Trauma Button / Live-Action TV

• In the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode, "Making Friends and Influencing People", Fitz discovers that Ward, the man who tried to kill him and left him with permanent brain damage, is being held in SHIELD's basement. He proceeds to experience an anxiety attack.
• All in the Family: Edith experienced this when she was sexually assaulted by a rapist in the episode "Edith's 50th birthday."
• Better Things: Sam can't stand to even look at her wedding photos with Xander, since they bring up bad memories.
• The Big Bang Theory: While Sheldon has plenty of Berserk Buttons that cause him to flip out over completely petty and trivial matters, Leonard and Penny having their first serious fight as a couple, arguing while Sheldon is around, freaks him out to the point where he he acts like a scared kid trying to ignore his parents' fighting. His own parents' marriage fell apart, and apparently the fighting got really bad towards the end, with Sheldon having been traumatized by it.
• Black Mirror: "White Christmas" contains an early scene where the protagonist has a disturbed reaction to the song "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day" by Wizzard and to an innocuous but distinctive clock on the wall. This is eventually revealed to be because he murdered a man while the song was playing, who had that clock on the wall.
• The Boys: Soldier Boy suffers from PTSD-induced panic attacks and blackouts when he hears Russian music, owing to the years he spent as a captive and experimental test subject of the Soviets. Unfortunately for everyone, these panic attacks also include a lot of people dying when he reflexively fires his Chest Blaster.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In early Season 7, it's clear that Spike's Attempted Rape of Buffy has left scars. Simply touching his hand by accident in "Beneath You" causes her to flashback to that moment, and in "Him," Spike unexpectedly touching her arm startles her. Even years later, during the Season 10 comics, she still has some troubles with it despite having long since forgiven and accepted Spike; in "Triggers," Spike unexpectedly entering the bathroom while she's showering causes her to instinctively kick him into a wall.
• Cheers
  • In "Woody Goes Belly Up," Beth, an old girlfriend of Woody's, comes to visit. He's shocked upon seeing her, especially because she's become much thinner since he left Indiana; Woody then reveals that he also used to be fat before losing a good deal of weight when he moved to Boston. But the pair's time together consists of nothing but going to various restaurants, so Woody begins packing on the pounds again. Sam reminisces that, when he was an alcoholic, there were people who automatically made him want a drink, and suggests that Beth is Woody's "eating buddy." Diane and Frasier chime in and realize that Beth and Woody are substituting their sexual appetite for a literal appetite.
  • After she dumps him at the altar, Diane eventually becomes one of these for Frasier. He actually jumps at the mere mention of her name, and in the finale it's made clear, despite his protestations otherwise, he's still tremendously hurt by her actions, something that gets explored further when she reappears in Frasier.
  • Halloween, and anything associated with it, for Rebecca Howe, because in her childhood she never got to celebrate it properly. Since this is Rebecca, this is Played for Laughs.
• Control Z: Alex telling Sofía to jump from the roof to the pool is related to Javier accidentally murdering a former football teammate, who died in the same way, something that Javier found very disturbing because it reminded him of his dark past. Despite insisting Sofía it isn't worth the shot, she jumps anyway and Javier angrily leaves the party.
• CSI, Nick has a mild one when he's back working an outdoor part of a crime scene after being buried alive at the end of the last season. A flying insect lands on him and he visibly cringes and frantically shoos it away. It's obvious he's still triggered at this point by the memories of the fire ant bites he was covered in. He does get better in later seasons though, even brushing up on bugs to fill a little of the space left by Grissom's departure.
• CSI: NY has Lindsay having one as a plot point. She's working a particularly bloody crime scene and gets triggered into memories of surviving the deaths of her friends as a teenager. She runs away and Stella talks to her about it later on, hoping to fix the problem as a friend rather than having to be in boss mode. She does warn her about not running away again in the future, though. They weren't at all consistant, though, as there was a scene with even more similarities not long after she arrived and yet she doesn't react at all.
• Narrowly averted in the pilot of Defiance; Tommy goes to arrest Irisa, but Nolan talks him out of using handcuffs, saying that Irisa had some really bad experiences with being chained up, and if Tommy tries to put cuffs on her, she will flip out and probably kill him. Since Irisa happens to be a ferocious-looking catgirl, Tommy wisely decides to follow Nolan's advice.
