Transcript
Hello, everyone welcome to another DailyJim it is monday august 8th 2022. Today, I wanted to talk about the concept of, opening up or sharing or venting or dumping or any other word we use to talk about emotional expression.
So I was reading about the concept of emotional dumping or trauma dumping earlier today, I had heard it yesterday in talking with a friend, who works in health for people experiencing postpartum depression, I believe.
And I was researching the concept because I was recently talking with someone as well and they said that. I was maybe saying too much okay, the phrase was putting a massive emotional burden on me and I was like, whoa! And so I wanted to think about how I was communicating with that person step back and really understand, and something I've really wondered a lot and I've talked about on this show is the idea of seeking consent to communicate with somebody to open up and share what's going on with us. And when I was researching more about this concept of emotional dumping or trauma dumping, the certain websites described it as different than venting mostly in terms of whether other people wanted to hear it. So in other words, does the receiver want to hear how the giver is feeling about certain issues, and maybe they don't want to hear it because they're feeling overwhelmed themselves, maybe they don't want to hear it because it seems like it's imbalanced where the one person is always sharing and the other person doesn't have the opportunity to share. So something about just that imbalance of sharing and maybe one person uh does not want to receive it, and that seems to be the difference between, what they would describe as dumping or venting, venting being, that the person does want to receive it and is actively listening and engaging and then dumping is where the person doesn't want to receive it for whichever reason. And I started thinking about this and just how yes, you know, it comes back to conversations of consent and how do we ask people whether they want us to do something before we do it, and while we're doing it and afterwards, and kind of just maintaining kind of this agreement that we are both doing something that we want to do. And I think that applies to many things, and I wonder how that translates very well into. Communication that is done a synchronously or at a distance and often both. I think it's the asynchronous part that may be even more difficult at times. So let's talk about at a distance. So I think a lot of times when we communicate with each other, we are face to face um and we can see many signals on how the other person is feeling or how. So if I say something I can gauge, okay, maybe that person looks a little sad and they look distracted. So maybe now is not the time to broach that subject. Maybe I don't want to open up about how stressful work is or how I feel so much dilemma when it comes to romance or finances or whatever it may be because I can see they look like they may not be in the mood.
At a distance, maybe on the phone, we can tell through the tone of voice, maybe on a video call, we can see it in the body language. But when it comes down to something like email or text, even if we're chatting live, there can be a lot of information that's not conveyed. So it can be harder for the giver to know how the other person is feeling. The receiver is feeling. Now there are tricks, we can ask questions. We can pay attention to how the person is using the language. Pay attention to how quickly they respond, how quickly they read it and some things like this, but it just seems to be fewer variables that we can notice and then talking about the asynchronous part. Um So if we're in person and we write a note and then we're not sure when the other person will see the note. Maybe we can read the body language, but we're not sure how that person will feel in the future when they read the note. Or if we send an email or a voice note or a video or a text message again, if we if we don't know what the person is currently feeling at the moment and we're not sure what the person may be feeling in the future. I think it could be really hard to guess whether they want to receive something or not. And so you know, if it's really a synchronous, imagine sending letters back and forth to each other which sometimes can take a week or two weeks to send and respond um asking for consent. You know, would you like me to tell you more about this or? Something along those lines? Can really really delay the conversation just because of the time delay. Um I'm not saying it's not possible. I'm just wondering if in situations like this, I can get better at also communicating if I don't want to hear something or um if other people can as well, or if, if I can get better at asking people if they want to hear something or getting better trying to read um, somebody else's emotional context or getting much better at um having the patients knowing that sometimes maybe these conversations will take longer, because there is more delay, in the communication, like I said, especially if it's asynchronous. And yeah, so I, you know, I hear certain phrases and I think I get frustrated when it's, you know, somebody is an emotional dumper and we attach an identity to it because I think it's a lot more complex than that. I think most people are trying, like if I know that I'm sharing too much and I'm burdening somebody, I feel bad, I'm not trying to burden somebody. Um a lot of times I just either I'm so overwhelmed with what I'm feeling that I uh don't fully recognize what the other person is feeling, or maybe sometimes I just, I just, I don't know, I don't notice it or I I notice it, but I don't get the the, you know, explicit, you know, I don't want to hear this, and so I don't know what to do and who knows, I think it's just highly highly complex, sometimes I don't want to say it because I don't wanna hurt the person's feeling. You know, maybe they're overwhelming me and I got other stuff going on and I don't want to tell them that I'm busy because maybe that I'm the only person that they turn to. There's I think there's lots of reasons why we would not want to communicate such a thing to a person, whether the fact that we don't want to hear it or asking and and uh trying to wait for their response. So there's no answers. I think I just wanted to reflect on that a little bit and kinda show you all a little bit what I'm thinking about and how it plays out in communication, but also in our health, and how some of these conversations we can be so afraid to have or we have them. We don't realize that we're causing pain to somebody else by having them. And I think I don't know, I appreciate when people share with me, even if I'm doing something that hurts them because then they can help me figure out that I can stop. Honestly. I don't often want to hurt other people. And I think a lot of times I just don't know how much pain I'm causing somebody else, so I don't know if this helps you at all. I hope so. If so, please comment and we're eight minutes. I'm gonna stop. All right. I'll talk with you soon. Bye.
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