Thread:Deeganspaz/@comment-24577221-20190818192327/@comment-24577221-20191120013514

XP1andPruton wrote: BunsenH wrote: I know what "triggered" means. It doesn't mean "angered" or "mad".

And what was on that page didn't have anything to do with any of those things

XP1AndPruton: Oh Sorry Its Just My Guess... Sorry Mr Admin "Triggering" is when someone has been through terrible experiences, and finds that they get upset by being reminded of those experiences. It isn't just about getting upset in general.

Someone who has been bullied might be "triggered" by being reminded of it. For example, that could happen if they read about someone else being bullied. This goes beyond "I don't like it" territory; this is into "this makes me so upset that I can't function properly".

I know an elderly man who works at an animal shelter. He has cared for many cats that have been badly hurt, by owners that have neglected them, by people that have intentionally harmed them, and by their having been hit by cars or in other accidents. There are a number of silly songs about animals having the kinds of experiences one sees in cartoons. (Eric Bogle's "Nobody's Moggie" is a good example.)  But silly or not, these kinds of songs are very upsetting to him, because they remind him too much of the real suffering he's seen.

Another silly song is "The Wreck of the Crash of the Easthill Mining Disaster" by Brooke Lunderville. I've seen a man get very upset by it, because the town he grew up in had suffered from both mining disasters and boating accidents. It didn't matter to him that the song was ridiculously exaggerated. He heard about a mining accident and a boat crash, being presented as funny... and to him, those are very not-funny things.

The word "triggering" comes from guns: moving a small object a short distance causes a large explosion.

It does happen, sometimes, that someone gets unreasonably upset by something small. But one shouldn't assume that someone who gets very upset about a small thing doesn't have a very good reason, from their point of view. Joking about triggering can be very hurtful to people who are already having trouble dealing with things.