Make sure this isn’t you because it’s hard to bring a relationship back from it.
Trauma dumping, also known as emotional dumping, refers to a situation in which you share your overwhelming and often distressing emotions, thoughts, or experiences with someone else without considering the other person’s capacity or consent to handle or support such emotional content.
This can happen in various contexts, including friendships, family relationships, or even professional settings. Dumping all your unprocessed feelings on someone else (especially if it happens often) is detrimental to your relationships in so many ways.
The people who you’re dumping on, your friends and family, near and dear, will start resenting you because healthy relationships thrive on mutual support and emotional reciprocity.
Being on the receiving end of that kind of dumping will make your listener feel helpless and burnt out. Not to mention that, as the dumper, you’re neglecting the other person’s consent and emotional well-being by just barrelling into what you want to talk about.
This can quickly overwhelm your listener, because trauma dumping involves sharing intense feelings and distressing experiences without considering your listener’s capacity or readiness to take on that kind of emotional work. Just dumping all of your unfiltered, unprocessed emotions on someone else means you’re asking them to handle the emotional labour for you, whether you meant to or not.
And this feels very disrespectful to the listener.
If your listener has a history of similar trauma themselves, you risk triggering severe emotional distress or even re-traumatising them — especially, if they have their own unresolved trauma and issues. Sharing intense emotions and traumatic experiences is a deeply personal thing and should ideally happen in an environment of trust and intimacy.
Trauma dumping erodes trust in the relationship and makes it difficult to rebuild. You’re also doing yourself a disservice, because when you trauma dump, you aren’t going to receive the constructive support you’re truly looking for.
This is because if you’re trauma dumping, you’re not using effective communication. Excessive venting and endless ranting won’t lead to understanding, support or a resolution. It’ll just leave both you and your listener feeling frustrated and disconnected.
Frequent or repeated trauma dumping also desensitizes your listener over time, leading them to feel less empathy and compassion towards you.
And I don’t have to tell you that this harms the overall emotional connection in the relationship.
The listener will often become less willing to engage in open conversations with you, fearing that every interaction will become emotionally overwhelming.
This is what happened to me.
When I became the go-to person for a friend who got into stressful times, I started feeling exhausted from the constant barrage of her dumping emotional events on me. Every time we made contact, she had more intense emotional events to dump on me, but she showed no sign of doing any work before sharing, or even putting any effort into it after we started talking about it.
I became emotionally exhausted and began distancing myself from that friend to protect my own mental well-being. I stopped sharing jokes and memes like I had before, because I never knew what was going to trigger an outburst. I pulled back from the easy, open flow of communication we’d had before and stopped sharing small daily thoughts, because it felt like she always found a way to bring the conversation back to the wrongs done to her.
At first, I was willing to provide emotional support and to listen. But as the ranting went on and on about how other people had wronged her and how other people were the problem (or the world in general), it just started to feel like my friend didn’t even want to find a way to feel better, just someone to dump it all on. And that got emotionally exhausting for me.
But when I pulled away, I was called out for being unavailable and not engaging in conversations as my friend had come to expect (not that she’d even noticed that most of our conversations were mostly her ranting about things, while I sat there silently and offered little comment). This led to a confrontation that ended in what felt like a classic YouTuber apology on her part, with a lot of posturing but little meaningful content.
I remember once seeing some PR expert on TikTok dissecting the anatomy of an apology, and it went some thing like “own it, explain it, promise it” and the expert said most brands fail because they don’t do all three. And if you don’t do all three — own the thing you did, explain what led to it, and promise how you’re going to avoid the same mistake in the future — you end up with an empty apology that nobody will believe.
That’s essentially what I got. My friend sort of owned it, but quickly turned the blame around on me and had me apologising by the end of it (mostly so I could get out of that conversation, if I’m honest, because she was building up for another emotional outburst).
That relationship hasn’t recovered to this day, because when I offered to listen and help talk through things, she chose instead to pull away because she “didn’t want to be accused of trauma dumping”.
I considered whether I should pursue the point, try to explain that going from one extreme reaction to another isn’t the healthiest thing, and that a lot of this could be solved with simple checking in before commencing the emotional dumping.
But based on the blow-out we had over the whole thing, and because of her behaviour patterns in the past indicating an unwillingness to sit and deal with her own feelings before pushing them onto someone else, I decided to let it be. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t force them to drink. Now, we’re more like acquaintances than friends and I’m left wondering how in the world I’m ever going to make another friend again.
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