“Trauma dumping refers to the oversharing of difficult emotions and thoughts with others,” Dr. Prewitt explains. “It is not a clinical term used by mental health providers, but people who engage in 'trauma dumping' often share traumatic events or stressful situations with others during inappropriate times.”
If you're highly self-conscious or socially anxious, worrying about being perceived as a “toxic person” might lead you to under-share your needs and to a lack of connection with others. On the other hand, oversharing may be a trauma response or a sign that you are ready for or need support.
Remember: Over-explaining is a trauma response designed to avoid conflict. “The logic behind fawning is that if a person does anything and everything they can to please the person who is trying to hurt them, that person might not follow through with the abusive behavior,” says Fenkel.
Oversharing can all too often be a smokescreen for a serious psychological issue, including things like anxiety disorder and borderline personality disorder. And the first hint can be whether you can control your blather or not.
The Oversharing Habit Is a Way for Us to Cope
Oversharing is one of those coping mechanisms that falls in that gray area, sometimes helping us to release stress, communicate our internal struggles or joys with others, and to reach out in a time of need.
Oversharing doesn't create intimacy. Oversharing is self-absorption masked as vulnerability. This may also signal emotional neediness and/or lack of boundaries.
Post-traumatic stress disorder has anxiety as one of its symptoms, which can lead to over talking. Complex PTSD, post-traumatic stress caused by an ongoing set of stressful experiences such as childhood sexual abuse, often comes with shame.
People with BPD often engage in self-sabotaging behavior. This can include: Oversharing. Misplaced anger.
Oversharing is described as “revealing an inappropriate amount of detail about one's personal life” – and Dr Kirren Schnack, a clinical psychologist from Oxford, has taken to TikTok to address the potential causes behind it.
It's common for people with ADHD to overshare information. People may be impulsive and not stop to think about what they're saying. Treating ADHD can help people improve self-control and think about consequences.
Trauma dumping refers to sharing a traumatic story without thinking about how it will affect the listener, or oversharing in an inappropriate context.
Fawning or people-pleasing can often be traced back to an event or series of events that caused a person to experience PTSD, more specifically Complex PTSD, or C-PTSD. Fortunately, C-PTSD can be approached and treated through comprehensive therapy.
All kinds of trauma create stress reactions. People often say that their first feeling is relief to be alive after a traumatic event. This may be followed by stress, fear and anger. Trauma may also lead people to find they are unable to stop thinking about what happened.
Is oversharing a defense mechanism? Oversharing is a habit many of us experience from time to time, particularly during seasons of great emotional stress or trauma. Oversharing is a coping mechanism, a trauma response, and also a habit that can negatively affect our reputation and our relationships.
According to Dr. Prewitt, some specific examples of trauma dumping include: A coworker sharing specific details of a difficult divorce while at a casual lunch with colleagues. A friend sharing details of a toxic relationship, without allowing the other person to talk about their day.
The bottom line
Venting is a healthy way to share negative emotions and reduce stress. But with trauma dumping, you overshare in a way that makes the listener feel overwhelmed or ignored.
06/9They are narcissistic
If a person is a narcissist, or they feel inadequate, they often end up sharing everything that comes to mind to make sure they are heard. The insecurity of feeling ignored or too much self-validation overpowers their ability to decide what to share or not.
In the case of manipulation, oversharing may mean that you lack strong boundaries, which could put you in the way of manipulation (Lusinski 2020).
Being careless with your privacy can open you and your family up to everything, from cyberbullying and theft to extortion and kidnap. Criminals can use social media geo-tagging, landmarks and research into your typical behaviour or schedule.
Intense, often unreasonable fear of being abandoned. Recurring involvement in turbulent relationships. A recurring sense of emptiness. Paranoia or loss of touch with reality, especially in stressful situations.
Having quiet borderline personality disorder (BPD) — aka “high-functioning” BPD — means that you often direct thoughts and feelings inward rather than outward. As a result, you may experience the intense, turbulent thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that characterize BPD, but you try to hide them from others.
Trauma is defined as “a psychological, emotional response to an event or an experience that is deeply distressing or disturbing.” In reality, trauma can come from any experience that makes us feel unsafe, physically or emotionally, and that disrupts the way we cope or function.
overexplained; overexplaining. transitive + intransitive. : to explain (something) to an excessive degree. The stories tended to be as simple as a good children's picture-book, so that nothing needed to be overexplained.
Fawning is a trauma response where a person develops people-pleasing behaviors to avoid conflict and to establish a sense of safety. In other words, the fawn trauma response is a type of coping mechanism that survivors of complex trauma adopt to "appease" their abusers.