A "trigger" is something that, well…​, triggers an involuntary and conventionally painful emotional response. It can also trigger loud speech or violent behavior.

In this model of human psychic reality, the human psyche is riddled with traps, caused by traumatic events earlier in life. My daughter, for example, says that she is triggered by her parents using speech that she identifies as "controlling". When she experiences such speech, an uncontrollable response is generated, and she is compelled to argue against it. She can’t stop herself. She is an automaton acting out a program over which she has no control. She believes this to be the case.

It is certainly true that traumatic events have lasting echoes — "the burned child fears the fire" — but the wisdom when I was young was that the effect faded, and became part of your valuable background experience. Only if the trauma was intense and prolonged did it seriously distort a personality.

The effect varies with the person. Some people learn from even truly terrible suffering, and become stronger because of it. And it may be true that some very fragile souls are seriously damaged by even mild trauma — human responses are complex and difficult to unravel.

But trauma can also be manufactured out of almost nothing. As a psychology student I knew a young mother who was irrationally terrified of bugs, and was training her three-year-old to follow her lead — not through instruction, but through pure behavioral contagion. The child had no prior reason to fear a dead bug on a windowsill. The fear was borrowed, secondhand, acquired from an authority figure who didn’t know she was teaching anything. When I had custody of the child for a couple of hours, a careful period of demonstrating that the dead bug couldn’t harm him was enough. The fear response dissolved. The "trauma" was reversible because it was shallow — a conditioned response, not a wound.

This is what the trigger framework gets wrong. It treats these three cases as equivalent: the borrowed fear dissolved in an afternoon, the ordinary emotional scar that fades with experience, and the genuine devastation of prolonged abuse.

My daughter’s ex may be an example of the last kind — a broken criminal drug-addled abusive family environment that may have essentially destroyed a promising human being. Sometimes the damage really is too great, the conditioning too deep, the wound too old to close, leaving a vindictive manipulative person who is a danger to himself and to others.

But collapsing these cases into a single model does real harm. It takes the reversible and insists it is the irreversible. It forecloses the intervention that worked on the child. And it hands the conditioned response a kind of permanent legitimacy it may not deserve — treating an automaton’s program as an identity rather than a habit that could, with effort, be changed.