Grace Petsnick
You’re with a group of friends, enjoying spending time together and laughing about nonsense. You are close enough with each of these people, and you care deeply about them, but the conversation is light and humorous at this specific moment. Then, one of your friends makes an off-hand comment about a traumatic experience: a reference to an abusive ex-partner, a memory of high-school bullies, an uncomfortable anecdote about their fucked-up childhood.
Suddenly, the atmosphere of the group changes. Maybe that friend tries laughing it off, and others might join in to fill the awkward silence. You don’t want them to feel embarrassed. Depending on the severity of the incident they are relaying, you might ask them if they’re okay, or if they need to talk about it. After all, they must have brought it up for a reason. If you don’t open yourself to their needs, they might feel hurt, unwanted or uncared for. You don’t want to be one of their future anecdotes about shitty friends who never listened to their cries for help. Is it even fair to consider it as a cry for help?
Your head is spinning, and all you want to do is go back to laughing about a stupid joke and dipping chips into the eight dollar jar of queso you just bought from the campus convenience store.
If you’ve ever been on the internet, you’ve probably run into the term ‘trauma-dumping.’ It’s most certainly not a clinical term, and is thrown around quite freely online, but it falls into the realm of ‘oversharing,’ often as a trauma response. This hypothetical is not the only instance that trauma-dumping occurs, but I have found that nonchalant and indifferent comments about things that could be considered traumatic are most difficult to navigate. This is because there is no escalation of information that can prompt a conversation like “I understand you are upset or frustrated, but I don’t have the emotional capacity to engage in a conversation like this,” or “I can see you want to talk about something that is bothering you, but I know there is a better time and place for us to have that conversation properly.” In our case above, the conversation passed as quickly as it formed, whether you were prepared for it or not.
In my personal experiences with trauma-dumping, oftentimes the end goal is to be understood by your peers. Traumatic experiences, while they do not define us, live quite rent-free in our minds for years and years afterwards, and can be a motivating factor in why we portray ourselves the way we do. I think it's fair to say that everybody wants to be understood by the people that matter to them, and for me, I knew I would feel safe, validated, and understood better by my group of close friends back home if they knew a specific aspect of my history. My experience in telling them occurred naturally during a drunken night in my basement. I vividly remember asking if the four of them would mind if I talked out loud about something that had happened to me. They eagerly agreed, and after I had said my little piece, one of my friends asked if she could also get bad feelings and experiences off of her chest, to which we wholeheartedly agreed to. Although it was an emotionally exhausting night, it remains a fond memory in my mind of mutual respect and understanding that I, and the other friends that shared, had needed for so long.
You might love and respect the friend who made the comment, and of course you want to be there for them. So why do you feel so uncomfortable?
Most of the time in a close friend group, where there is general respect and understanding for one-another, dark humor and inappropriate jokes can be recognized as just that: jokes. Trauma-dumping can slither its way into the conversation through this medium, and if dark humor is a frequent occurrence within your friend group, radical things can be inappropriately hilarious, with the understanding that it was, in fact, a joke; however, if a comment makes you uncomfortable, and makes you question the reasoning behind the comment in the first place, there is a chance that there might be more to the comment beneath the surface. And you, mouth full of Tostitos, could be experiencing emotional turmoil about how to handle the situation as a caring and empathetic friend.
They have no right to make you uncomfortable and feel unsafe through their trauma. The whole situation was born out of lack of consent to share the burden of their traumatic experiences. A surprise attack, if you will. This is not to say that there is malicious intent behind their comment. On the contrary, they might feel comfortable enough with you to share this information, and didn’t consider how they might be making external parties feel much less comfortable. Once you start noticing and recognizing frequent trauma-dumping, waiting for it to occur within a conversation can be extremely stressful, enough that it may start having an effect on the friendship itself. If you find your boundaries being challenged and broken by a chronic oversharer, despite the discomfort it may bring, I highly recommend trying to have an open conversation about it, (with everyone's consent, of course.) Usually, people don’t even realize they are trauma-dumping. There shouldn’t be any intention of “calling out” a trauma-dumper, and you shouldn’t try to designate yourself as their psychiatrist and tell them how to cope with their issues. It is not your job to fix someone else's problems, but it is your responsibility to defend your own boundaries.
Seeking to be understood is a part of the human experience, and cultivating relationships that can reach these levels of understanding in a consensual way is a step towards improving your interactions with the people you care about most.
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