Why we do not use trigger warnings in our training courses

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Nothing gets me thinking about trigger warnings like Father’s Day or Mother’s Day: the annual run of emails asking whether I would prefer to opt out of promotions relating to the occasion.

The intentions are good, I am sure. No one wants to upset people by reminding them of the loss of a loved one, or of a difficult relationship with a parent. Yet, when subject line after subject line heralds the coming of Father’s Day from around mid-May onwards, the impact can feel like the opposite of what was intended.

An email that asks us if we wish to avoid Father’s Day-related emails is itself a Father’s Day-related email: a reminder of the very thing it asks whether we wish to avoid.

In this way, the trigger warning itself becomes the trigger.

When the warning becomes the trigger

Our decision not to use content warnings in training at Plinth House has not come about for want of trying. When the company was first started nine years ago, I would stand up and say, “the case study we are about to discuss involves a fictional student disclosing historic sexual abuse”, or put a message on a slide saying, “Content warning: we will now be discussing a student who discloses suicidal feelings”.

However, just like those Father’s Day emails, the warnings felt to me, every time, as though they were doing the very thing I was trying to avoid. I felt the tension in the room palpably rise when I gave the heads up. Suddenly, as the trainer, I was the person who was introducing more anxiety into the training room.

A content warning signals, explicitly or implicitly, that some colleagues may not be able to cope with what follows. That can be a destabilising message to put out, however carefully it is worded.

In theory, warning participants about content may be an attempt at empowering them by offering them a choice about whether they stay for the content or not – giving people a potential ‘out’. But, in practice, with choice can come a pressure to decide. "Can I cope with this content? Should I leave for this section? Maybe I should".

Far from showing confidence in attendees and in their ability to manage tricky student-facing interactions in practice, I was indicating that some of the attendees may not even be able to make it through an exploration of these issues in a training setting.

I came to realise that these warnings were undermining the very purpose of the training. If I am prompting participants to question whether they can make it through a discussion about an issue, what does that do to their level of confidence in dealing with that same issue when the scenario is no longer hypothetical?

A trainer does more than explain a process. Whether we intend to or not, we model a way of entering difficult territory. Both confidence and its absence can be contagious. When a trainer seems hesitant, participants notice and can follow suit. When a trainer shows they are able to move calmly and straightforwardly into difficult territory, participants are more likely to believe that they can do the same.

Students do not come with trigger warnings

A student will not usually knock on the door and say, “Before I begin, I should let you know that what I am about to disclose involves [insert difficult topic here – whether it be bereavement, domestic abuse, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, sexual violence, or addiction].” More often, the conversation starts somewhere more ordinary: an extension, a missed seminar, an accommodation complaint, or a level of disengagement or anger from a student that seems out of step with the issue in front of them. Then, sometimes slowly and sometimes suddenly, something more serious emerges.

That is the reality we are trying to prepare staff for. Not because we want training to be shocking, bleak or emotionally performative, but because we want it to be honest. If our training pre-announces every difficult theme, we risk creating an artificial version of student-facing work: one in which distress arrives labelled, sequenced and neatly separated from the rest of the conversation.

As academics and professional services staff, we must be able to respond effectively to situations that arise with students – even when the student reminds us of something that has happened to us personally, something we feel ourselves, or something that happened to a loved one of ours.

There may, of course, be situations where a member of staff is not the best person to deal with a particular student longer term because the issue is too painful for them. When I worked as a director of student services, there were times – not often, but occasionally – when I knew that someone in my team should not lead on a specific case. It is perfectly reasonable to question whether a recently bereaved colleague is well-suited to being a university’s point of contact for the parents of a student who recently died, for example.

However, it goes beyond reasonable to expect that we can shield that same colleague from any or every mention of death in their work. The next student they meet might mention a bereavement or a terminal diagnosis. Part of being in a student-facing role is not knowing, and yet still being able to hold, whatever a student brings, at least long enough to get them to the right place or make them aware of relevant sources of advice or support.

Given that students do not come with trigger warnings, it is artificial for a trainer to give university staff a warning about the content of a case study or about the next section of a training course. And good training should not be artificial.

Part of responding effectively to a tricky student situation is also managing our response in the moment. It can be important for colleagues to experience, in the relatively supportive context of training, the moment when a fictional student mentions self-harm, abuse or suicidal feelings in a case study, without warning. It gives those colleagues a valuable opportunity to ask themselves how they would react and start to question what an effective response to that student might look like.

Training allows us to test our skills and build confidence so that we are ready for real-world situations. Its content and delivery should therefore, as far as possible, reflect the real-world challenges of higher education. Content warnings take us away from that.

