Guide: Sensitive Content and Trigger Warnings

For simplicity’s sake, most people refer to trigger warnings as “tw” and content warnings as “cw” so that’s what I’ll be referring to them in this thread.

Trigger Warnings? Content Warnings? What are those? A trigger warning is putting a warning before or blurring out specific “triggers”. Many people, like myself, have PTSD and can get “triggered” on certain sensitive topics. Such topics include:

tw // a lot of triggers

• Sexual Assault
• Rape
• Eating disorders
• Suicide
• Serious mental health problems
• Violence (physical and sexual)
• Self Harm

Talking about these sensitive subjects could rightfully upset someone, and what I’m about to say applies for writing stories and posts.

By “triggers”, I don’t mean just casually mentioning it, but going more in-depth for these sensitive subjects. If you’re going to talk about these topics in detail, please, for the sake of the community, try to include a trigger warning (tw // trigger here), use the hide details button, or even simpler, blur it. This is different if the thread has a trigger warning on it; then you don’t need to blur or add a trigger warning because it already says in the thread. Please, if you talk in-depth about these subjects, blur it. It takes no work at all.

What are content warnings?

Content warnings are for content in a post, such as the image, video, and actual text. Same rules apply for trigger warnings as for content warnings. The only things you would really want to blur on images would be excessive blood, violence, and sexual stuff.

The reason this is on this website? Well, because, quite simply, you should include trigger warnings in your writing! You might not want to include blur spoilers as that might disrupt the f l o w of the piece, but add a cw (content warning) at the top if you include any of these topics. The same goes for roleplaying! From what I observed from roleplays, blurring out certain words might be better – or adding a tw.

I’m not trying to prevent you from talking about these topics. A lot of them are important if you want to share your experiences, give advice, and raise awareness. All I’m saying is be mindful! Please blur out any “graphic” details I listed above and you’ll be good to go. And if you read this and still don’t want to blur out some words, then I really don’t know what to say.

Please keep in mind that just including a trigger warning and blurring does not replace following the guidelines. Please keep things PG 13. This goes for literally everything on here.

That’s it! I’m not an expert on trigger warnings, but I wholeheartedly believe using them will help others out and is just a kind thing to do.

This was stolen from my thread on the ShanniiWrites Forums! (@TheDancingFryer)