Having a traumatic childhood means you cannot talk even objectively about your basic foundational experiences without it being "venting", even if you're not actually venting. You just straight up have a huge chunk of your life you can't talk about, full stop, without it being trauma dumping.
And it not being socially acceptable to talk about your own childhood is super alienating. Sometimes people want to know why, and any answer you can give them is going to be off putting.
It's to the point I get irritated when something I said is framed as venting when I'm literally just talking about my life experiences, doing my best to keep emotion out of it.
when I was in high school, I overheard two older students talking about a friend of theirs.
One of them said something like, "it doesn't bother me that [Friend] was in residential mental health treatment, I just wish they wouldn't talk about it ALL the time".
The other replied, "Well, that was all of last year for them. So when they say 'when I was in treatment,' it's like when you say 'last year'."
I try to remember that any time someone says something that sounds Shocking to me. sometimes one person's scary special crisis is another person's last year.
If you want to be accepting of mental illness, you need to accept the fact that some people's everyday lives are going to be terrifying to you. That doesn't mean they don't get to talk about it. Stop forcing hurt, isolated people to become even MORE hurt and isolated because you can't fathom toughening up a bit.
My therapist asked me this week; "what's behind your fear of talking about your flashbacks and memories?" It's my homework so I've been thinking about it a lot and I've come to the conclusion that a large part of it comes down to protecting the person I'm talking to. People are so desperately uncomfortable with the subject matter, it's so utterly abhorrent to them, that they can barely handle an overview of what was done to me, let alone the graphic details in my flashbacks. So I stay quiet, afraid of making people uncomfortable by sharing a part of what made me me.
Pretty fucked up really, innit?
