on trauma dumping
redefining boundaries and empathy in friendships
i’ve been trying to work out the reason lately why i find myself so uncomfortable when i hear the popular convention that you shouldn’t trauma dump to your friends. the adage that your friends “are not your therapists”.
i get it. everybody’s in survival mode. and not everybody has the ability or capacity to take on other people’s emotional turmoil.
i understand that for most people, healing their own traumas in this brutalized planet is already hard enough - i really get it. you’re allowed to have boundaries, but… i want to look at it from a different angle.
i worry that this way of thinking can come close to victim blaming and spiritual bypassing in a world that does not want to see its own shadow.
this rhetoric presupposes that:
that there is a “normal” way of relating to this brutal world; and
that there are avenues for you to process your vulnerability or grief for you if can’t manage your emotions - go journal about it, instead of venting to a friend or crying about it on the internet.
they forget that we live in a rapaciously capitalist world that has us alienated from our own internal work, our neighbors, our community. they forget that the families we come from are also big sources of our own traumas. they forget that existing is hard for a lot of people. your grief is pathologized.
so where does it go? where do we take this pain in absence of healing communities?
the majority of the world doesn’t have adequate access to health care. forget therapy! and maybe i’m incorrect but i feel like the majority of this planet is traumatized and most people do not want to confront that reality. most of us are in unconscious zombie states. i’m here, but i’m not here. thus, people that can’t contain their grief become disruptive.
when a friend - someone you’re supposed to be in community with - asks you how you are doing, you have two options. one is to do the popular thing and lie and say you’re doing fine. and the other is to do what a lot of people are equating to “trauma dumping” - which is, to be honest.
maybe you don’t know where your next meal is gonna come from. maybe you don’t know what hell you’ll walk into at work, at home, or at school. maybe your home country is facing an occupation or an invasion or a massive crisis, and you have family members to worry about. maybe you spent the entire weekend in a dissociative state because you had a traumatic flashback.
so even without asking to, even without asking for an empathetic witness or ear - you’re just describing your day.
for a lot of people in this world, everyday living is deeply traumatic. i believe it is possible to cultivate healthy and loving relationships with boundaries, while also serving as each other’s empathetic witnesses. grieving with your friends. creating safe spaces with your friends. letting your friends know that their pain is not a burden and that, you too, see the world they are confronting.
i find it all very interesting - that telling people not to share their traumas, that they can’t build community on the internet, that they can’t trauma dump to their friends…
it feels to me very much like a world unwilling to grapple with its shadow. a world that’s not ready for the collective grieving that unfolds as we each confront the state of our world.
in a world that wants you to hide your pain - I say, grieve, and GRIEVE LOUDLY! because none of us are okay. grieving loudly and openly shows that none of us ought to suffer in silence. i know, for one, i don’t want you to.