Category: Writing

No surprises: on trigger warnings

When I was fourteen and my teeth were at their worst – upper and lower rotting molars right through to my incisors and most of them turning yellow or grey – I took to covering my mouth with my hand whenever I spoke, in a bid to conceal their condition.

Even as I tried to hide the state of my teeth from others, I could not hide them from myself. My tongue worried at the jagged edges but the thought of doing anything about this state disturbed me more than the feel of those teeth, the smell of my breath and the threat of exposure.

The thought of a dentist looking into my mouth, one who would pronounce in shock and horror that mine was the worst case he had ever seen, brought such shame I tried endlessly to distract myself.

Whenever an advertisement for toothpaste came onto the television, I cast my eyes to left and right and checked the faces of my sisters and brothers worried that the ad might alert them to the state of my teeth.

These toothpaste advertisements acted as a trigger to a level of shame and anxiety I could not bear.

My once rotting teeth come to mind now as I wonder how it is that a person can be triggered, not only by the obvious things that lead to trauma: war, rape and cruelty to animals, but by less obvious things that might mean little to an ordinary person but to someone who has experienced severe trauma can be terrifying indeed, causing flashbacks and slippages into dissociated mind states in attempts to cope with what is unthinkable.

The sounds of a low lying plane over head and its resonance to her memories of the second world war caused one of the women with whom my mother once worked as a cleaner to go into a state of panic so intense she had to be lifted from the floor.

And herein lies the difficulty. There are so many things that might trigger us, depending on who we are and where we’ve been. Which is not to say there are not situations in which we can anticipate that people might be disturbed by whatever lies ahead and it behoves is to put out a warning.

But none of this is black and white and I find myself objecting to extreme demands that we put trigger warnings on almost anything that might unsettle a listener, reader or viewer.

I have my suspicions that the issue of warning people of the risks involved in being exposed to something that might well traumatise them comes out of the ways in which the Internet imposes itself on us as we flick from one image or set of words to another.

These things can come at us fast and once inside, such as an image of grave horror – a beheading or some such ghastly event, something most of us would never want to see – we can’t get the image out of our mind.

Sometimes when I’m scrolling through and sending off to trash the spam that comes into the comments section of my blog, I inadvertently click on one of the details of some random message and catch a flash of naked breasts or a penis that I have no desire to see at that moment.

I delete it, but even then, as if subliminally, the flash of image disturbs me. It’s as if someone is forcing something into me that I had not asked for.

The Internet has a way of imposing itself on you, which might well be one of the reasons there is more of a call for trigger warnings these days.

Or perhaps it has more to do with the sheer complexity and volume of stimuli that surround us everyday from all directions. Most of us filter them out but sometimes it’s not so easy. Sometimes just a glimpse is enough to set us down a path we don’t want to follow. Rather like the ambulance lights flashing at the side of the road can cause us to slow down as we pass to gawk at those involved, even as we might be terrified to see something unbearable.

A body on the side of the road. Blood.

Equally for me when I’m in such a situation I also have the sense that I want to know that it’s not as bad as it might be. I want to know the people are all right. If I think the accident is a ghastly fatality, maybe one involving children, then I find myself affected by it for a long time to come, as if it insists itself into my consciousness and won’t go away.

We tend to develop defensive manoeuvres most of them based on what seems to work best for us as we mature. We can try to turn a blind eye. We can even deny it ever happened.

We can rationalise it away with words of self-congratulation: the accident victims must have been speeding or they were drunk or on drugs. It would never happen to me because I wouldn’t behave like that.

If we’re honest with ourselves we know the adage: there but for the grace of whoever go I. We are all vulnerable as human beings. We are all subject to disturbances.

Much as I do not want to be vilified for failing to take care of people who read my writing by not forewarning them on the nature of its content, I do not want to be insensitive to these things.

So I’m all for trigger warnings but we also need some sort of critical analysis on the reasons for implementing them, when and where and why. In part, because life itself offers no trigger warnings.

Trauma happens and trauma is about the wound that comes on unexpectedly more often than not, and demands we find ways of managing its shocking charge without instantly blaming other people for inflicting it upon us.

Nor yet blaming ourselves for being subject to whatever horrors might befall us.

Yellow fingers

I’m due for my next pap smear later this week, that bi-annual event when the doctor takes up her silver speculum – her fingers of steel – and inserts it as far as she can to scrape off a small tissue sample to send off to the laboratory.

All of it designed as a preventative measure to rule out the possibility of cellular changes that might suggest the arrival of something dreadful like cancer.

I must have endured over twenty pap smears over the years given my age, if I do my calculations right and each time they become easier.

Even so there’s something in the process that causes me to hold my breath and gasp at the invasiveness of this procedure, this intrusion into my body that may be necessary if prevention is the aim, but nevertheless feels obscene.

When I was young in my mid twenties when I first took up the regular pap smear habit, given all the times I’d heard about the dangers sexually active women might encounter if they did not check our their inner workings regularly.

I was content to take myself off to see my then usually male GP who would leave the room to give me time to strip off my lower half of clothes and crawl onto the elected examination table and cover myself in the crisp starched sheets that were the main stay of the medical profession.

These days they tend to use towels and more recently I’ve noticed they prefer disposable sheets of material like paper for hygienic purposes. In any case there was always an attempt at modesty and the GP, my first regular GP once I’d left home and established myself as a grown up was a gentle kind man, who reeked of cigarettes and who donned the disposable gloves of his trade over his nicotine yellow fingers and always tried to engage in light conversation as he shifted the speculum into place.

Twenty or so pap smears later and I still have trouble in working out how best to position myself for this procedure. I need to be reminded every time. The way the doctor urges me to put my feet together sole to sole so that my knees spill out to either side, which apparently makes for easier access.

And what to do with my arms and hands? Let them rest by my side. Not once have I found it painful, though I recognise some women do, and perhaps the fact that I have learned to switch off my mind to this intrusion and float away on clouds of dissociation may have contributed to the extent to which I usually feel nothing during the procedure.

I learned this on my visits to the dentist as a child when I needed to switch off and float to the ceiling, to look down at the doctor whose white coat concealed the arms and gloved fingers of the monster who was about to intrude into my mouth with metal spikes and tweezers and all manner of unspeakable equipment, far worse than the speculum.

I shall try to stay awake during this next visit to my doctor. A woman for preference. A woman because somehow I imagine she is more understanding of this internal violation that we women must endure every two years if we are to stave off the horrors of other unwelcome guests.

It’s the intimacy mixed in with the coldness of steel; the clinical specificity of the doctor’s need to gather cell samples with the posturing required; the nakedness; the closeness to love making; to other forms of activity, like when you’re being raped and all those associations that turn the humble pap smear into an additional traumatic occurrence in a life that’s filled with occasions when the best thing you can do is dissociate.

I have the same sense when I’m writing. This same need to cut off from my emotions in the cold clinical way of a surgeon, so that my fingers can take up each word as it floats into my consciousness and put it down there on the page as it comes to me, not to react to that inner voice that recoils and tells me I must not write this.

I go in, invade my space, and come up with a sample that’s hopefully not cancerous, but a pointer to the illusion that, for a while at least, all is well.