools are and to advocate for their removal from war arsenals. A “Trigger Warning: Graphic death and mutilation” is kind of a duh, right?

But we can all take a lesson from China Mieville and Perdido Street Station when it comes to addressing these issues in a way that is painful yet empathetic.

Mieville does not lionize the rapist, nor does he make excuses for this character. Looking back with the knowledge of what he did, it’s actually pretty clear that he was hiding something and portraying himself as the victim rather than taking accountability.

The actual victim is shown as a strong, proud woman who is taking a bold step in exposing this man. Those around the newly-discovered rapist are disgusted; they react with righteous anger, cutting the character off and refusing to help him anymore. Everyone who knows turns their back on the rapist, as they should.

Most importantly, Mieville does not go into gratuitous detail about what happened, which is years prior by the book’s timeline. He doesn’t need to; we get the point. Doing a gory flashback would diminish the moment.

By handling the assault so carefully, revealing only what is necessary, the moment becomes a powerful exposition on how people are not always who they appear to be. He demonstrates that monsters can hide in plain sight, acting like victims when they are the perpetrators. This makes it so much more impactful and engaging.

Writing trauma is very hard; you must balance suspense and intrigue with empathy for those who have suffered this particular problem. However, a lot of things about writing are hard, and we have to learn how to appropriately represent them through careful research.

If you’re concerned that you’re not dealing with trauma in a healing way, then don’t just slap some trigger warnings on it. Reach out to sensitivity readers, take their feedback into consideration, and keep working on it until you’re satisfied.

You will likely find that the end result is very worth it. Indeed, you may find that people reach out to you with deep appreciation for how you have helped them face down their own problems. That is such an honor and what I consider my highest achievement in writing. I hope you can receive such feedback too.