by Nicole F.
I’m triggered. It’s a phrase that’s tossed around pretty casually these days. People will say it if they are a part of a fandom, if they see something they don’t agree with, or just offhandedly as a joke, but the word wasn’t always used as a kind of meme. The phrase ‘triggered’ is actually a term used a lot in psychology and therapy. It’s a phrase that was used for people with PTSD to identify what set them off.
The true definition of the word ‘triggered’ is, something that sets off a memory or flashback transporting the person back to the event of his/her actual trauma. The word started to be really openly used in the 1940s around the end of the first world war, mostly due to the increased cases of PTSD that the members of the military experienced. It was a word used to give a name to the episodes experienced by people when they would see, smell, or hear anything related to their trauma that would often lead to the fight or flight instinct to be activated.
To avoid this from happening, psychologists would work with the individual to assess what caused their fit and those stimuli would be classified as a ‘trigger’. So an example would be for me personally, I cannot smell Jergens hand lotion without being triggered and experiencing massive amounts of stress and anxiety due to my own past trauma. Being triggered can be a very scary experience for anyone who actually has suffered through trauma and has triggers.
So how did this word, a word that meant something serious for people who suffered from trauma, become bastardized in the way it has today?
Well, as the internet became larger and larger the phrase ‘trigger warning’ began to appear more. At first it was used to let people know that there would be content that could cause some people who have experienced trauma to be triggered and have a possible PTSD episode or anxiety attack. People would post fanfictions or other content that would contain rape, abuse, or some other form of traumatic experiences and to prevent their readers from becoming upset by it, they would post a trigger warning, but as the internet continued to grow and the ‘trolls’ of the internet discovered the word they inferred a different meaning.
To them the word was a phrase that stated ‘pansies, do not enter’. Many of these people would mock the use of the word ‘triggered’ and began to use it as a joke. This is how the word came to be used the way it is today. Now it has been repurposed into a word that has almost lost all of its original meaning. Now if you post a trigger warning for something, you may receive comments about not being so sensitive and if you see posts that are offensive without the trigger warning you see the opposite side, berating the individual who posted it.
The word has been bastardized and rebranded as a meme, something we say as a joke even though it’s far from it. Being triggered is something serious and can be a horrible thing for those who have to deal with it. As a community, we need to spread more awareness on what the word really means and to take it back to be used the way it was intended to be used. It shouldn’t be funny to say that you’re ‘triggered’ by something that simply makes you angry, because you are taking away the power of the word for those who need it’s power. So please think about the way you are using the word before you use it and have respect for those who have dealt with trauma and need that word to describe what they are experiencing.