Is it venting or trauma dumping?
While venting is simply discussing an experience or sharing the details of something that happened to you to get it off your chest or to release it emotionally, trauma dumping feels heavier. When someone shares the same traumatic story or crisis experience repeatedly, often to a captive audience without consent, they are emotionally dumping on them. With trauma dumping, one relays a traumatic experience to anyone who listens, heaping the emotional weight on whoever will listen. The experience is intense, heavy, awkward uncomfortable, and the listener doesn’t feel good hearing it. The impact on the receiver, as much as the intent, determines whether a conversation is venting or trauma dumping. These stories often make the listener feel uneasy. In a trauma dumping situation, the dumper complains but doesn’t want to get better, rejecting advice and proposed solutions. They don’t want help; they enjoy getting attention from telling (and retelling) the story. While venting is normal and a healthy unburdening, trauma dumping is a toxic power play.
Trauma dumping can be better understood by exploring Eckart Tolle’s idea of the pain body, James Redfield’s control drama concept, and revisiting the idea of the shadow.
How the pain body works
The pain body concept was first introduced in Eckhart Tolle’s 2005 best-selling book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. The pain body is an energetic entity made up of old emotional pain, including accumulated hurt and trauma, that becomes a sort of tulpa seeking out more of the same to feed itself. The pain body is constantly searching for negative emotions to devour as self-sustaining fuel. I’ve repurposed the Chinese idea of the hungry ghost to explain profound, restless emotional pain that’s always looking for more energy, ever hungry, never satisfied.
The idea is that there is an energetic pain body within each person. An energy storehouse filled with accumulated emotional pain, wounds, hurts, and trauma. This body occasionally needs to be fueled by negative emotions such as anger, pain, sorrow, and rage. Pain bodies thrive in toxic families and relationships where there’s drama. One can feed the pain body by making other people feel discomfort. The pain body seeks to feed or fuel itself with negative emotions, and it’s not picky. It craves an emotional reaction and is always hungry for more pain energy. The pain body can sometimes become part of a person’s identity when they become accustomed to feeling energized and fueled by the negative emotions or distress of others. This way of attaining negative attention becomes part of the person’s toxic emotional coping strategy.
It is easy to see how trauma dumping fits into this pattern of feeding and sustaining the pain body.
A quick refresher on control dramas
James Redfield’s groundbreaking 1993 book, The Celestine Prophecy, introduced the concept of control dramas to the world. The book’s sixth insight described control dramas as the ways people steal energy from one another by gaining control of situations using strategic habits of power. In the book, Redfield described four styles of control drama, the intimidator, the interrogator, aloof, and poor me. It is clear, without explaining the others any further, trauma dumping is a technique used by the poor me control drama. Poor-me people gain power by pulling other people’s energy to themselves by eliciting attention and sympathy. They tend toward pessimism, continually recounting the trauma and crisis in their lives in an endless loop. They appear vulnerable and worried, and they have an incessant need for help. Still, these people will rarely take advice or embrace solutions. They leech the energy of others through the sympathy cycle, repeatedly explaining the same story.
The shadow
Another way of thinking about the energy behind trauma dumping is as a shadow aspect showing itself. Generally speaking, what that shadow aspect wants, is to be recognized and integrated. A trauma dumper is holding a trauma story apart from themselves; they haven’t found a way to comprehend and integrate the lesson. They keep the experience at a distance because it is too distasteful to own and embrace. In this way, the story becomes a shadow aspect, a negative emotional entity that needs to be fed separately from the rest of the psychological self.
How to stop trauma dumping
If you’re reading this and recognize that you’re a trauma dumper, that’s great! It means you are ready to grow past it. Start with the aspect that makes the most sense to you; you can work to dissolve the pain body, stop playing into control dramas, or integrate the shadow. Much easier said than done, but the sooner you begin working, the sooner you’ll feel the results. There are so many methods and resources for healing. You’ll find the right path if you put your feelers out and follow your gut.
If you are the victim of trauma dumping
The best thing to do when someone is trauma dumping on you is, first and foremost, to set boundaries. Let the person know when they’ve gone too far. Do this with kindness but also firmness. You must compassionately let them know when they’ve made you uncomfortable. You can show sympathy, letting them know that what they’ve experienced sounds intense and heavy and that you are very sorry. But, then, extricate yourself from the situation.
Another great thing to do when you are being trauma dumped on is to let the person know how valuable therapy can be. If a person who has experienced trauma decides to see a professional, that professional can support and validate them in a way that can be very healing. With therapy, they can get to the heart of the trauma and heal the deep wound. A trained professional has strategies to deal with all aspects of the trauma and put it to rest.
If someone trauma dumps on you, they generally don’t want advice. They may become insulted, offended, or defensive if you volunteer it. Typically, they aren’t looking to solve the problem; they want the quick hit of satisfaction from sharing the story and sucking up the other person’s attention. Think about the control dramas described earlier; it’s the same dynamic. One person is sucking the energy away from another person by behaving in specific ways and eliciting negative emotions. While it’s not malicious most of the time (in fact, the trauma dumper feels like a victim), it’s essential to stop the energy drain immediately.
Remember, the healthiest thing you can do when you realize someone is trauma dumping is to kindly and clearly, set limits. Let them know that you have sympathy for their situation, but also explain that you’re not equipped to help them heal, and remind them the best way forward may be for them to see a professional. Acknowledge the pain that they’ve suffered, but don’t indulge them by allowing them to cause you discomfort.
This article has demonstrated that there are many ways to understand the emotional structures underlying trauma dumping. The pain body, control dramas, and shadow manifest in various ways. There are all kinds of toxic emotional behaviors and maladaptive patterns that people can fall into when coping with trauma. Thankfully, there are just as many interventions and techniques for healing. I consider trauma dumping a maladaptive coping mechanism, nothing more, nothing less. An optimistic way to view it is the beginning stage of healing the emotional pain caused by the trauma. With desire and education, anyone can heal from trauma and put to rest unhealthy coping mechanisms.