Humans are constantly communicating with one another, whether it be a short conversation about how someone’s week has been going or an important dialogue about a difficult situation. But when does sharing details of our lives turn into burdening the people in our lives with problems that they can’t solve? In recent years, a new term has emerged to refer to a familiar phenomenon: “trauma-dumping,” or the act of sharing an overwhelming amount of intimate details and secrets to someone who didn’t necessarily ask for it. While opening up is a helpful way to process big life events, trauma-dumping is an unhealthy manner of communicating feelings and creates a toxic environment for everyone involved. In order to ensure that expressing feelings doesn’t become too messy, people need to make a clear boundary between sharing how they feel and burdening their communities with information they can’t help to process.
While trauma-dumping has many negative impacts, simply sharing about something that happened isn’t inherently bad. “Venting,” a similar term with more positive connotations, describes the act of expressing a strong emotion. While many of us vent often, it can easily devolve into trauma dumping. The key difference between the two is that venting seeks mutual relief or connection, while trauma dumping is an uncontrolled and extremely overwhelming experience that isn’t helpful in the long run. Part of the reason that trauma dumping becomes so messy is that it leaves a lot of heavy information out in the open, making it much more difficult to sort through. Without being intentional with how information is shared, venting easily can become trauma dumping.
The chief issue with trauma-dumping is that it has detrimental effects on the receiver of the information. For one, giving friends and family so much often troubling information can become a significant burden on their lives. When sharing serious thoughts and feelings and expecting the listener to process and solve them, people can create an incredibly toxic dynamic in their relationships.
Even though trauma dumping can cause a lot of problems, so can being entirely self-sufficient. Living a life free of any support from the people someone loves can be harmful to their mental health in the long run. But without proper recognition of the capacity a listener has to help understand and process something harmful, trauma dumping ends up hurting the listener and doesn’t assist the talker in feeling at peace.
All in all, sharing with each other about hard experiences in our lives is an essential part of human relationships. But if we exploit listeners in order for them to bear the brunt of our problems and traumas, it becomes much more difficult to maintain relationships without toxicity. In order to create bonds that won’t be ultimately damaging, we must consciously remember not to blur the boundary between venting and trauma dumping. If we don’t find a balance between receiving support and being self-sufficient, we will cause more harm to the mental health and wellbeing of our communities.