Helping or harming? The effect of trigger warnings on individuals with trauma histories.

but that'd be my general (amateur) take on it

I'm not sure how studied you are, but I would highly recommend that you speak with a professional on the matter.

Exposure may help patients with PTSD recover faster but even in artificially safe, extremely well controlled studies, there's a lot that can potentially go wrong. I believe you are extrapolating far too much from the study in the original post. In fact, even among studies which show exposure therapy to be viable for PTSD studies, the way the patient presents under duress varies and some types of presentation are not well studied. A review on exposure therapy to PTSD had the following to say:

Unlike trauma-related cognitions, where the majority of individuals with PTSD report the presence of negative cognitions, both the presence and extent of anger and dissociation symptoms are more variable. That is, not every individual with chronic PTSD presents with elevated levels of anger and dissociation. Thus, treatment effects on these variables may be obscured due to lower scores for some individuals. Consistent with this idea, Cahill and colleagues found prolonged exposure to be effective in reducing symptoms of anger, particularly for those with higher levels of anger at pre-treatment (Cahill, Rauch, Hembree, & Foa, 2003). Similar reductions have been also been reported by other investigators (e.g., Taylor et al., 2003). Even less is known about PE treatment effects on dissociation (Feeny & Danielson, 2004), though Taylor and colleagues reported reductions in dissociation with in vivo and imaginal exposure (Taylor et al., 2003).

Finally I'd like to mention that therapists need to be trained in exposure therapy in order for it to be useful. The client needs to be engaged with the content in a specific way for it to be beneficial. In a review paper this is highlighted throughout the passages of clinician expectations - for example with regards to client engagement

fear activation must occur in order for exposure to be effective. Clients must be at a level of engagement where significant, yet tolerable, distress is experienced. As a clinician, often the most difficult task is to help increase (not decrease) clients’ engagement with the trauma memory. Existing clinical manuals thoroughly discuss handling both underengagement and overengagement. There are simple techniques that the therapist can use to help reduce or enhance engagement with the memory (e.g., shift from present to past tense during revisiting). Thus, contrary to common clinical expectations, one of the main therapeutic issues is handling underengagement rather than handling the much more rare experience of extreme distress or panic.

This is further expanded upon in the same paper with a lot of really good narrative in the "Common Challenges in Learning Exposure Therapy" section. In particular I'd like to draw attention to the case involving a woman in Virginia.

As Virginia’s case illustrates, when a therapist does not have prior experience listening to traumatic events, it is often difficult to determine whether the client is successfully revisiting a painful memory (which is what we want to see), or whether he or she is reliving what happened (which is not what we want to see), and needs to be less engaged in the memory. Prior to obtaining direct personal experience, new therapists can follow general guidelines on how to recognize optimal engagement and identify overengagement so as to know when it is appropriate to intervene.

I would encourage you to read the narrative in this section as well because the client is presented with the same exposure multiple times and the levels of engagement differ. Even a trained therapist struggles with getting the client to engage in the right way so that they may heal, rather than the wrong way which will reinforce their ideals (the importance of this is highlighted in the very first narrative of the section as it results in a client leaving therapy and not coming back).

I bring this all up because I often see people talk about mental health issues in a way that they connect with. It is very possible that you went through a traumatic event, developed PTSD in your past, and got over it via self-exposure. I am not discounting this possibility. I am simply pointing out that people are varied and their presentations vary and what will solve a problem for one individual will not solve it for all individuals. Even when we talk about effectiveness of a style of therapy, that's speaking broadly across humans - just because exposure therapy meets statistical significance does not mean it will work for any one individual.

The goal of studies like this are to tell us a little bit more about methods and tools we can use to help people, not to make broad statements like "At some point you will have to face your fears and traumas". While this may be true for some, it's not true for all, and we need to be extremely careful about broad strokes.