I don’t know if I am the only person who struggles with this but lately I have had to deal with quite a few acquaintances and friends who trauma dumped on me. Trauma dumping is when you share something traumatic that has happened to you without asking the other person for consent. I know for many people it has to do with that they don’t want to get triggered or that they are not emotionally prepared to hear about something horrific. I get that. I don’t really get triggered though, not in the sense of that I am shocked by what someone is describing. I am more annoyed with that they picked me and that I am forced to reply, and support them, when I am in a bad place myself and really don’t have the emotional spoons to be there for them.
Supporting someone: Professional Setting vs. Friends
I used to work in mental health and I am an excellent active listener. I am a pro at it, and I have helped many people in a professional setting with strong boundaries. I was good at leaving my own issues at the door when I was about to support someone. I only made myself available when I knew I was able to focus on the other person’s needs. It went exceptionally well. I assume that dissociation had a lot to do with it too. I am quite sure that I would still be able to do it, even on bad days. To focus on another person’s needs for a while. But there were boundaries: time wise and emotionally. I had no deep emotional connection to any of those people and the entity of the conversation was about their issues. My life story didn’t matter. There was no connection on any other level. That is why it worked so well for me: I rarely got emotionally affected by things and if I did, I had peer support.
But it is different with friends, isn’t it? I don’t have any boundaries with them in that sense. I am emotionally involved and I feel more prone to actually say what I think they should do instead of focusing on allowing them to reflect what they want and need. So I rather not have my friends come to me with some serious stuff unless they first ask me if I am in the right place. Now, most of the people in my life know that I have mental illness. The majority doesn’t know what is going on with me on a day to day basis. And almost no one knows the exact illnesses I have or what trauma lies in my past. I like to keep it that way because I am a private person, I don’t want to have to deal with stigma and I rather have some shallow connections that are about common likes or goals instead of anything on a personal level. It is safer that way. I want to be a fun person to be around. I don’t want to be a problem.
But I must give off a vibe, like a vibe that makes people think that telling me things is okay. And it is okay. I don’t mind listening to people’s relationship issues or work stress. But I don’t want to hear about their panic attacks, trauma, depression or chronic illnesses. And the reason is not because I judge them. Or because I don’t want them to feel well. It is because I’m now aware of my own shit way more than I have ever been, and I feel like we are on totally different levels of suffering. I am not invalidating their pain, not in my mind, and I would never do that to their face. But I think that we are not the same.
We are not the same
To me, most issues are on a spectrum. And I am on one extreme end of the spectrum and they are barely on the spectrum at all. It has nothing to do with the severity of the trauma, but it can. The more severe and long lasting the trauma, the more likely you are going to end up with mental and physical health issues in the future. And one thing that doesn’t seem traumatic to one person at all, can ruin another person’s life. I get all that. But if someone knows that I have been through sexual abuse by a caretaker for years, as a child, in addition to physical and mental abuse, and they mention a minor traumatic event and liken it to what I have been through? I don’t know how to react. I feel like my trauma is being minimized. It is not only that they trauma dumped something on me, but they also place themselves at the extreme end of the spectrum.
I have had several of these situations in the last few weeks. I tend to validate their pain and then talk about how the trauma is affecting them today, and eventually suggest to look into certain diagnosis, therapies or even self-help stuff. But inside I am boiling. I have tried other angles, as in mentioning all the chronic physical illnesses I am dealing with that, that I am unable to work or live a functioning life, the C-PTSD, the DID, the GAD. The response is often: maybe I have DID too. And there I am again, sending them tests, and resources and hope they don’t go down the rabbit hole of self-diagnosis.
It doesn’t matter what I try, when I respond. I will feel minimized, invalidated and not being taken seriously. My life and my issues are part of the conversation but they are not assessing them correctly. They are comparing a metaphorically broken nail to a a metaphorically broken spine. I have been in and out of psych units for a good portion of my 30s. I have lost everything. I have tried to take my own life so many times, I stopped counting. And they talk about how their mother was too strict and now they are too scared to give her a call. I get it. Their pain matters, and that is why I support them. But I am sitting here after a dissociative seizure, crying, hit with major fatigue because of another flare-up of one of my auto-immune illnesses, with an alter trying to push me to hurt myself. And I am still trying to support them via text. We are not struggling with the same thing.
Is Comparison helpful though?
In DBT therapy they tell you, that comparison can be helpful because you become grateful for the things that you have. I remember being told that I am lucky because I have a roof over my head and food on the table while there are children in Africa dying of starvation right now. It made me feel like absolute shit. I hated myself for being a whiny bitch, for taking up space and I wished that me and the child could just switch places. I still sometimes become incredibly upset about being so privileged of having food, and shelter, while others who are just as much deserving of bad things are homeless and hungry. The comparison angle doesn’t work for me.
So I don’t want to try it on others. I don’t want to trigger them into feeling bad or hating themselves, or even apologizing. I don’t want to make anyone feel bad. But by not speaking up, I make them think that we are the same. And we just aren’t. And because those incidents have been piling up a bit lately, while I am in a place of struggle, I am worried that I might just blow up at the wrong person, in the wrong way.
I have this strong urge to just be rude and tell them about my trauma and what I am struggling with every single day. Just to shut them up. I am aware of the urge and I think I can keep it under control. But for fuck’s sake, people need to get some perspective sometimes. But how do I give them that perspective without seeming invalidating, and trauma dumping on them myself? Their struggles matter too, but looking at myself, they could have it way worse.
If someone like me doesn’t speak up, people don’t become aware of the spectrum that I am aware of. The spectrum of struggles stemming from trauma. But how do you tell someone in the kindest way that your trauma and your struggles are way worse than theirs – objectively and subjectively? Does it make me a vile person to want to set them straight and would they really benefit from it? I think society as a whole would benefit from it for sure. There have been a ton of documentaries on childhood trauma lately and people are shocked by the stories. What no one is telling them is that there are hundreds of thousands of adults out there who have been through similar things. But they keep quiet because they don’t want to trauma dump or upset anyone. So the fuck are we supposed to do then?
Fragments of Reality 