A friend had just revealed in our group chat that her husband had a sickness bug. I replied with a frantic account of my own health anxiety around vomiting in a season of endless bugs (“I’m finding it so hard to manage my worry around it – any tips???”) and I feared I might have a problem.
Sure, I paused briefly before hitting send, wondering fleetingly if my personal panic would be reassuring or, indeed, helpful to someone mopping up after her partner. But I sent the message anyway. After all, I reasoned, what are group chats for if not oversharing, unloading, or dumping intense emotional trauma onto friends while they commute, cook tea or pile vomit-splattered bedclothes into the washing machine?
It’s not the first time I’ve caught myself dumping my on my friends. No one has mentioned anything about it to me – they’re all too fantastic. But I have become increasingly, and uncomfortably, aware of how easy I find it to bring a story, any story, back to how I’m feeling. No one else in the WhatsApp group has talked about their own anxiety, only about the prevalence of winter bugs.
Trauma dumping – the act of sharing something traumatic or distressing with someone without their consent, without checking in first to see if they have the emotional bandwidth to carry your heavy load – is not necessarily new. It is likely you have done it, too, perhaps inadvertently as you attempt to offer a friend support with a difficult situation by sharing your own, similar, experience.
Anita Guru – therapist, coach, and founder of The Mind Coach – specialises in trauma. She says, often, trauma dumpers simply don’t “consider the gravity” of what they’re sharing. Our trauma, she explains, can become normalised in our heads.
“You can be desensitised to the gravity of the trauma and how it may unsettle others,” she says. As for why we do it, Guru explains that humans are “wired for connection” and trauma dumping, no matter the scale, “is a way to be seen or heard; an opportunity to have our experiences witnessed or validated by those close to us.”
It’s also, she tells me, an issue of boundaries. “A person may struggle with boundaries and so is likely to trauma dump without considering how they are infringing on the needs and wellbeing of their friend,” she says. “It can often feel like a person is being talked at rather than talked to. It may feel like a one-sided conversation and you’re almost being held hostage.”
Chloe wonders whether her trauma dumping habits have arisen because, as the mother of young children, she desperately craves adult connectionPersonally, I’m struck by the ease with which I can be hugely vulnerable, both in public on social media or in my writing, or in the more private setting of a WhatsApp group. I’ve shared my OCD, my health anxiety, my grief. Sometimes it helps me lighten my own load but, more often, it’s a way of seeking connection with my friends: if I have a trauma that relates to theirs, it wakes up within me, clawing its way out of my chest and into our conversation.
I’d previously thought this was indicative of a healthy approach to sharing; we are, after all, much more aware of the need to talk these days – a problem shared and all that. And, surely, seeking connection is the most human of traits. But I worry, now, that my sharing has been too one-sided, that I’ve become too quick to unload, vent, or pour out my heart, and less quick to listen, to check in, or to simply to hold space for someone else’s story. It’s a fear that’s been niggling in the back of my mind for a couple of years, but – perhaps because, as the mother of young children, I desperately crave adult connection – it’s recently come screaming to the forefront.
I’m curious, too, as to the role technologies like WhatsApp or Instagram play: have they trained me up as a trauma dumper? Dr Carolina Are, a social media researcher at the London School of Economics, says the success of social media has been down to users – creators, really – sharing first-person stories and audiences relating to these.
“Not in a trauma dumping way but in a way that (has) influenced how we share,” she explains. Social media sharing, she posits, may have altered the way in which we share in person: if sharing trauma breeds success online then why not do it offline as well? “If we become used to broadcasting our lives into a void – the app, the platform, the algorithm – maybe we forget that our offline friends, partners, and audiences want a two-way conversation and not top-down communication.” Certainly I have to remind myself that my friends are not my followers.
Some of this online sharing, of course, has led to hugely influential uprisings. Dr Are describes the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements as “pivotal moments of self-disclosure” which led to essential conversations around inequality. “This was not oversharing: it was a release of shame and a raising of awareness of violence and discrimination that fought forces that thrive because of silence.” We’d never call this trauma dumping, and nor should we, but I do wonder if it is part of the same sharing eco-system; this idea that, as a society, we have opened up.
She reminds us, too, that we cannot decontextualise the use of platforms for mental health advice or trauma dumping from the “erosion” of funding of mental health services: we’re opening up to our friends more because we have no other option. “In a post-pandemic world where the public health sector is on its knees, people may also be trauma dumping because they have nowhere else to go,” she explains, suggesting, too, that the sharing habits we formed during the “very online” years of the pandemic may have influenced how we connect with and relate to people after it.
Your next read
square PENSIONS AND RETIREMENTI live in Tunisia with a frozen pension – at 75 I can’t afford to return to the UK
square LIFESTYLEI test drive electric cars – these are the ones to buy, and to avoid
square TRAVELI live in Barcelona – but this nearby foodie city offers an uncrowded spring break
square LIFESTYLEMy Gen Z colleagues are always on holiday – I’m sick of picking up the slack
The irony of me writing a piece in which I offload to readers my fear that I’m a trauma dumper is not lost on me. So what can I do? Guru suggests I consider more carefully what I share in the future. “How might you feel hearing about it from someone else? This can be a clue as to whether it’s suitable to share, without consent,” she says. “If you feel like sharing something big, ask for permission or even give a trigger warning as it gives the person the opportunity to assess their capacity to hear it.”
She also advises checking in with myself after I’ve shared to assess whether it has left me feeling “uncomfortable” or “anxious or unsettled”. And, finally, she flags that if I am regularly sharing a traumatic event, it may mean I need professional help. “If you are feeling desensitised to the event, or have no emotion, this indicates you require some help in unpacking it,” she says. “This is a normal response to trauma and can be overcome.”
After writing this, I went back through my WhatsApp messages to see what had happened following my response to my friend and her vomiting husband. A quick scroll revealed that, just a minute after my message, she had sent another one, revealing her own anxiety about the situation, to which my response had been an emoji hug and a brief message of solidarity. A superficial exchange, perhaps, but also the reality of offering emotional support while juggling jobs, families, and our own anxieties: I know for a fact I sent that emoji hug while waiting for the kettle to boil at work. But it made me wonder: did she share her anxiety because I shared mine? Perhaps. Maybe she, too, needed a safe space in which to be vulnerable; to unburden herself; to, well, dump her trauma.
Hence then, the article about the moment i realised i was a trauma dumper was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( The moment I realised I was a ‘trauma dumper’ )
Also on site :
- White House Mocks Kesha Over Singer’s Outrage About “Disgusting” Use Of Song In Military Posting; She Responds: “Stop Using My Music, Perverts”
- Cursor has reportedly surpassed $2B in annualized revenue
- Trump dismisses criticism from Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson over Iran attacks: ‘MAGA loves what I’m doing’