Trauma Dumping Is What Friendship Is For
The instinct to reach for someone is healthy. The voice telling you not to burden them is not.
On her Substack, The Biology of Becoming, Pamela Cantor, M.D. writes about a young woman who told researchers she takes her hardest nights to a chatbot because she doesn't want to "trauma dump" on her friends. Dr. Cantor looks at the belief underneath that choice: that a young person's inner life is a burden on the people who love her.
Drawing on research on shame, co-regulation, and perceived isolation, she makes the case that the instinct to reach for another person is healthy, and that sitting with someone through a bad night gives them something their body needs and cannot supply alone. She closes with a simple way for adults to help: go first, and let a young person see that being honest about a hard moment doesn't cost them the relationship.
