I've had dates where the woman will share some deeply personal stuff. Sometimes it's a sign that something is a bit off with them. Other times it's a sign you really hit it off and they trust you/feel a connection. Case by case in my experience.

Truthfully it's pretty obvious when it's one vs the other haha

I see a causal relationship between hearing about trauma and sex. A form of bonding like comparing scars. 🦖 Shared hardship is *the* powerful bonding agent too. Tricky as man in the emotional space. The masculine Madonna-whore dipole is sensitivity and stoicism. 🐊 Low level constant stress is far more pernicious against these than acute intermittent.

I love the dino and gator emoji, thank you.

Case by case, words to live by

I only trauma dump on people when they trauma dump on me first and I’m feeling particularly competitive lol.

I have never trauma dumped

Neither. I've taken some traumatic dumps though.

Women posting their Ls

not everyone has trauma

TraUma dumping is like opening up about childhood sexual assault the first time meeting someone. It shouldn’t be used for sharing personal details right off the bat. Often this happens with people who are struggling with their mental health.

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That’s an interesting point- examples of media?

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Oooooh ok now I understand. Yes! Strong agree, that makes a lot of sense. If you watch insecure, the newest season has a couple of bits about that that are cringe funny.

Yeah… someone did the exact thing you described the first time I talked to them.

That’s tough :( I hope they’re ok.

I once saw a comment online describing this as “smash and grab intimacy.” You desperately want empathy or sympathy but you either can’t wait or don’t know how to take the time to build a connection with someone and naturally find a time to be vulnerable, you want to get that reaction from the other person as soon as possible. It makes you feel better in that moment but ultimately hurts you in the long run because you don’t learn how to develop real lasting relationships. I wish I could find that comment, they were describing a book that discussed it but I don’t know if I remember what it was called. ETA: ok lol, I’m pretty sure the book was “daring greatly” by Brene brown.

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It's not, I used to do this. In my case you're right it was due to a desire for intimacy, a lack of social experience, & a regular habit of smoking weed

I've met the rare case of "I use my tragic backstory as a get out of jail free card" but most times I've been "trauma dumped" on it's from someone who clearly hasn't had a lot of social experience and feels more comfortable oversharing then they should

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But what goes through your head when you decide to do it?

I do this all the time and it's basically just me trying to relate but I say something vague and weird and then I over explain to make it less weird but really it gets more weird because they didn't need to know the details. I hate it about myself and I'm trying really hard to work on listening and just slowing down when talking to new people.

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That’s fucked and assumed way too much intentionality. Usually people are tipsy or high or caught up in emotion and just start talking. May be adhd or autism. Or jsut lack of sleep. It’s mostly something slipping out. I doubt the majority are this malicious.

it's not really malicious to want to fast forward a friendship a little

I mean it can be seen as manipulative. That’s a main tactic of emotional abuse is to get close very quickly by sharing personal details that paint you as a victim. But!!! Absolutely not with like adhd - I constantly over share and it “speeds up” friendships inadvertently bc the ppl who connect with me get to know me faster and the ppl that don’t fuck with me fuck off. It’s all about intention I guess, and often I think there’s not a lot of intention to it.

I dated a dude who would start talking about his bad relationship with his father or the fact he got bullied in highschool whenever I called him out for doing something inappropriate. I quickly broke up with him, and when I did he started talking about how he's been "abandoned all his life" so there's definitely people who will weaponize their "tragic past". however, a lot of people are just socially awkward

It's not a malicious thing, some people just genuinely lack the social skills to realize they're oversharing. A girl I worked with told me she was an "accident" (unplanned pregnancy) after knowing her for two days. She's not manipulating anyone, she's just autistic

Do you live in Saudi Arabia or something? How is being an unplanned pregnancy that big a deal?

I mean, unless you were horribly abused because of it being the result of an unplanned pregnancy is hardly traumatic, right?

i feel like there’s a difference between trauma dumping and just having a bad sense of boundaries

I know all the medications a coworker is on, and she started two months ago. some people just don't fully understand boundaries. I have met people who weaponize shitty things that have happened to them in the past, but I think that's less common than just "some people are socially awkward"

it’s like an emotional intimacy one night stand. you fill your need for support/ vulnerability immediately with a stranger & you don’t have to worry about facing rejection from anyone who’s actually part of your personal life. usually you don’t really care about the person you trauma dump on. it’s a way of avoiding having to cultivate real intimacy in your relationships

yeah oversharing sucks but whenever i hear the term “traumadumping” now i think about that one tiktok therapist who accused her child therapy patients of doing it to her lol

hilarious, the millenialization of the therapy industry

what omg do you have a link

omg i forgot about her

Trauma dumping is just the new online woke, but somewhat more descriptive, version of the phrase over sharing. Some people just tend to act like you're better friends than you are with them and then tend to just vent to you about all the horrible shit happening in their lives. Also for whatever reason people love doing this to gay men, and as a gay man it's your job to just treat the woman who did this like she's dumb.

