A trigger is a special sort of touchstone, but I prefer the term “tender stories.”

“Trigger Warning” serves a well-intentioned purpose, but I’m beginning to feel like the term is getting so much wear and tear that it has begun to lose some of its usefulness.

If a trigger is present, the force of emotion is also present, making the trigger a touchstone. When we warn people about a trigger, we are alerting them to potentially painful subject matter, but we do so knowing that the pain isn’t new. It has been around long enough for you to notice it. If you don’t yet have a relationship with that pain, hearing about a similar experience from someone else can often feel like touching a raw nerve.

Grief, for example, is often named as a trigger warning. As I wrote about in People Are Stories-in-Progress, my mother’s father died when she was eighteen, and most of her peers and friends stopped talking about her dad in front of her. But she was always grateful when someone mentioned her loss with kindness—it meant that someone witnessed her pain. 

Sometimes too, pain is triggered by something that no one could guess: an object in your own room which reminds you of a harsh memory, a son which was playing during a painful moment, or the same kind of car as the person who recently broke your heart. There are no trigger warnings in parking lots or Spotify, and it’s impossible to reason with a feeling. You can’t simply tell a car or a song that it’s too random and ridiculous to trigger you.

You simply have to weather the pain until you can learn to hold it in a new way.

So, instead of “trigger warnings,” I prefer the term “tender stories.”

Right there in the name, it’s telling you how to approach that story—with tenderness towards yourself, your own pain, and perhaps even someone else’s.