Trigger Warnings Don’t Work. We May Still Owe Each Other One.

TW: Distressing research, author opinions, Freud, and grad school stories.

Photo by Mehrpouya H on Unsplash

My first semester of grad school, I took a Freudian theory seminar with a professor everyone had opinions about. Most of those opinions were variations on privileged white man behaving exactly as advertised.

I thought he was great.

I was also more than a decade older than most of my classmates. They had grown up with language about triggers, content warnings, and safer classrooms. I had spent years working as a hospital chaplain, where the closest thing we had to a content warning was a 1:00 a.m. page informing us a seven-year-old with gunshot wound to the head would be arriving in three minutes.

To me, the worst things in life had never seemed particularly committed to giving notice.

In a class on Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria, the professor was explaining how a traumatic experience can disappear from conscious memory while the body keeps a record. He illustrated the point with a patient who had been sexually assaulted. He gave no warning, which had not occurred to me as a problem until the woman two seats down interrupted him.

Whoa. Trigger warning.

He stopped and stared at her. His mouth actually fell open a little.

Then he said, You are about to be therapists. Your clients will not give you trigger warnings.

That may have been the most brilliant thing anyone said during my first year. Of course clients would not give us trigger warnings. People do not sit down and say, Just so you know, the next part is going to be difficult. TW: suicide. They just tell you what happened.

I repeated his line for years. I said it at parties, to supervisees, and once in a conference hallway to a woman who had not asked for my opinion and showed no observable signs of needing it.

I still think he was morally right. Asking clients to slap warning labels on their own pain would be deranged. Over the years, though, the question got wider: how much warning do the rest of us owe one another before a difficult story, idea, or fact?

Trigger Warnings: All Forecast, No Umbrella

Trigger warnings are supposed to help people do one of two things: brace themselves for difficult material or avoid it when they cannot handle it.

A 2024 meta-analysis found that they were largely useless at both.

Anticipation Without Relief

Across nine studies, researchers measured anxiety, fear, distress, negative mood, and other emotional reactions after people encountered disturbing material. The difference between those who received a warning and those who did not was d = 0.02, which, in nerd speak, is basically zero (Bridgland et al., 2024).

The warning told people something upsetting was coming. Once it arrived, the participants were no less upset.

When I was talking through the research with my husband, he said, Well, yeah. A trigger warning just gives my anxiety a running head start.

That is almost exactly what the researchers found. Warnings caused a small but reliable rise in distress before the material arrived, without reducing distress afterward (Bridgland et al., 2024).

That small window may be the strongest argument in their favor.

Someone who knows their body well may notice their heart speeding up, their breathing getting shallow, or their muscles beginning to brace. Someone with practiced regulation skills can use the advance notice to slow their breathing, press their feet into the floor, sit near the door, or decide to return to the material later.

The warning provides a few extra seconds. Any useful preparation has to come from the person receiving it.

The research supports that limitation more clearly than it supports my optimistic interpretation. When people were asked how they would prepare after seeing a warning, only a minority described an active coping strategy, such as deliberately changing how they thought about the material or redirecting their attention (Bridgland et al., 2022).

For most people, the warning simply started the anxiety earlier.

Given an Exit, Everyone Stayed

The other promise is that trigger warnings help people avoid material they do not feel able to handle. The research is equally unimpressed by that claim.

In one study, college students could read a passage describing physical and sexual assault or choose a non-distressing alternative. More than 96 percent chose the assault passage anyway (Kimble et al., 2021).

They had been given a clear exit, and almost nobody took it. In some experiments, people were even more likely to choose the material carrying the warning.

Humans are curious little trauma goblins.

But What About Trauma Survivors?

The obvious comeback is that trigger warnings may do very little for most people and still help the people who have lived through the thing being described.

A study of 451 trauma survivors found that warnings did not reduce anxiety, even when the material resembled participants’ own trauma. Among people with the strongest current PTSD symptoms, the warnings slightly increased immediate anxiety (Jones et al., 2020).

These studies have limits. Most lasted one session and involved college students or online participants reading passages or watching film clips. A laboratory cannot recreate the worst day of someone’s life, which is probably for the best given research ethics and basic human decency.

But the question is not whether one person, somewhere, once benefited from a warning. Almost any intervention can produce a testimonial. The question is whether trigger warnings reliably do what people claim they do.

So far, the evidence keeps saying no.

Trigger Warning: You Still Have to Stay in the Room

The demand for a trigger warning usually comes after someone has already said the controversial thing. At that point, nobody is asking for preparation. They are asking for punishment.

