A person who trauma dumps is unconsciously seeking people who have a stronger than average need to be liked or to please others. This need arises—again often unconsciously—from a fear of being rejected or of being unloveable.
Emotional dumping is an act of unconsciously sharing your feelings or perspective without an awareness of the other person and their emotional state or needs. Emotional dumping typically occurs as a heightened reactive response to a triggering event that is relived and repeated within a conversation.
There are a few reasons why people might engage in trauma dumping. For some, it might be a way of seeking validation or attention. Others may feel that they need to unload the burden of their experience onto someone else. Still, others may not know how else to cope with their feelings surrounding the event.
While venting can be helpful, Emotional Dumping can violate boundaries, create resentment and cause us to be stuck in cycles without awareness. For many people on the receiving end, Emotional Dumping is a form of connection that can leave us feeling drained, unseen, or resentful.
Trauma dumping: With trauma dumping, you overshare difficult or intimate personal information without the other person's consent or during inappropriate times.
Most of the time, trauma dumping is not purposefully abusive or manipulative. It's more common for a dumper to be so involved in talking about their traumatic experience that they are unaware of how their story is impacting their listeners.
Trauma dumping isn't necessarily abusive, although it can cross the line into emotional abuse when someone uses it on purpose to exert power over you. Meanwhile, someone sharing trauma without considering how it affects you may feel unpleasant to be around, but they aren't actively seeking to control or manipulate.
While venting can be a natural part of working through our negative emotions, does it become toxic at a certain point? It turns out, it can. And that's when venting becomes trauma dumping — the act of oversharing your emotions in a way that becomes harmful to the other person.
In short, yes, but their grief is going to be different because if the dumper is an avoidant they've come up with all these coping mechanisms to suppress how they're feeling. Think of it like a more agonizing process that on the outside might not look like they're grieving at all.
A person who trauma dumps is unconsciously seeking people who have a stronger than average need to be liked or to please others. This need arises—again often unconsciously—from a fear of being rejected or of being unloveable.
Sharing trauma without permission, in an inappropriate place and time, to someone who may not have the capacity to process it. That's trauma dumping. It's become so commonplace on social media, our kids may have come to accept it as normal.
With venting vs. dumping, the venting couple is sharing their emotions. Still, in the dumping situation, the person doing the dumping is not concerned with the other person's feelings at all. It is a one-sided partnership with no room for a mate to get support or express themself.
Initial reactions to trauma can include exhaustion, confusion, sadness, anxiety, agitation, numbness, dissociation, confusion, physical arousal, and blunted affect. Most responses are normal in that they affect most survivors and are socially acceptable, psychologically effective, and self-limited.
The fawn response is when an individual tries to avoid or minimize distress or danger by pleasing and appeasing the threat. Someone responding in this way would do whatever they can to keep the threat, or abuser, happy despite their own needs and wants.
Oversharing can also have negative consequences for your mental health. Constantly sharing your problems with others can often create more problems, like increasing your anxiety and making you feel isolated and ashamed.
Intrusive memories
Recurrent, unwanted distressing memories of the traumatic event. Reliving the traumatic event as if it were happening again (flashbacks) Upsetting dreams or nightmares about the traumatic event. Severe emotional distress or physical reactions to something that reminds you of the traumatic event.
Trauma dumping can also mean toxic oversharing and can be manipulative and abusive. While one can feel better “trauma dumping” over social media, it can also cause some negative impacts. Other coping mechanisms can protect your mental health and online friendships.
Trauma dumping is not the same as having post-traumatic stress disorder. Trauma dumping describes people in the general population who have a tendency to over-emote. It is not an appropriate term to describe people who have experienced genuine trauma and find themselves overwhelmed because of it.
Being broken up with can lead to feelings of hurt and rejection. Even if the breakup is mutual, it's still natural to struggle with difficult feelings, like anger or depression, at least for a while. As painful as the decision can be, there are healthy ways to deal with a breakup and get over a breakup.
Trauma dumping (also referred to as “emotional dumping” or just “dumping”) is when a person overshares their painful experiences with an unsuspecting person to get sympathy or validation. Venting crosses into trauma dumping territory when it becomes harmful to the person listening.
To be clear, vulnerability is not self-serving
This means you must be thoughtful about what you share, when you share it, and why. That means: Don't overshare and dump your emotions on other people without purpose or thought. That's emotional dumping or projecting, not vulnerability.
What is Toxic Venting? Toxic venting feels like an attack on someone's character. Whether you are the one venting, or you're listening to someone else do it, this communication makes the other person out to be “the bad guy.” This type of bad-mouthing becomes an intense form of gossip.
Illegal dumping also can have environmental impacts by polluting our state waters (including ground water, streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, etc), damaging our soil quality, affecting our air quality from open burning activities and negatively impacting wildlife.