Comment by cthalupa

Everything you wrote sounds really good in theory - it passes the smell test for me, and I believed it for a long time because it seemed perfectly logical. It all just Made Sense to me in an intuitive manner.

But there's pretty universal agreement that avoidant behavior isn't a good thing. There's a difference between the awful idea of trying to self-manage exposure therapy or forcing exposure and allowing yourself to be exposed to things in the manner that matches the 'real world.' If someone wants to put 'Dead Dove' on their ao3 and provide a a trigger warning because the fic is based around that thing, then yeah, that's one thing. I wouldn't recommend someone go watch Hostel if their trauma is at all related to that either. But most media that has triggering content aren't anywhere near those extremes. And obviously, if the trauma just occurred, it's a whole different thing. But if the studies that show an increase in avoidant behavior from trigger warnings are right, it's increasing a bad thing. If the studies that show a 'forbidden fruit' effect are right, then it's a negative for the proposed benefit from trigger warning proponents.

But most studies show no increase or negligible increase in avoidance for the study participants, including trauma groups. So if that's the case, they aren't doing what proponents are saying is their core benefit, either.

Meanwhile quite a few show an increase in anxiety from the warning itself, which is obviously a negative.

I'm open to the idea that there might be some effective way to do trigger warnings - more specific warnings up to spoilers, or something couching it in context of how this relates to recovery and how to manage it, etc. etc. - something along those lines. There's certainly plenty of precedent for a general idea being right and the initial implementations of it being bad. But proving that is going to come down to someone figuring it out and getting studies that show positive impact.