What the evidence says

I may have made the decision to stop using trigger warnings at Plinth House because of what I was experiencing first hand in the training room, but there is also a growing body of evidence that content warnings may not be as useful as we assume in wider settings.

A 2023 meta-analysis by Victoria Bridgland, Payton Jones and Benjamin Bellet reviewed the available empirical studies on trigger warnings and found that warnings had no meaningful effect on people’s emotional responses to difficult material or on educational outcomes. What they did find was those warnings reliably increased anticipatory anxiety: people felt more anxious before the material, without being less distressed afterwards or better able to engage with what followed.

I do not want to overstate the case. Research is still developing, and no single study can settle every question. But if a practice is increasingly shown not to reliably reduce distress or improve learning, but to increase anticipatory anxiety, we should be at least cautious about presenting it as an act of care.

Trigger warnings may have other impacts in pedagogical settings in higher education. Fred Attenborough recently published a thought-provoking piece in his newsletter on LinkedIn about trigger warnings in teaching settings, in light of the relatively new regulatory context around free speech. In it, Attenborough observes that content warnings may play a range of roles in the classroom, including being “a vehicle for lecturers to virtue signal that a text contains attitudes, assumptions or representations that they regard as morally or politically problematic”.

Given that our training is specifically designed for colleagues in higher education, were we to make use of trigger warnings, we might inadvertently signal support for the wider adoption of these warnings in teaching or research settings. A lack of evidence behind trigger warnings and other challenges to their efficacy in higher education may not have been the primary reasons behind us at Plinth House moving away from using them in our work, but they do make us even more comfortable with this decision.

Compassion requires separation

One of the core professional disciplines in student support and teaching is the ability to remain present when a student brings something difficult into the room. That does not mean being detached or unaffected. It means noticing our own reaction without making it the centre of the conversation.

A student’s grief is not our grief. A student’s mental health struggle is not the mental health struggle that we faced, or that someone we love faced. A student’s disclosure may remind us of something, but it is not an invitation to collapse the difference between their experience and ours.

That separation is not a lack of compassion. It is a condition of compassion. If I cannot tell the difference between what belongs to the student and what belongs to me, I am much less likely to be helpful. I may over-identify. I may panic. I may avoid. I may move too quickly into reassurance because I need the conversation to feel less frightening. I may steer the student away from the thing they are trying to say because I cannot bear to hear it. I may become overinvolved or provide too much support to the student, as a way of trying to turn the interaction into a way of meeting my own emotional needs.

Good training helps staff build the capacity to stay with difficulty without being consumed by it: careful listening, calm enquiry, clear boundaries, appropriate escalation, accurate recording and reflective practice afterwards.

Our approach

Moving away from trigger warnings does not mean leaving participants in the dark. It is reasonable for people attending a training session to have a decent grasp of what the session will cover, not least so they can decide whether it is relevant for them to attend in the first place.

When a university or HEI books one of our 'Managing distressed students' training courses, for example, we generally provide a wording, for them to share with all participants, which lists the main areas the course will explore, including how to respond to a student who presents at a higher level of risk, such as a student who mentions suicide. Similarly, our 'Safeguarding in HE' training course descriptors mention that our courses explore different types of abuse and neglect as one of the learning outcomes of the course.

The key thing is that this information is not framed as a warning. It is a more straightforward, factual description of the course content.

We create effective training environments through structure, facilitation and support. We explain the purpose of our sessions, use case studies carefully, avoid graphic detail for its own sake, and do not pressure participants to disclose personal experiences that they are not comfortable sharing. We try to cultivate a vibe in the room that is relaxed about people stepping outside the room momentarily for any reason.

But we also hold the line that professional learning sometimes requires us to encounter material we would not choose to encounter in our personal lives. A trigger warning can imply that the main question is whether we can avoid the difficult thing. In our context, the better question is: how do we respond well when the difficult thing arrives?

Because it will arrive. It may arrive in a tutorial, at a reception desk, in a placement meeting, in a conduct investigation, in an email read at 10am or in a conversation with university security at midnight. It may be the main reason a student is talking to you, or it may be something that gets quietly mentioned five minutes before the end of a conversation which had appeared, until then, to be about something else entirely.

So, no, we do not use trigger warnings in our training courses. We use care, judgement, preparation, and professional boundaries. But we do not pretend that professional practice in higher education – or, indeed, pretend that life – can be organised around advance notice of every possible pain point. Our aim is to help colleagues become clearer, steadier and better able to hold the emotion in the room when students are struggling or presenting in challenging ways, in the interests of everyone involved.

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