{"id":302,"date":"2018-12-10T13:13:12","date_gmt":"2018-12-10T13:13:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/?p=302"},"modified":"2018-12-10T13:13:12","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T13:13:12","slug":"strong-emotional-reactions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/uncategorized\/strong-emotional-reactions\/","title":{"rendered":"Strong Emotional Reactions"},"content":{"rendered":"I\u2019m someone who\u2019s a big believer in content warnings. Each term, my students and I identify topics in my courses that might trigger someone in the room \u2013 cause a profound psychological and physical reaction, for example. I then indicate that on the syllabus, in class, or on my LMS so that those students can make an informed decision about how to interact with readings, discussions, and in-class materials. I believe that warnings allow students (and professors) to manage otherwise debilitating responses to triggering content. A warning lets traumatized students enter into learning without demanding that it become incapacitating, or creating negative ramifications that last long after class is over.\n\nThose who protest the use of content warnings often do so under the presumption that they coddle students, needlessly (even wrongly) trying to protect them from the discomfort that is often a product of learning new things. But to me, that framing is all wrong. First, it suggests that there is no difference between hearing or reading new information and being thrown into absolute panic, or a flashback, or having your sensory systems overload and refuse to work. (Spoiler alert: there is a difference.) Second, it suggests that as instructors when things are inevitably discomfiting in our classes there is nothing we can (or should) do.\n\nI find this problematic. Take my history classes, for example: I teach Native history, the history of women, non-binary, and trans people, the history of slavery, and the history of oppressive systems. Often, if a student is learning something brand new in those classes, they occupy a position of privilege in relation to the subject matter. My white students struggle with how ruthless enslavement really was, for example, while my black students already have a good idea. My non-Native students wrestle with their status as settler colonists, while my Native students have had to deal with settlers their whole lives. This is not to say my black or Native students don\u2019t experience discomfort \u2013 they do. But their discomfort is often that of being in a marginalized position in a room full of white students whose position in a white supremacist system means they haven\u2019t had to think critically about race before. That\u2019s just one example.\n\nWhen there\u2019s that kind of tension in a room, it often becomes hard for people to talk. People have enormous feelings about the things we\u2019re studying \u2013 rage, guilt, grief, worry, disgust \u2013 and it\u2019s hard for the best of us to talk around a lump in our throat that\u2019s a big ball of anger or the product of a visceral reaction to being upset. I don\u2019t expect my students to intuit their way through my classes \u2013 to just know how to write a paper well or analyze a primary source \u2013 but until a few years ago, I expected them to intuit how to express their feelings, tackle tension, and deal with conflict.\n\nI don\u2019t anymore.\n\nI\u2019m trained in Intergroup Dialogue, and for the past five years have co-directed my campus\u2019s IGD program, including teaching undergraduates how to become effective facilitators of difficult conversations. Part of the work my co-director, Gabrielle Raley, and I undertake with those students are reflective exercises about strong emotional reactions (SERs), drawing extensively on handouts provided by IGD program at the University of Michigan. We discuss how SERs are common (everyone has them), different from being triggered, and yet important to pay attention to in ourselves and others. The exercises we collectively undertake are meant take patterns that might otherwise go unrecognized and bring them to our attention, as well as create space in which we can all take the time to imagine new outcomes to old problems.\n\nThe first exercise has everyone read a sheet that defines what SERs are, and which offers a range of responses people commonly have when emotionally activated. We read this \u2013 sometimes silently, sometimes aloud in round-robin form \u2013 and then talk about which responses resonated for people. Do people typically fall silent when someone says something upsetting? Get angry? Leave the room? Internalize the conflict? This is a key part of surfacing our unexamined patterns of response.\n\n