• Deputy: In "10-8 Paperwork" Paula's triggered by hearing an alarm go off while she's about to perform surgery, as this makes her remember being held hostage during "10-8 Do No Harm". She does manage to calm herself though and continue the operation, reassuring Paula she's capable of dealing with it.
• In one episode of The Drew Carey Show, Mr. Wick grows tired of Mimi's outlandish outfits and garish makeup and tries to seal her up inside a cubicle so that he won't have to look at her. However, she turns out to be severely claustrophobic and Drew ends up convincing Wick to remove the partitions, because her usual bitchy self is far more preferable to the nervous wreck that she's turning into.
• Fawlty Towers: In "The Kipper and the Corpse", Miss Tibbs is traumatised by the sight of the dead Mr Leeman. Three times she sees him, screams hysterically, and faints.
• Feel Good: Mae is an addict that suffers from PTSD from an innapropriate sexual relationship with the manager of a comedy club in their hometown, and whenever they experience a moment that reminds them of either drugs or sexual abuse, we hear a shard Drone of Dread.
• In Firefly, River has seemingly-random trigger moments which bring back memories of her time at the Academy, which coupled with her schizophrenia and Psychic Powers (and the Power Incontinence associated with them) result in very violent delusions. The most common trigger is anything relating to the Blue Sun corporation.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Theon suffers this when Euron calls him a "cockless coward". He starts slipping back into his Reek persona after trying to come back. It shows that while Ramsay is gone, his torture of Theon will haunt Theon for the rest of his life.
  • Fire proves to be this for Sandor Clegane, the Hound. This is because when he was a young boy, his older brother Ser Gregor Clegane caught him playing with one of his toys, and pushed his face into a fire in retribution. This leads to him deserting in the midst of the Battle of the Blackwater when he sees a man burnt by wildfire burning, screaming and falling in pain and starts his trial by combat against Beric Dondarrion hesitating in fear faced with his opponent's flaming sword.
• General Hospital:
  • Michael finally admits to being a victim of Prison Rape after seeing his girlfriend being attacked in a similar fashion.
  • Karen Wexler began having strange flashbacks triggered by the sound of radio static and/or the sight of a window shade being pulled down. When she finally recalled being sexually abused by one of her mother's boyfriends, she remembered that it always started with him pulling down the window shade so that no one could see what he was doing and turning up the radio to muffle her screams.
• Played for Laughs in an episode of The Golden Girls when Rose's new doorbell, which sounds like dogs barking, triggers Sophia into thinking she's back in war-torn Sicily.
  Sophia: The dogs are on my tail again! Run through the river, run through the river!
• Eleanor in The Good Place tends to break down when she encounters family-related stuff as a consequence of her almost sarcastically neglectful parents. In one flashback she's reduced to helpless weeping by a family pack of toothbrushes.
• In Halt and Catch Fire, Cameron meets Joe McMillan's father, Joe Sr., and they actually get along for a while... until Joe Sr. says that Cameron must make her own father very proud. Cameron lost her dad when she was only 10 years old, and the mere mention of him upsets her so badly that she retreats into another room to cry.
  • In the third season, she goes home to try and claim some of her father's old possessions, but the prospect of having to see her mother again fills her with such panic that she completely disappears for several days.
• Hightown: Renee has a painful flashback of killing Jorge in the office after she's got to get inside, having obvious lingering trauma from it.
• Throughout Homicide: Life on the Street, Bayliss becomes emotionally compromised whenever he investigates a case involving a dead child and is always deeply impacted by these cases. In Season 5, he admits to Pembleton it's because they remind him of he himself was molested throughout his childhood by his uncle.
• Horatio Hornblower: Implied with Archie Kennedy's reaction to Wellard's beatings. Wellard is a young midshipman who suffers the most because of Captain Sawyer's growing paranoia. It is Lieutenant Kennedy who tries to intervene, openly calls it an injustice and is visibly upset while other Lieutenants try to hand-wave it at first as Captain's harsher ways and common naval discipline. In the first series, Archie was the young midshipman who suffered at the hands of a powerful bully.
• House of the Dragon: King Viserys is willing to overlook a lot in the name of the love he bears his brother, but anything that pertains to his dead baby son Baelon is a trigger for him, be it the "Heir for a Day" toast or the theft of Baelon's dragon egg.
