Mental Health

Is It Okay to “Trauma Dump”?

I’d never heard this phrase before the Pandemic, a phrase encapsulating our collective fragility

CW: You might encounter anything in the paragraphs to come. Read as if you are experiencing real life, with no warnings about what is going to happen.

This morning, I published a post in Prism & Pen covering some of my experience in court as a domestic violence survivor. My personal editing process for this piece involved continuously adding and removing a lot of graphic detail, reliving things I wouldn’t mention publicly in this space, carefully pulling the punches of my writing to make it digestible in today’s culture.

I fretted over what to say in my content warning, trying my best to guess at what a reader would need to know in advance about what they were about to encounter in my writing to avoid a flashback of their own. I did this despite knowing that there’s endless debate about whether content warnings even help people like me who have PTSD, since our triggers could be literally anything associated with our personal experiences. The result is a self-censored account that gives someone unfamiliar with this sort of experience a tiny taste of what it’s like to face someone who caused deep personal harm in a problematic court system.

I’d never heard the phrase “trauma dump” before the Pandemic, when the question “How are you?” was quickly replaced with “I hope you are well,” in all written correspondence. As a society, we all quickly hit a saturation point for hearing any difficult stories, so we changed our language to prevent others from “oversharing” what we couldn’t handle hearing.

There’s a good reason for that. As we all experienced a collective, world-wide unspeakable trauma together, everyone learned the impact of vicarious trauma piled onto what was likely a mountain of personal grief for almost everyone on the planet. We all learned together that the vast majority of us sometimes have no emotional space left for empathy.

I can empathize with compassion fatigue. I know all about the numb fog of burnout. A year into the Pandemic, shortly after experiencing another sexual assault, this time related more directly to being…