A red flag doesn’t mean you should get away from that person straight away.
They are forms to defend your peace, mental health, and well-being.
There are levels of red flags of course, like when someone has stolen an egg from your fridge without your permission compared to someone who invaded your personal space, like your room and went through your stuff.
The second person you keep them away. The first one might be hungry and have no money, talk to them.
Anyways, a red flag I’ve noticed recently is about people who open up to you without even knowing you that well.
They met you one day and they are already telling you how their parents are horrible, and how they were toxic to them, or how their friends abandoned them or betrayed them.
How life is unfair or how they were victims of a familiar dynamic.
As I said, that could indicate loads of things, for example, a person that is trying to manipulate you by making you feeling pity for them.
“Poor person, I should do whatever it takes to make them feel better”
That is where people-pleasers become a prey.
They smell pleasers from kilometers away.
Most of these behaviors are unconsciously projected though.
Even the people-pleaser is projecting, so it becomes a feedback where the pleaser will do everything for the supposed victim.
The “victim” will also please the pleaser as they “need” someone to fulfill the desire of please others for the wrong intentions.
Sometimes, though, you’ll met genuine people who are just tired of all the bullshit that has been going on in their lives.
They’ll feel like they can trust you and your presence makes them comfortable to share things they never felt like they could share with other people.
As I said, there are levels, but be aware in any case that you should already show some boundaries.
It is very easy for those people to become dependent on you and sometimes we can also take advantage from it.
So, if you feel like, listen to them, but let it clear you’re not their saviors, nor their constant support person, the one sent by god.
In general it is just a heads up.
Ps: it is worth to mention that I’m not saying that everybody who overshares is a bad person.
I said some people might try to manipulate you with that behavior and that’ll be an unconscious dynamic they’ve learned from their childhood.
That might be even worse if that dynamic feedbacks itself. (For example a people-pleaser and a narcissist)
People with ADHD tends to overshare and that is a total different thing.
I’d say that that could be worked out as well, but believe me I’m not talking about this kind of oversharing.
I do talk about my traumas with other people, but to emphasize what I’ve learned, how it affected who I am and what I am doing to overcome it.
Don’t get me wrong, you can talk about your trauma as some people complemented below.
But first make sure you acknowledge the person in front of you.
Make sure you are not just dumping your frustrations on them.
That is important for you as well, why would you share such personal things with someone you barely know? Especially if it is something that still hurts you.
All I’m saying is, make sure you have a friend in front of you, a friend that really listen you.
Otherwise, how many times are you gonna tell people the same stories?
Be careful as well to not make traumas the mainly topic of your life.
You’re not them, that was part of your story but not who you are.
If you think you don’t have anything to share in a conversation instead of your wounds, you might need to discover what truly gives you joy, and then you can find people to talk about the same topics.
And don’t get me wrong, talking abt how I overcame traumas is one of my favorite topics.
But more in a rational way, how that affected me, what steps I’ve taken to overcome it.
I don’t like though to relive it every time.
Also, I’d be totally there if a friend of mine wanted to share anything with me and wouldn’t mind if they overshares in the conversation, because I know them at a certain level already.
I feel like some people are desperately trying to create a connection with you, or sharing their deepest traumas so one day they might find someone who validates them.
That’s where I say, those people are victims of themselves, and you can engage, but taking care so you nor they get hurt at the end.
32 comments
Red flag is just a term people use to describe traits and behaviours they don’t like. It’s subjective.
I think the main thing I dislike about strangers who speedrun venting is that they don’t care about getting to know *me* and are just looking for the nearest free therapist. The feeling of being interchangeable – that I could be replaced with a dog and they wouldn’t notice a difference – makes me immediately want to run away.
For my own clarification, is it that the person shares too much too quickly, or that what they share is exclusively negative? Does it make it any better if they can share what they learned from the negative experience, or find a positive twist on a negative situation?
I’m trying to figure out how guilty I am of this particular red flag myself.
You are projecting. Sometimes people feel more comfortable opening up to a stranger than someone they know.