• Impulse: Henry being touched by men or her being close to the truck will lead to this, due to her rape by Clay in his truck.
• Inspector Lynley: Barbara Havers, back on the job after being shot in the stomach in the previous episode, shows obvious signs of PTSD throughout the episode; she is nervy and jumpy even more than her usual. Lynley is concerned but doesn't want to interfere. When she is held hostage at gunpoint, however, Barbara completely flies off the handle and attacks the man pointing the gun at her, using him for a punching bag until Lynley gets there, pulls her off and talks her down with a Cooldown Hug. It must be emphasized that he could only manage this because of Barbara's implicit and unconditional trust in him; anyone else trying the same thing would have also been used as a punching bag, and in fact, Barbara obviously nails Lynley a time or two before he can get through to her and she recognizes him.
• L.A.'s Finest: Nancy dealing with a bomb while in the LAPD provokes traumatic flashbacks of her Navy service, when she faced an Iraqi suicide bomber, especially since a little boy she bonded with died during the attack.
• The Last of Us (2023): Near the end of the pilot, a FEDRA soldier holds Joel's group, including the young Ellie, at gunpoint. This causes Joel to have a flashback to his daughter Sarah's death at the hands of a soldier at the start of the pandemic, and he proceeds to beat the FEDRA soldier to death.
• In one episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, a young man at a party suddenly goes berserk and kills one of the revelers. Goren and Eames learn that the young man had been locked up in a basement for long periods of time and subjected to loud house music as part of some cruel therapy for his psychological issues, so when he heard the same kind of music being played at the party, it caused him to want to kill.
• Legends of Tomorrow: When Nate mentions high school, Gary freezes with wide-eyed terror like he's having a war flashback.
  Nate: Wow, you are broken.
• Lessons in Chemistry: Elizabeth prefers working with the door open because closed doors remind her of her past assault.
• In Leverage, spending any amount of time in a hospital drastically increases the odds of Nathan Ford relapsing on his drinking habit, due to all the time he spent in the hospital when his son was dying.
• Little House on the Prairie: Experienced by both Albert and Mary in the Season 6 epic episode "May We Make Them Proud." It all starts with a music box, which Albert presented to Mary, who has been in a deep catatonic state since her son (and Albert's nephew), Adam Jr., was killed in a fire at the School for the Blind. Albert plays the melody, and Mary snaps out of her trance-like state, screaming, "MY BABY!!!" repeatedly. Albert — who was smoking in the basement of the School for the Blind the night of the fire — realizes he may have unintentionally started the fire (he and a friend hid a lit pipe inside a pile of old rags) and screams, "I DIDN'T MEAN IT!!! IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!!!" before running out.
• The L Word: Tasha has a lot of PTSD triggers, even really simple things setting them off. Initially as well she won't talk about them, leaving Alice confused.
• Midnight Sun (2016): Kahina is triggered by reminders of her son whom she gave away, and she cuts herself to cope sometimes.
• Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: Cate Randa has PTSD due to witnessing up close the destruction that occurred in Godzilla (2014) which included the deaths of her school students. She flashes back to being on the Golden Gate Bridge as Godzilla and the military's clash destroyed it when she sees an "evacuation route" sign on the airport floor that bears Godzilla's image, and also when she's in a subway shelter during a Godzilla attack evacuation drill (which causes her to flip out and go into a full-blown panic attack and try to run back out into the street, until Emiko calms her down with a Cooldown Hug). When Tim and Duvall attempt to kidnap Cate and they put a bag over her head to stop her seeing where they're going, the darkness causes Cate to physically lash out amid her flashbacks, which ultimately causes their car to crash and enables her to escape them.
• In an episode of Mulaney, Lou has Vietnam War-style flashbacks of a failed improv comedy routine for the USO whenever he hears the words "man down".
• NCIS:
  • One episode has a retired Marina confess to killing a fellow soldier during World War II; however, since it was so long ago, he can no longer remember exactly what happened. The team eventually use this trope to jog his memory, bringing in a retired Japanese soldier and having him bark orders in Japanese until it triggers a flashback in the Marine. Turns out his friend was badly wounded and there were Japanese soldiers closing in, so he was forced to perform a Mercy Kill.
  • Jacqueline Sloane was captured and tortured while serving in Afghanistan, and still has the scars to show for it. So one night she's on a date, and she suddenly hears the voice of her torturer. The results aren't pretty.