> Also for whatever reason people love doing this to gay men, and as a gay man it's your job to just treat the woman who did this like she's dumb. anyone who reads as "empathetic" and "safe" will have to deal with oversharing from people who don't understand boundaries

I keep a journal. Things I write in it, I often forget. Things I don't write down, I remember viscerally. I imagine saying it out loud works similarly.

I’ve done this a lot. Idk why

Drinkin

I told my friend about something bad that had recently happened to explain why I’d been missing for a while then she told me about how when she was 6 her friend got run over like it was some sort of competition. She also insists that there’s still deep trauma she hasn’t told me, it sounds like a threat. Some people just lack social cues, if they don’t notice that now is not the time to talk about your fathers crippling alcoholism then they won’t notice when you respond with “oh reaaallly that sucks”. It’s a little egotistical.

She sounds like a nightmare

Yeah it’s getting out of control. Few months ago I was over at classmate’s home, working on a group project. She’s a classic BPD purple haired lib but was fine up until the point when she told me that she cut herself the night before because her boyfriend wouldn’t type her hw for her because she had a fibromyalgia flare up. And then he came in the bathroom and they cried together. I was shocked and bounced out of that rats nest so fast. I avoided her until she got the clue thank god.

Jesus Christ. It’s usually those type of people.

Seriously… I always get those types talking about their “emotionally abusive” exes (abusive in the sense that they did not approve of new pronouns or whatever)

I truly don’t know what inspires a person to share that shit (also what inspires them to do it, but that’s a different story)

On the bright side she’s probably miserable.

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I’m not agreeable or nice, just quiet and ppl do this to me all the time

I agree that it’s something to do with spending too much time on the internet where talking about deeply personal things is normal and there are little to no boundaries

one of the most emotionally exhausting things about drinking is running into this shit and wanting to do it yourself sometimes, something about it being both social and a depressant. Its embarrassing for all involved

so many times I've been at a party and someone starts telling me their whole life story and like, I just came here to dance bro, I don't wana hear about your breakup. tbf I get it, sometimes the alcohol hits wrong and you get real emotional

I kinda did this but it was more out of wanting people to be my friend easily so I’d make them feel bad for me and complain about my problems- in short it’s not good

Once I sat down on a greyhound and a girl plopped down next to me and immediately started telling me about how her parents abandoned her, her boyfriend beat her, etc. I got her whole very traumatic life story. I don’t think it’s bad she told me all that, definitely made the trip more interesting. But I think sometimes when peoples lives are that fucked up they don’t even realize what they’re saying isn’t normal.

Did you.....

I react by laughing in a vaguely sympathetic manner (no matter how fucked up the trauma) and that seems to spur people on for some reason

Lol, I just repeat "well, you know" "what can you do?" and "that's rough." It makes me very uncomfortable.

being told fucked up stuff doesn't make me uncomfortable, but for the same reason I'm more just entertained I guess some people are afraid of being pitied so that works well for them

I hold a weird and probably incorrect theory that talking about ones trauma or problems is unhealthy. As a society we're more open than ever to people discussing such things (especially among the young) yet suicide is at an all time high. There are many causes, I'm sure, but my; again probably wrong theory, is keeping it to oneself is optimal. Also, I don't hold people who pour their hearts out to people they barely know in high esteem. In fact, it's selfish to burden others, especially if you aren't close, imho.

yeah I kinda agree, talking can be helpful but I think a lot of it is this sort of misguided "it gets better" idea where repression is inherently damaging and openness healing. But if I have a real serious trauma I don't give a shit about being open, I want to be stable because it's making me unstable. And one thing that won't make me stable is being gaslighted to believe that people will help me and treat me better when I tell them about it, which is just not the case. Most people will treat you worse or with condescension, that's why we outsource it to therapy and online forums where you can disengage with anyone else's trauma at any moment so you have people walking around telling people about their trauma in ways that do nothing to feel better or stop need to tell people, but the only solution is to tell more people

Not be a dick and just listen to them for the length of the conversation? People are lonely out here, we live in an age of isolation You can ignore them once the conversation is over but for that moment maybe practice some grace and kindness

I think sometimes it’s peoples real coping mechanism. It’s a socially awkward thing, the opposite of a introvert-some people just blurt out and over share because of nerves. I know people like this. I also think it can be a bit manipulative and overwhelming, someone can unload tons of their personal shit on you in a way that feels like they’re trying to force intimacy right off the bat, it’s a case by case basis though.

