Thinking about the concept of trigger warnings got me thinking of a related opposite: curse words. Both are attempts to try to co-opt our brains' reflexive spontaneity- rather than deliberation or conscious effort- in absorbing information.

This spontaneity of information processing is why words themselves can be an assault of sorts, because our brains alone, if you think about it, cannot stop the invasive act of communication. Once read or heard, words immediately are interpreted and form into ideas in our heads, whether we wanted to absorb them or not. There is no perfect way of both understanding an offensive concept and filtering it out before it can be absorbed, because it MUST be absorbed and understood before it can be screened. The criteria we are left to rely on to guess whether or not upcoming words will be offensive or not is really only contextual information, which can't completely, perfectly, portend what's coming next.

And because our brains evolve the associations we have with words anyway (semantic change), trigger warnings are in an unending arms race in which they continuously try to maintain their intended purpose and meaning while losing it, like Steven Pinker's euphemism treadmill.

A particular trigger warning will progressively take on more and more of the meaning it was created to prevent in the mind of a person comprehending it on repeated exposures- until a new one is invented, at least.