Is it wrong to trigger someone? The question came up for me recently when I realized that I had accidentally triggered someone in a big way. For the sake of privacy, I'm not going to tell that story, other than to say this: It was not fun being on the receiving end of the fall out. In my early adult and career life, I had NO idea what being triggered even meant, except that Trigger was Roy Roger's horse. These days, I'm seeing the word used a bit like a hammer. Instagram is flooded with "trigger warnings", and we frequently see someone say "I'm so triggered." So what is a trigger? One way to think of it is a reaction to a stimulus. For example, imagine I gave you a lemon, and asked you to cut it in half and then squeeze some of that lemony juice into your mouth. Could you almost taste it? My mouth started watering just writing the sentence. I could feel the sourness hit my tongue. Another way to look at it is that a trigger is agitation with a story attached to it. In the example above, if you had never had a lemon, the "agitation" I provided with the picture of a lemon would have had no story to attach to. You might have been curious about the lemon and how it might taste, but you would not have a history to inform the experience of squeezing lemon juice in your mouth. We ...