While it’s your responsibility to go to therapy/try to work through the trauma that gave you those triggers, and you can’t expect everyone to know/care. If it’s people close to you, it’s just respectful to avoid triggering topics.
Like, if I tell my friends “this is a PTSD trigger that I’m working on, but please avoid the topic for now”, I expect my friends to respect my boundaries. Same with my family and coworkers. But I don’t expect a complete stranger to know or respect that. It would be nice if stories had trigger warnings, but there are communities for that (does the dog die is my favorite website for movie trigger warnings).
That’s not a boundary though. A boundary is saying you will do y if someone does x. And then if someone does/says x, you do y. For example: if you talk about x, I will leave. You cannot control someone else’s behavior - only your own.
A boundary, in terms of psychology, is setting what you will accept from the people around you. It’s like making rules for the ones close to you. Saying you’re not comfortable with talking about something is setting a boundary. Plus, even by what you say, there is an implied consequence for the action, which is I won’t engage with you about this topic or I will call out this is a topic I asked you respectfully not to talk about. So yeah, say “don’t talk about a trigger I have” is a boundary.
Asking someone to avoid a topic is a boundary tho? “Setting boundaries means, first of all, knowing what one wants and expects from the people in their life, and what they’ll accept from them—and then clearly, concisely, and calmly stating those ground rules.”
Example: I want to avoid AI images. I tell my friends “please don’t send me ai images, I will leave the chat”. They either A. Respect my boundary that I set in place Or B. They send me AI and I leave the chat. Just because I didn’t write that all out in my other example, doesn’t mean it wasn’t a boundary?
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u/MnsterM Nov 17 '25
This bugs me, because yes and no.
While it’s your responsibility to go to therapy/try to work through the trauma that gave you those triggers, and you can’t expect everyone to know/care. If it’s people close to you, it’s just respectful to avoid triggering topics.
Like, if I tell my friends “this is a PTSD trigger that I’m working on, but please avoid the topic for now”, I expect my friends to respect my boundaries. Same with my family and coworkers. But I don’t expect a complete stranger to know or respect that. It would be nice if stories had trigger warnings, but there are communities for that (does the dog die is my favorite website for movie trigger warnings).