a lot of what informs the way i behave on twitter (and elsewhere) is based on a specific understanding of defensiveness and triggers that i've never articulated on the birdsite, so, thread about defensiveness and triggers: (1/n)
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sometimes a person says a thing and you feel threatened. maybe there's some anger and some fear and some adrenaline going on. "how *dare* you say that thing!" etc. this what i'm pointing at by "defensive" or "triggered"; ~the fight / flight / freeze response (2/n)
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often when people get triggered they stay "subject to" or "blended with" the triggered state; if it's fight-flavored in particular they might lash out, write angry rants, yell IRL, etc.
often the result is that whoever they're talking to also gets triggered (3/n)
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idk about you guys but my experience is that nothing good happens in a conversation where both people are triggered and blended with the triggered state (or even one person really). you can't really listen to someone when you're interpreting their words as threats (4/n)
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moreover i consistently find that my triggers are much less about the content of the conversation i'm having or the person who said the thing that triggered me and much more an emotional flashback about unresolved past stuff (5/n)
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also this page on emotional flashbacks and C-PTSD from pete walker:
pete-walker.com/flashbackManag
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processing the past stuff consistently defuses the trigger. i am lucky enough to practically never be in any real danger IRL so whenever my body starts reacting as if i'm about to be eaten by a tiger in response to some pixels on a screen i know *something*'s up (6/n)
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you can train the skill of learning how to "defuse" / "unblend" / "take as object" a triggered state even without knowing how to find the underlying emotional content that generated it; there are signs and they're not that subtle and you can just keep noticing them sooner (7/n)
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i have never regretted noticing that i'm triggered and i have basically always regretted YOLO'ing and lashing out; i'm not at my best in that state, the anger hasn't been properly transformed into clarity, i just hurt other people and myself (8/n)
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26. but anger properly worked with is extremely important. as @Meaningness says, anger is the stagnant form of clarity. i don't claim to know everything he means by that, but in my experience anger is a path to understanding what you care about and are wiling to protect
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the most tragic thing to me about being triggered and lashing out in a way that makes other people triggered and lash out is that you can create threats out of nothing
what started as a misunderstanding + flashbacks can compound into two people who actually hate each other (9/n)
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now, here we are on twitter, which makes money off of generating conversations where as many participants are triggered as possible; that's how you build the outrage cycle, that's how you generate drama and hate-clicks and hate-QTs and engagement
this is Bad, Actually (10/n)
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twitter is like a competition to see who in the world can summon the most dangerous demon and people get better at it every day (11/n)
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slightly troubling to note that if I made decisions by polling The People... The People would drag me straight to hell,,, (as a treat)
you cannot really summon fractional demons, that's the tricky thing about demons. you summon it and it typically consumes everything
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there's a big conversation to be had, beyond the scope of this thread, about how to redesign social media so that it does not encourage demon summoning quite so hard, but in the meantime what we all personally can do is strive to be kinder online (12/n)
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using twitter in a way that is focused on kindness means actively fighting twitter's tendency to pull you towards hatred; this is part of what i read into 's description of being Very Online as an "extreme sport" (13/n)
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the trick to being Extremely Online in a way that doesn't involve turning into a shell script is... you have to learn to surf the chaos of other people
it is said that hell is other people; there is a truth to that
what I do is a form of hell-surfing
it's an extreme sport
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a big part of how i try to be on twitter is
1) i try not to start conversations i think will produce triggering dynamics, and
2) if i somehow end up in one and get triggered, i try to name that i'm triggered and pause or leave the conversation to work through it (14/n)
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the point of naming that i'm triggered is to remove my own plausible deniability. most people just "tweet through it" and there's a name for that for a reason. your reasoning becomes extremely untrustworthy, everything becomes about proving you were right at all costs (15/n)
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a funny meta-note i kinda have to add to this is that the word "trigger" has itself become charged and politicized
i think the way this happened is that people weaponized "X triggered me, therefore X is bad"
this is the opposite of what i'm saying (16/n)
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my experience has consistently been that "X triggered me" is much more about me than it is about X, and that focusing on the me part of that interaction is much better for my sanity than blaming X for making me feel bad, which just never ever ever ever works (17/n)
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having written all of this out, i think the biggest criticism of this perspective that i anticipate caring about is something like "what about righteous anger? what about standing up for what you believe in?"
i could say a bunch of things here, but let's try this: (18/n)
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standing up for what you believe in should look and feel beautiful (19/n)
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