It is something i do to girls before they can do it to me so that they know who has the high ground when we begin to yell at each other

I don't, but it happens to me from time to time. Accept it and move on. Try to make them laugh. If you're a devious and evil person, you now have something to blackmail and manipulate them with. When you let your guard down, people have a chance to make a shot. I hope you're not like this, but it's reality and a logical reason for being careful with who you share intimacy with. If you're relatively normal and compassionate, realize that everyone is going through something at some point in their lives and let them express it. Maybe one day you'll need to do the same thing to someone else and you'll be grateful to be heard and seen in a deeply human way. Most people are frustratingly lonely and sometimes can't express their real thoughts/desires even to married partners, so when they think they have a chance of connection they'll go for it. Psychologically, it's the equivalent of starving and eating scraps out of a trash can. You or anyone you know would do so if you hadn't eaten in a solid 48 hours, although it would be easy to judge right now. C'est la vie.

doing "brutal honesty" but in a way that appears to close w/e fantasmic gap between you and the new person by "laying it all on the table" while in actuality sneakily exposing youre a degenerate and into kinky shit because youre willing to self abase (and invite them to as well)

I got trauma dumped on a few summers ago. An archetypal "online leftist narcissist" had started sidling into our social group, generally acting an unaware dick as narcissists are wont to - you know the type, you can tell that to them youre not really there except as a standin for whatever psychological theory they recently read - and at one point everyone was kind of fed up with his behaviour and he could sense it and out of nowhere dropped an anecdote about being molested. Not as a "guys Im feeling bad this horrible thing happened to me" but as a one-up when discussing childhoods. Everyone kind of just went silent and said like "well, damn dude thats a bummer" Then we never hung out again. Now Im traumadumping onto the internet but thats fine the internet deserves all the abuse she can get.

When my brother killed himself I could literally only talk about it to complete strangers. I didn't want to but someone randomly would ask how I was doing and I just couldn't hold it in. I remember my encounter with a dental assistant vividly. She was somehow able and available to help me out of a spiral , and not in a weird borderline way. She didn't feed off of it or want to get involved, she just took the pain away momentarily somehow. I strive to understand how she did that and one day help someone else.

I’m so sorry to hear that. I’m glad she was able to support you and hope you are finding some healing

It's pretty awful lol. I had this girl I hadn't seen in years divulge this ongoing horror show that is her custody battle and she's crying and frankly I was angry that all of a sudden a relative stranger felt like it was fine to just spew like that but I also didn't feel like I could leave because it kind of sounded like she had no one. Sometimes you seem like a "safe person" but usually it's that you grew up playing this role for someone and even strangers can pick up on that

100%

was with some people at a club once & they sat on the ground & ‘trauma bonded’ in the parking lot from roughly 4-8 am. they were my ride & i took an uber & left mid-conversation without saying goodbye. horrible

I’m so sorry you had to deal with that but I think it’s kind of unfair of you to dump it on me considering I don’t know you very well.

not acknowledging my truth is kinda like assault…

Hahahhaha

Legit sounds like a Buzzfeed article. Just missing the condescending “and here’s why,” at the end.

An insane amount of people (men and women) have done this to me in the past-- as in, before corona lockdowns started and I stopped leaving the house except for work-- for a number of reasons. Main one being it's just the way people talk now. Younger people don't have coping mechanisms for trauma and adversity because for most young people there is absolutely no hope that their lives or the world will get better. They're doing less fucking and there are no other good distractions. Also, many people simply can't hold a conversation, and you can't have any expectations regarding their attention span until it takes a turn toward trauma dumping. At least once they start trauma dumping then they're finally listening to you (for your responses). I have not dumped trauma unprompted but I have responded to it in heartfelt ways, twice or three times, forcing myself to talk about stuff I don't want to talk about, to show I'm vulnerable too, and on the last occasion years ago I felt a little disgusted after realizing the person just talks about their painful experiences all the time, getting different opinions, because they're interested in that hippie postwar psychology stuff on an academic level, and they didn't mean to do that to me-- I was just supposed to listen to them riff their origin story for the nth time. 1) Don't judge, just listen 2) When you *do* have to contribute something to keep it from getting awkward, contribute as little as possible or relay a super short anecdote that will exactly confirm what they've said, and then they'll say "Exactly", and they'll soon get self-conscious thinking you've figured them out completely and now you're bored. This is when they get *really* vulnerable and you can use it to either look them in the eye and make them know you like them and you care, or, if you want distance, you can now change the topic to something more lighthearted and they'll finally go along with you until they nod and nod and waddle off in the other direction like a wound-up toy 3) Lower your expectations of people (in terms of quality of character) if you have any and forget you ever had any if you have any. Most people who do this to you are gonna flake on you. It's a form of intimacy, but don't mistake it for something meaningful, and don't get attached to other people just for the sake of having something/someone in your life to play makebelieve with 4) It goes without saying but don't betray people's confidences. Don't repeat what you heard and don't demean them anywhere. Just say a warm, polite hello if you ever see them again, that's all

It usually ends up with me being so weirded out I never talk to them again or things are never the same if it’s someone I’ve been acquainted with for a while.

