To be completely honest providing a list of triggers is fairly basic precaution? I share my particular sensory/emotional flags to you know, avoid getting a day-ruining surprise later in the interaction. Nobody wants to risk a panic attack
Triggers were never meant to be a term that left the realm of psychiatric professionals and patients in their care–it’s when patients broke the ethics code of being their own advocates for strength and self-confidence that it leaked into mainstream usage and the seriousness of the term was diluted.
Triggers are an identification technique for the well-being of those who experience anxiety or PTSD, for the individual undergoing treatment to isolate what may be out there that they, personally, know they must shoulder the burden to avoid and cope with upon encountering. Exposure is something every medical professional wishes their patients didn’t have to deal with, but know is a firm reality that they may encounter. Therefore, patients are taught to identify what ‘triggers’ their emotional distress.
And along with being taught how to identify triggers, they’re also taught proper methods of de-escalating the emotional and mental reactions, bringing themselves back to proper grounding, and becoming stronger than their triggers. At no point has a true doctor ever (or will ever) advise any patient they legitimately are treating to tell other people what their triggers are and kindly ask other people to go out of their way to keep them safe.
Psychiatrists know better than to teach their patients to put their own mental and emotional well-being in the hands of others (especially when doing so also gives anyone who does wish to hurt them a grocery list of weapons to bring that person to their knees). Treatment is a two step process: identification and overcoming. The idea is not to teach sufferers of mental duress how to avoid and that they must tell everyone else to treat them kindly, because the world is not accommodating by nature, much as we’d wish it to be. Instead, the idea is to identify potential triggers and, through professional treatment and a first-person advocacy, strength-building lifestyle, help a person become stronger than that which has caused them duress.
Medicine is for healing, not simply stasis. Triggers are casts meant to let medicine do its work while bones in the mind heal. But when people all go around wearing casts they don’t need to gain friends’ signatures and doodles, it’s harmful to those who have actually broken their arm in a legitimate accident or violent struggle. In this regard, Tumblr is a middle school, and the school nurse has been seeing way too many patients mistaking bruises for shattered tibias.
