Trauma Dumping Online
By Ruby Sullivan
Trauma dumping involves emotionally offloading with no set objective in mind, no respect for the listeners time or whether they consent to bare your burdens. Within close friendships, venting can be an important part of connection. Some key differences between trauma dumping and venting to keep in mind to avoid overwhelming the people around you is to take accountability for your part in the issue, be aware of time spent talking about it, be aware of what’s going on in your listeners life, don’t dart from issue to issue swamping your listener, and be open to solutions. It’s no secret that social media is a huge part of everyone’s lives and I love it for keeping in contact with my friends and family that aren’t in Galway, sharing fun memories I can look back on and educating myself (as my good friend once said ‘the internet is literally free go and look it up’). But it does have it’s negatives. Social media isn’t necessarily the villain here but our mindset and propensity to over share could be to blame. The question being asked here is - is there a place for trauma dumping online? And the hard pill to swallow is no. Having grown up, for the most part, being exposed to social media, we find it easy to share things online, things we probably wouldn’t ever say out loud, and one of the risks of trauma dumping is the misguided feeling of closeness it leads to. The dumper feels intimacy while the dumpee feels deflated and as if their emotions are not being thought of. When we bring social media into this, the dumpee can be thousands of people, anyone from strangers to best friends and the intimacy and closeness the dumper feels is even more false and contrived.
When I was 19, I began using Twitter obsessively. The account, originally created to get the attention of my ex boyfriend, was toxic before I even gained my first follower and quickly turned into a place to spill every secret I had, in the hopes of some likes but more importantly, a message from Him. Over that year of my life I posted constantly, which resulted in my best friend of ten years telling me she didn’t even recognise me anymore. She asked me repeatedly to message or call her instead of imposing my baggage on 1000+ strangers online. The 280 character window I allowed people into my life gave them a sense of entitlement over me that I grew to resent even though it was I who had allowed them it to begin with. Countless photos of me crying, posts about my breakups, sex life, therapy sessions, and personal information about me and my partner that he didn’t consent to share are still out there somewhere and I have to accept that I wavered ownership over that information when I shared it. I felt a huge sense of competition between me and my online peers and the ‘who has it worse?’ mentality paired with more and more extreme posts to get my exes attention finally caught up with me and I deleted my account. Thankfully, I’m never looking back. I am still guilty of opening up about experiences that are too personal with people I have just met using ‘it’s important to talk about these things’ as an excuse but there’s better ways to spread awareness without offloading on strangers. During my year on Twitter I was someone that even I didn’t like and the thought of people still thinking of me as the person I carefully designed and presented online makes me feel uneasy. Trauma dumping, specifically online, cements an idea of you in strangers minds and because of the essence of trauma dumping, it is usually a version of you that you would like to forget.