• In an episode of Necessary Roughness, TK hires a massage therapist to try and speed up his recovery after getting shot. However, he repeatedly throws her out because she keeps touching the area where he got shot, causing him to remember the shooting. After he finally relents and actually starts to remember the shooting, he shows up at Dr. Santino's house looking utterly wrecked.
• Never Have I Ever:
  • Music class triggers this for Devi, because her dad Mohan died during a concert, even though she wants to bury herself deep in denial about her grief.
  • She has another concert finally in Season 3, but hallucinates her dad is among the crowd and runs away tearfully into the bathroom, unable to keep going. Her boyfriend's mom helps her recover and get out there though to perform.
• In an episode of Robin of Sherwood, Will Scarlet, who was forced to watch the rape and murder of his wife by Norman marauders, appears to be on the verge of an attack of PTSD when he sees the aftermath of Bertrand of Nivelles' attack on a village.
• On Seinfeld, Frank Costanza sees someone choking at a singles event he cooked for and is reminded of an incident during the Korean War where he was responsible for his troopmates getting food poisoning. Frank flips out and tries to stop everyone from eating, overturning the food table in the process.
• At the beginning of the TV movie "Shattering The Silence", a woman is inexplicably disturbed by the sight of her father gifting her newborn daughter a stuffed horse—"Family tradition! All my little girls get horsies!" (and out of the corner of her eye, she notices her niece's own upset reaction to this) As the movie progresses, she slowly regains Repressed Memories of she and her sister having been sexually abused by him and that he would disguise his behavior as a game—"Let's play "Ride The Horsey!" The stuffed animal served as a Trauma Button for her niece as well because she's become his newest victim.
• In the first issue of the USA miniseries The Sinner, Cora Tannetti suddenly goes berserk and murders a young man at the beach, having been inexplicably triggered by the song that he was playing. The young man, it turns out, accidentally killed her younger sister years earlier; she'd managed to suppress the memory for years, but the music suddenly brought it all back.
• Sleeper Cell: Ilija survived the Bosnian genocide, where Serbs murdered his entire family. Given this, he's triggered by running into anybody with Serbian heritage. The first season has him go on a date with a woman who's revealed to be a Serbian-American from wearing a crucifix which Ilija recognizes as the one used by Serbian Orthodox Christians. Ilija's response is to then ask if she thinks he's a dog, which bewilders and upsets the woman (as the genocidal Serbs had called Bosnian Muslims this) before he leaves in a rage. After he's on the run in Season 2, he hitches a ride with a man it turns out is a Serb. Ilija immediately starts to jump out, but is stopped by the man, who's compassionate to him and wishes for reconciliation after the Yugoslav Wars, revealing he's also married to a Bosnian Muslim woman. On hearing this, Ilija is mollified and sits down.
• Sons of Guns: Will has PTSD from his use of flamethrowers in combat. This is Played for Drama in the episodes with a flamethrower restoration and a flamethrower cannon build.
• In The Sopranos, family patriarch Tony Soprano suffers from panic attacks for the entirety of the series and starts the series by (reluctantly) going to a therapist for help. Around Season 3, it's finally revealed that his trigger is meat, of all things. It turns out that he has a traumatic childhood memory of witnessing his father "Johnny Boy" Soprano torturing the local butcher Francis Satriale after he failed to pay his debts, then going home and finding his mother casually serving meat from Satriale's shop for dinner. By the time of the series, Satriale's Pork Store has become a front business for Tony's own crime family, serving as a constant reminder of the day that Tony found out how his father made his money. Call Backs reveal that there were hints about it all along: every single one of Tony's previous panic attacks happened when he was cooking or handling meat while under more stress than usual.
• Star Trek: Discovery:
  • Michael Burnham watched her parents get killed in a Klingon attack when she was a little girl. Since then, being near Klingons gets her riled up.
  • By the same token, Ash Tyler falls apart whenever he gets near L'Rell, the Klingon who held him captive and repeatedly raped him. Then it turns out that he's actually a Klingon sleeper agent who's having trouble "awakening", and those traumatic memories include the procedure that transformed him into a human.
  • In the fourth season, we learn about Oros, a researcher Ruon Tarka worked with in an Emerald Chain work camp. After witnessing his former cellmate die in an escape attempt, Oros curls up into a ball and begins panicking when he hears the camp alarms go off later.
