On triggering and reasonable accomodation
On triggering and reasonable accomodation
Some people are triggered by the word "cancer." The Undertaker is triggered by cucumbers. How can we help them?
Today, an editor who I don’t feel like singling out sparked some online discourse when she advised writers not to use “cancer” and cancer-related terms as metaphors in their writing. The rationale, if you haven’t heard this one before, is that since some people have suffered from cancer they may find it triggering to dhear it referenced, even metaphorically.
Suffice to say that online was generally not impressed by this logic — but that it also seemed like people were having trouble articulating clear objections. Most of them fell into the “not my problem” category, which of course is not a rationale that social justice etiquette usually considers legitimate. After all, if bringing up cancer is really going to spark some kind of intense emotional or personal reaction, why not avoid it whenever possible?
Here are my problems with this way of thinking about triggering.
First: why use “cancer” as a simile? Because we’re trying to describe something that is dangerous and that spreads uncontrollably. But look at the alternatives:
Spreads like a wildfire
Spreads like a plague
Spreads like an infection
Aren’t all of these things that kill people, too? The problem here isn’t with the metaphor we are trying to use — it’s with the very concept that we want to describe. As long as we are talking about something that’s dangerous and that spreads, we risk triggering someone who has had a harrowing experience with that danger.
I suppose you could conclude from this that we just can’t talk about dangerous things anymore since someone might find them triggering. More reasonably, however, I think we need to accept that we will want (and need) to talk about dangerous things sometimes, and that people who are triggered by their existence need to either avoid those conversations or deal in some other way.
Second: just as a matter of psychological fact, literally anything can be triggering. This is often one of the great challenges to treatment: patients will have a PTSD reaction that seems to come out of nowhere and the therapist will have to trace it back to its source. A war veteran might have a flashback if (say) he smells a cigarette that reminds him of the cigarette another soldier was smoking when the air raid began. A grown adult can be triggered if she hears a song that was playing when she was molested as a child by her uncle. The human mind does not operate in some literalistic way that only associates cancer with the word “cancer”; it may also associate cancer with “golden retriever” if your job was to feed the dog when your friend was in the hospital.
It is literally impossible to write or say something that doesn’t risk triggering someone. Did you know that Mark Calaway, also known as The Undertaker — a giant of a man, and one of the most feared professional wrestlers in history — is terrified of cucumbers? If you read that as me trivializing what it means to be triggered then you need to have more sympathy for Calaway, because I assure you the phobia is quite real.
Fortunately, I think the common-sense solution to triggering that most people adopt happens to be the right one. It’s okay to talk about cucumbers or to say that something “is spreading like a cancer” — just try to avoid it when The Undertaker or a cancer survivor is in the room. Meanwhile, if you are personally triggered by innocuous metaphors or vegetables in real life, there is nothing wrong with you and you shouldn’t feel bad about it; but the solution here is therapy. It just isn’t possible to reshape the entire world into a safe space for everyone’s personal traumas; if we tried, we wouldn’t be able to say anything at all.