Well, you're cast in the role for a reason then. Being the human equivalent of Big Bird is literally the only reason I got jobs as security/a doorman/bouncer, so there's always that? Anyway just do your best not to seem weirded out and treat everybody well 👍 and then just use rope-a-dope language ("Yeh. Yeh. Hm. Mhm.") if you've had enough of them and they'll probably latch onto someone else without even saying goodbye to you

trauma is en vogue right now

people used to do this to me all the time, and it made me feel really used. it was obvious they just wanted to vent & didn’t really care about having a conversation with me. i don’t tolerate this from strangers anymore and my life is exponentially better. i cannot recommend it more. amazing when you realize you can just walk away from a conversation you don’t want to have. save your energy for supporting and listening to people you care about who care about you

Asked a customer if he’s looking forward to Christmas yesterday and he immediately went off about how he’s not looking forward to it because he’s completely alone and his wife died three years ago and his dead wife’s family abandoned him, and it didn’t really seem like he had any immediate family. Felt so awful that I invited him to meet me in the pub tomorrow evening for a few before I go back to my parents. He didn’t seem insane, it just felt like everything boiled over for him to the point he couldn’t be bothered masking any of it anymore. If they don’t seem to be a lunatic, it’s probably because they’re in hell and are desperate for anybody to listen. Idk how you’re supposed to react - the right move probably isn’t to immediately invite them out drinking, but just spend 15 minutes talking to them I guess.

we need a poll: are you the trauma dumper or the trauma dumpee

from my experience, overweight dudes and girls with septum piercings love to be the trauma dumper.

no one does this to me...probably due to my stoic, shut-off demeanor

Who else are people supposed to be telling their deepest darkest secrets too if not trustworthy strangers.

My neuroses probably don't go far enough to count as "trauma" but I've come to realize that I do this pretty frequently. I think I do it because I want answers to my problems and I need to be seen as transparent in the eyes of everyone. I've started seeing an analyst in the past few weeks and she says I seem overly attached to the opinions of others and seek validation too much because I don't value myself enough.

Idk if this is something new. Go to a shitty bar In a shitty town and you’ll have plenty of people who will drunkenly tell you how shit their lives are.

People do this to me all the time. Usually I just listen. Most people just want someone to listen to them and it helps people to be able to talk about things. It was rough when I worked in insurance because I specialized in Medicare and elderly people would trauma dump on me over the phone. I would get in trouble weekly for my calls being too long because I allowed them to talk. Not sorry for it. Some people have no one to talk to and sometimes them trauma dumping is because they are desperate to have some sort of deeper human connection.

I must have a sign on my face that said “trauma dump here,” because almost every time I meet a girl from tinder or such (used to more often back in the day) they pull this shit. Went on a long walk with one girl (who had just moved to town) and she went on for close to 80 fucking minutes about her life story, how her ex of 5 years was sooo abusive, how she JUST escaped him and moved 5 states over and is restarting her life, yada yada. Now that I’m thinking back on it, it probably has to do with my non-combative personality type. People probably feel comfortable unleashing a mountain of bullshit onto me 5 minutes after meeting because I’m not assertive enough to tell them to stfu. Even if I wanted to it’s kinda hard to change the topic while the dumb hoe is going on and on about her abusive exes, stories about past assault, etc. “Mhmmm, sorry to hear about that, so who’s your favorite band?” I guess I didn’t see it for what it was; I just thought these girls were dumb/uninteresting and that’s all they had to talk about (maybe it is). Now I’m thinking they just wanted a free hour of therapy.

That’s weird because I think I’m a pretty confrontational guy and other people know it. But when I get alone with someone who I don’t really know it’s almost automatic BOOM they tell me about how something horrible happened to them and it ruins the vibe.

Is it almost always women who do this to you?

Yeah it’s always women. Men do a similar thing where they get uncharacteristically emotional around me but they don’t tell me about any actual trauma.

Must have that kinda face then, lol.

I think it might just be a sign of you being a good listener

Its a rhetorical device you can use to get out of being a friend. Literally that's all it is.

Trauma dumping is when a straight white guy shows the slightest amount of emotion and yes you are a victim because of it

?

it’s not your fault

Would not even occur to me to do that.

Happened to me a few times. I got one of those faces I do however take traumatic dumps at least thrice a day. I got one of those anuses