• Star Trek: Picard: In "The Impossible Box", the bad memories of Picard's past assimilation by the Borg start coming back en route to the Artifact, making him increasingly agitated and snappish. He then sees a picture of himself as Locutus, leaving him stunned speechless and instinctively touching his face where there used to be lots of Borg components. Things go way downhill for him after he beams onto the Artifact, and his mind is assaulted with flashbacks of his time as Locutus. At one point, he can barely stand and would've fallen into a chasm if he wasn't grabbed by two xBs.
• In an episode of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, Arwin screams hysterically whenever the word "bowling" is said in front of him. It is eventually revealed that he was once a star bowler and even won a trophy for it. But a head injury inadvertently inflicted on his mother prompted him to relinquish his love for bowling ever since.
• Supernatural:
  • After Dean comes back from Hell, a demonic-looking Halloween mask gives Dean flashbacks. He maintains a cool exterior, however, and is able to continue a conversation without letting on.
  • Castiel is rendered nearly catatonic in season 8 when he hears his brother Samandriel screaming because it triggers flashbacks to his torture and brainwashing at the hands of Naomi. What makes it doubly horrifying is that the events in question have been wiped from his memory — and he still reacts to it. The flashbacks are actually what tip him off that something's been done to him.
• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: for Derek, classical music playing (while Cameron practices a ballet routine) triggers flashbacks to a time when he was captured and, it's implied, tortured by Terminators. For John during "Self Made Man," a combination of feeling uncomfortable at a party where Riley is flirting with another boy (who's also a dick), a violent video game, and a confrontation with the boy when Riley steals his lighter leads John to attack the boy. By this time, it's revealed that John killed Sarkissian and his fight with the boy recalls that one.
• True Blood:
  • After Lafayette gets out of the dungeon that the vampires held him in, Detective Andy approaches him in the kitchen at Merlotte's, where Lafayette works. The next scene is basically him threatening to put Lafayette back in exactly the situation he just escaped from. Terry, a veteran with PTSD who probably recognized the signs since Lafayette had fallen down, terrified, calls the officer in question on this in a sort of one-on-one Shaming the Mob.
  • Terry also appears to have gotten one just before we come on-screen. Which makes sense, since he's an Iraq war vet who had just seen his wife covered in blood. She's not dead, but the white sheets are dark red.
• In the pilot of Tyrant (2014), Barry's carefully-maintained stoic façade is jarred when, during his nephew's wedding, his brother Jamal fires a gun into the air and then hands the gun to Barry, expecting him to do the same. This causes Barry to experience a flashback to the time his father tried to force Jamal to shoot someone, but Barry ended up having to do it because Jamal was too scared. Barry hands the gun back to Jamal and quickly walks away before his panic starts to show.
• In Ugly Betty, Wilhelmina deliberately triggers her Yandere sister Renee with candles to increase her Sanity Slippage so she'll be institutionalized. It turns out Renee accidentally killed her old boyfriend in a fire (while trying to kill his secretary, who she'd become convinced was an obstacle).
• Utopia Falls: After she's in the riot, Sage gets violent hallucinations if things remind her of it.
• In The Walking Dead (2010), Judith's crying clearly makes Michonne uncomfortable, causing her to snap at Beth when the girl asks her to hold the baby. Michonne eventually breaks down in tears, and we later learn that she had an infant son who was slaughtered during the outbreak. This is further emphasized when she suffers a traumatic nightmare relating to the event.
• Josh from The West Wing has a flashback trigger in Christmas music, because his delayed-reaction PTSD erupted right around Christmastime, and he mentally associated the constant caroling of the band in the White House lobby with the sirens from the assassination attempt during which he was near-fatally shot.
  • The episode where Josh's trigger is established includes a B-plot of C.J. looking into a story about a woman "freaking out" at a painting during a tour of the White House. It turns out the painting originally belonged to the woman's father, but it was stolen from them by the Nazis during World War II. Seeing the painting brought back the trauma of what she'd been through.
• The Wilds: It's implied that being confronted by Toni's open lesbian sexuality serves as one to Shelby, since it turns out she'd been attracted to her friend Becca, but rejected her after fearing their families' reaction, which caused Becca's suicide.

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