One debate about college environments that keeps coming up is that of free speech versus safe spaces, how to balance the basic expectation of civility and respect that students have when they attend university  with the need to be pushed out of our safe spaces to produce the growth and education that universities are called to give students.

Not being a minority in any sense of the word, I’m not going to attempt to tackle in this post how we could balance our duty to provide underrepresented students the same level of stability and basic comfort and respect that the rest of us already expect when we move throughout our campus communities. But what I do want to talk about today is what we can do after someone’s comfort zone has been breached.

Because we know it’s going to happen. And it will happen for all of us at some point during our college careers, hopefully more than just once. Those times of discomfort are necessary for growth, if we know how to care for them and use them to our benefit when they arise. So, I think the focus of the discussion about safe spaces and triggers can be shifted slightly to make the discussion more fruitful.

What I would discuss instead is:

• How do we identify when someone is experiencing one of these, or recognize when we ourselves are in one of these events?
• How can we turn one of these events into an opportunity for constructive growth, meaning furthering education about the world or acquiring greater self knowledge?

The first goal involves being aware of the internal feelings and assumptions of ourselves and others. This means being able to tolerate, to some extent, the discomfort of bodily feelings. It also means being proficient at reading other people and having some knowledge of their goals, values, and assumptions prior to the event. It requires a certain level of confidence and a sense of self and knowledge of the ability to tolerate extreme and unanticipated stress.

The second goal requires a knowledge of the resources available to us and others. This may include counselors and other therapeutic healing practices, as well as various forms of communication.

We also need to determine what is an appropriate level of discomfort or trigger. This is where things get very controversial. In general, at the college level especially, there is no one appropriate level of intellectual offense beyond which a line has been crossed, as long as we’re discussing communicating ideas  via legal and appropriate means such as via text books, civil discussion and lectures, movies, homework and class projects.

The usefulness of a lesson is lost if it traumatizes the student. Responsible faculty would try to reduce this risk by avoiding lessons or modes of communication that they reasonably expect to be traumatic to their students.

But since we often don’t know the personal history, original culture, and life experiences of the people around us, we can’t be assured of whether something is experienced by them as traumatic or not. I had a horrible experience at a seminar in college where we watched a graphic movie. We had been told ahead of time that we would be watching a movie about a violent rape and double murder and that the movie would be exploring the theme of forgiveness in what seems like an impossible situation. The seminar was not required, but I went anyway because I have often wondered about the concept of forgiveness, something that I struggle with myself sometimes.

Anyway, we watched the movie, and it was way more traumatic than I expected. I couldn’t complain, because I found myself just being grateful that I wasn’t the person being depicted on screen. To me, the violence looked real. My physiological system couldn’t differentiate between seeing the event through the TV screen versus in real life, and it felt horrible to sit there watching people’s lives end brutally. It was so triggering for me that I couldn’t comprehend what the movie was trying to teach me about forgiveness. I didn’t get a debrief afterward either, so I was just haunted by what I had witnessed without any real growth from it. I also felt creeped out that no one around me seemed to be reacting as strongly as I was to seeing something so terrifying.

I reasoned that I shouldn’t complain about not being given sufficient warning before seeing something so horrible, because the people who it happened to in real life hadn’t been warned either. But the ostensible point of the film was not to traumatize its viewers. And the forum in which we were watching it was not supposed to do that either, it was supposed to get us thinking about the concept of forgiveness. I left the seminar in a state of mild shock and with no further understanding of forgiveness, such as the difference between transactional forgiveness and a state forgiveness. For me, that movie and that lesson failed.

And that is an example of a potential learning opportunity gone horribly wrong. Ideally, the seminar could have included a discussion of how we were feeling after having watched something so awful and an overview of the resources available to us to recover from it. We could have also had a meatier discussion about types and instances of forgiveness in our own lives or in the lives of famous historical figures, with several different viewpoints and situations being introduced to us to broaden our minds.

I eventually discovered or was introduced to the writings of folks such as Martin Luther King Jr, Thich Nhat Hanh, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and more. I learned about the shades of different emotions and spiritual states by reading Martha Nussbaum. But it took me years to do this, years during which I could have benefited from already having that spiritual understanding.

So it seems to me that these opportunities of difficulty and discomfort that faculty may seek out for their students and that students ideally learn to seek out for themselves are not in themselves wrong or politically distasteful. It is more that they are only responsible, they are only civil and respectful of people with diverse backgrounds and underrepresented students, if we make sure to debrief and heal anyone who has been traumatized afterward, and if we continue the discussion until we have heard and debated the diverse perspectives of the other participants. Notably, this means that we may need to iterate between healing and further discussions, because students who were traumatized by the original lecture or seminar content are not in a position to then continue the discussion. If we don’t allow for healing followed by further discussions, then the “learning experience” becomes just an excuse to further traumatize already disadvantaged members of the student population.