Trigger Warnings Are Making Us Emotionally Poor

On bubble-wrapped living, Emotional Wealth, and the case for becoming a rascal.

Opening Scene:

The corridor stretches long, pale grey walls, floors, and ceilings, brightly lit with neon strip lights. One flickers, then crackles back to full beaming life. Behind one of the doors is a room full of people in lab coats working. One is on the Vulnerability Patch Station shushing the others through gritted teeth while burying vulnerabilities under shields of “resilience” and “functioning”. Another is on the Optimisation Desk writing a massive codebase of nested loops, conditional logic, and micro-adjustments (must avoid if this happens, because that takes place, and then it results in…). And the rest are on the Risk Minimisation Task Force loudly protecting peace, avoiding triggers, and managing emotions. There’s a lot of shouting and very little shush. From the corridor there’s nothing to hear.

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We are swimming without armbands in an ocean of hyper-curated, clinically sanitised wellness. Yet, every Sunday night, millions of us are forgetting how to breathe into our bellies while googling “how to set boundaries,” “signs of burnout,” and “how to stop overthinking.”

We’ve treated our emotional lives like a risk-averse corporate IT department of the soul, patching vulnerabilities, optimising ourselves, and minimising risk. We’ve achieved maximum psychological safety, and yet we feel emotionally bankrupt.

The portfolio looks great, but there’s zero cash flow.

In our obsession with protecting our peace, we’ve covered our emotional selves in bubble wrap. And bubble wrap keeps out the good stuff too: serendipity, throwing caution to the wind and throwing ourselves after it, and the pure rascal joy of feeling alive and being fully human.

We are emotionally wealthy on paper, but it’s time to pop those bubbles.

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But first, can we talk about the over-generalisation of trigger warnings?

Trigger warnings were invented for a very specific, clinical reason: to help people with PTSD and C-PTSD navigate emotional triggers so they could choose when and whether to engage with potentially activating material.

Now, everyone is triggered all the time.

(*hard eye roll)

And yes, everyone is probably carrying some degree of unprocessed stress and emotional residue (just watching the news too often is really bad for your mental health), but being triggered is not the same as being “uncomfortable,” “challenged,” or “offended.” And protecting someone from discomfort is not the same as protecting them from harm.

So when the trigger card is played, we have to proceed with caution, probably apologise, and definitely shut up and avoid doing or saying whatever caused the trigger response.

(BTW I’m talking to you as someone who is a card-carrying member of the C-PTSD club - more than half a century of collecting small “t” trauma like stamps, or badges of dis-honour. I know the difference.)

By wrapping the world in bubble wrap we aren’t actually making people safer, we’re making them brittle. We’ve turned emotional life into a sterile, allergen-free corporate cafeteria that smells of disinfectant and regret.

The bubble wrap is an Emotional Wealth tax.

Here’s the science bit: psychology shows that the most evidence-backed treatment for anxiety is Exposure Therapy - essentially, gradually facing the thing that you fear most, in graded steps, until your nervous system learns it won’t kill you. Trigger warning culture prioritises the opposite: Avoidance Therapy. And avoidance is the very mechanism that keeps anxiety alive. Every time you sidestep a trigger, you send your nervous system a memo that says: confirmed threat, steer clear. And you’ve added one more entry in the trigger portfolio.

Avoidance shrinks your world by narrowing your perception and whispers to your nervous system with hot, stale cigarette breath: “You are fragile, and this topic will break you.”

You can’t build Emotional Wealth when you don’t have the capacity to hold emotions of all flavours.

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So instead of Trigger Warnings, I’m issuing Trigger Promises!

I have a love-hate relationship with my triggers.

I hate how I feel when triggered.

I love that I’ve been shown exactly where I’m not free yet.

And by “not free” I mean: there’s a wound from an event I experienced, gave a meaning to, and haven’t yet finished with. Finishing with it (completing the emotional response in my body, finding out what it’s trying to teach me, and integrating that) is how the wound closes. Not by avoiding the thing that pressed my trigger button.

I wrote a whole essay about emotions as teachers:

There's No Such Thing As a Negative Emotion

I now know, after several years of embracing my triggers, that I’m barely triggerable by other people. I still trigger the f*ck out of myself when I get caught in an uncertainty loop (when will that ever become comfortable?), but when someone else pokes my trigger button, I go there. I resist first (of course I do), but then I go there. I put my snorkel and goggles on and I dive in.

And I get to pop another bubble on the wrap.

And my Emotional Wealth grows.

Here’s the Trigger Promise: Your triggers are not evidence of your fragility. They are a map to your unfinished business. And unfinished business, once finished, is freedom.

Not letting your triggers be your teachers keeps you in emotional poverty (all cosy and wrapped up and avoidant, hands over ears, singing lalalalaa), while your actual life, the one with love and risk and adventure, as well as the occasional disaster, waits outside.

Recently, I noticed the absence of being triggered in a particular situation. It was strange, like an echo of a part of me (the identity that had the trigger story) that was expecting to be triggered and wasn’t. And I have no doubt that I’ll soon not even notice the echo, because that’s the beauty of working with your triggers, you don’t get triggered, you notice the absence and then you forget you were ever triggerable. You just have more energy to live your life with.

True Emotional Wealth isn’t a high balance of undisturbed peace. It’s having enough internal capital to walk into high-stakes scenarios and know you won’t break if things go sideways. It’s the difference between someone who tiptoes through life protecting their peace, and someone who shoulder-shimmies through it with the loose-limbed confidence of a person who has met their monsters and made them tea.

And unlike the self-improvement industrial complex version of “do the work,” this isn’t about becoming more disciplined, more regulated, or more managed. It’s the opposite. It’s about becoming less managed. Which means freer, and if you are so inclined - more rascal.

Pop the plastic, welcome the Trigger Promise, and go make a little trouble.

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Closing Scene:

The corridor again. Same pale grey walls, same neon strip lights. But the door to the lab is wide open now, someone left it that way on their way out. The Vulnerability Patch Station is unmanned. The Optimisation Desk has a half-drunk cup of tea on it, still warm. Someone from the Risk Minimisation Task Force left in such a hurry they forgot their lanyard (it’s on the floor next to an empty chair). From outside, through a window no one had noticed before, comes a sound. A pop. Then another. Then a long, irresponsibly delightful sequence of them. Someone out there has found the bubble wrap. And they are absolutely losing their mind with it in the best way.

Polly 🤍

p.s. Want to clear a trigger today with an Experiment?