Shunning by family, cliques, or governments is an active form of harassment, and is consistently detrimental to all parties, even as it becomes norma… - Sarah Schulman

A “trigger” is a form of overreaction crucial to the conflation of Conflict with Abuse. We react constantly through life. Breathing, noticing, thinking, swallowing, feeling, and moving are all reactions. Most reactions are not really observed because they are commensurate with their stimuli, but a triggered reaction stands out because it is out of sync with what is actually taking place. When we are triggered, we have unresolved pain from the past that is expressed in the present. The present is not seen on its own terms. The real experience of the present is denied. Although reacting to the past in the present may make sense within the triggered person’s logic system, it can have detrimental effects on those around them who are not the source of the pain being expressed, but are being punished nonetheless. They are acting in the present, but are being made accountable for past events they did not cause and cannot heal. The one being falsely blamed is also a person, and this burden may hurt their life. The person being triggered is suffering, but they often make other people suffer as well. There is narcissism to Supremacy, but there is also a narcissism to Trauma, when a person cannot see how others are being affected. Although the triggered person may be made narcissistic and self-involved by the enormity of their pain, both parties are in fact equally important. And it is the job of the surrounding communities to insist on this.

The force that takes Conflict and misrepresents it as Abuse is called Escalation. Escalation is a kind of smokescreen to cover up the agent’s own influence on events, their own contributions to the Conflict. By escalating in the face of nothing, normative conflict, or resistance and acting as if it is Abuse, we avoid having to confront ourselves, or our family, our clique, our HIV status, our country, our own individual and group shortcomings, our anxieties from an unresolved past. Instead, we use accusation to create an artificial furor to override or distract from our own responsibility.

Shunning, an active form of harassment, is never useful in resolving problems; in most cases it is petty and primarily a way to avoid an adjustment of the self that is required for accountability. If it has no terms for resolution, it is simply a form of asserting supremacy and imposing punishment, and punishment, as we know, rarely does anything but produce more pain.