I did not like what you said leaves room for disagreement. You activated my trauma turns a preference into an injury, the speaker into an asshole, and the room into a hostage situation.

It is censorship with a doctor’s note.

This does not mean they are completely useless. Sometimes a traumatic story comes apropos of nothing and takes the listener down a dark alley.

You are talking about a friend who died, and then you are about to describe exactly what the body looked like when you found it. Pausing to say, This gets graphic. Do you want the full version? is, very simply, courtesy.

Trigger warnings can do a terrible job protecting people and still be good manners.

The problem begins when courtesy becomes an obligation, and the person telling the story is made responsible for managing everyone else’s reaction to it.

Someone tells you about a miscarriage, an assault, a suicide, or the night their father overdosed. You may feel your stomach drop. You may think of something that happened to you. You may wish they had chosen another story, another level of detail, another day.

Those reactions are real.

However, person speaking does not automatically become responsible for soothing you because their life touched something painful in yours. Sometimes they get to finish the story. Sometimes they get to remain the person the conversation is about.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that triggering someone was an act of unkindness rather than one of the unavoidable risks of being human around other humans.

We can speak with care. We can also take responsibility for whatever another person’s words stir up in us.

People will talk about grief, assault, miscarriage, addiction, violence, and death. Sometimes they will warn you first. Sometimes the subject will arrive before anyone has had time to put little orange cones around it.

A warning can be kind. Its absence is not automatically harm.

At some point, we all have to learn how to stay in the room.

Further Reading

The End of Trauma by George A. Bonanno

This is probably the best companion to this essay. Bonanno’s research complicates the assumption that trauma reliably produces permanent psychological damage. Most people are far more resilient than our current cultural language gives them credit for, and there is no single correct way to cope with something terrible.

What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo

I watched this book single handedly change a clients life after working with him for two years. Infuriating.

Foo also keeps this entire conversation honest. Some people really do have nervous systems that react to reminders as though the original danger has returned. Acknowledging that reality does not require pretending avoidance is always healing or that everyone else becomes responsible for preventing distress.

The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris

This is the most practically useful book on the list.

Harris explains Acceptance and Commitment Therapy without requiring the reader to have a graduate degree or an alarming collection of cardigans. The central idea is that a meaningful life requires learning how to experience unpleasant thoughts, memories, and emotions without allowing them to run the entire operation.

It is an excellent book for anyone whose coping plan has slowly become “avoid everything that makes my nervous system file a complaint.”

The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

This is the closest match for the broader cultural argument around trigger warnings, emotional safety, and the increasingly blurry line between discomfort and harm.

The authors have a clear position, and sometimes they push their argument farther than the evidence comfortably carries it. Still, the book is readable, provocative, and useful for thinking about what happens when protection from difficult ideas becomes a moral expectation.

Read it as an argument, rather than scripture carved into a university-funded stone tablet.

Conflict Is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman

This is for readers who would prefer to leave with an argument.

Schulman examines what happens when conflict, rejection, discomfort, and ordinary human failure are described using the language of abuse. She is particularly interested in how claims of harm can become a way of avoiding accountability, complexity, and repair.

The book is sharp, occasionally infuriating, and almost impossible to read without thinking of at least three people you know. Four, if you are currently in a group chat.

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. The trigger warnings may not work, but the links do occasionally produce seventy-three cents.

References

Bell, K. M., Howardson, R., Holmberg, D., & Cornelius, T. L. (2025). “Warning — This content may trigger temporary discomfort, which is expected and manageable”: The effect of modified trigger-warning language on reactions to emotionally provocative content. Behavior Therapy, 56(2), 213–224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2024.11.001

Bridgland, V. M. E., Barnard, J. F., & Takarangi, M. K. T. (2022). Unprepared: Thinking of a trigger warning does not prompt preparation for trauma-related content. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 75, 101708. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2021.101708

Bridgland, V. M. E., Jones, P. J., & Bellet, B. W. (2024). A meta-analysis of the efficacy of trigger warnings, content warnings, and content notes. Clinical Psychological Science, 12(4), 751–771. https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026231186625

Jones, P. J., Bellet, B. W., & McNally, R. J. (2020). Helping or harming? The effect of trigger warnings on individuals with trauma histories. Clinical Psychological Science, 8(5), 905–917. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702620921341

Kimble, M., Flack, W., Koide, J., Bennion, K., Brenneman, M., & Meyersburg, C. (2021). Student reactions to traumatic material in literature: Implications for trigger warnings. PLOS ONE, 16(3), e0247579. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247579