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.
I could not care less if what I say seems like “venting”. My life was fucked up, I had to deal with stuff and we are having conversations. If you wanna talk, eventually those subjects will show up. Same goes to my friends and mutuals. Bro I don’t care if you want to talk about how pretty the moon is or how scary it was in the mental hospital, I’ll treat it all the same: someone talking about their experience in life or someone talking about a subject.
I may be more open to emotional topics because I’m a survivor myself, because I’m autistic or because I’m Brazilian, or all of the above but thing is: if you wanna talk, I’ll not judge