Hi I’m very confused rn 😀
I am that “red flag person”, I am open book, I am very honest, but at the same time I am a people pleaser and will go out of my way to make people feel good or accommodate their needs, while not needing to be accommodated myself as I am very self reliant 😀
I don’t vent because I need a pity party, I just want to spread awareness that people who have drawn the short straw in life can still be nice and interesting, but I guess it backfires most of the time as everyone just wants us to act like “nothing happened” and honestly it’s frustrating. It’s like you bring a broken moldy flower from a dumpster and get angry at it because it’s not growing normally like a new store-bought plant hyped up on fertilizer would.
I have recently learned to STFU, but some people literally look for this – “why do you dress in black?” “I like it” “Why?” and 5 “Why”s later I end up talking about how my father is a waste of space 😀
Or last time this one girl was like “I am the youngest child, I am spoiled by my parents…do you have siblings?” “Yes…I’m the youngest” “OH THEN YOUR PARENTS MUST LOVE YOU NO?” “Sorry… no C:” ….SORRY I CAN’T LIE….
Sorry, trauma is a big part of us…. that is why you have public speakers who went through kidnappings, r*pe, etc etc. To spread awareness, to give hope to those who are going through it.
well sometimes those people have nothing to say except their struggles, or they arent able to carry on a normal conversation … personally sometimes it is hard to speak about some personal stuff so I focus to do so and sometimes I end up with complaining conversation even though It wasnt an intention
Wow, some pretty varied responses in this thread. Not suprisingly, this is a topic people seem to care about.
First I’ll say that I enjoyed reading your post. Your points seemed clear and I liked how you formatted it. I especially liked your definitions and examples of red flags.
I tend to agree that opening up too fast is a red flag. I think you left out one possibility for why it happens, which is that some people just don’t have good boundaries.
You could look at the situation as someone over sharing because they are trying to manipulate you (or having a ‘fuck it’ attitude). For me personally, I like looking at it from the perspective of what tools/skills people have or don’t have.
Someone else in the comments mentioned how you could be mistaking over-sharing for being open because you have trust issues (or something similar to that). That is certainly the case for me, so maybe it’s something for you to keep in mind as well as you continue to explore relationships.
>But let it clear you’re not their saviors, nor their constant support person, the one sent by god.
This can come across as super toxic. You might wanna paraphrase that into whether or not you’re comfortable with the interraction rather than saying “i’m not your saviour”
Because the whole point in venting isn’t to get your problems solved.
But yes, communicate if you don’t feel comfortable with it. Tell them you aren’t equipped to deal with that situation. Interrupt them if you have to.
Please also let it be known that therapy is an answer, but not a short term one for some people. In my country I legit have to wait 2 years to get into my first session, so it can come across as dismissing someone because you don’t give a shit.
But yeah, be like “Hey that sounds like a really fucked up situation you’ve been through (give your genuine opinion on it), however I’m not equipped to deal with this, and because of that it’s making me feel super uncomfortable.
* Have you looked into getting therapy?
* Do you have anyone else you can talk to about this?
* You might want to call Samaritans.”
This seems to happen to me a lot on first dates 😐 I’m not into it.
Yeah this is sound advice. Even if it’s not malicious, people that overshare a crazy amount when you’ve just met them often have hugeeee boundary issues.
And as I’ve learned the hard way, you want to establish a boundary early on with them otherwise they’ll drain you of your energy by constantly trauma dumping
Trauma dumping is a bit of a faux pas, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it a red flag. Sometimes people just need somebody to vent to…
Having emotional connection before sharing really matters a lot.
Oh most older adults see this as a red flag.
I would bet that most people learn this red flag in their early 20s.
Not really a red flag imo.
>The term fawning, which refers to over-explaining trauma, was first coined by Pete Walker, MFT. “Fawn types seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs, and demands of others,” he wrote in The 4Fs: A Trauma Typology in Complex PTSD. “They act as if they unconsciously believe that the price of admission to any relationship is the forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences, and boundaries.”
>In short, psychotherapist and Stryke Club co-founder Nicole Brooks, says that as a result of PTSD, some people revert into extreme forms of people pleasing in which they over-explain themselves in an attempt to diffuse conflict and reestablish a sense of safety.
>Additionally, Dr. Porter points out that fawning behaviors can develop as a result of being told to hide your emotions as a child. After hiding emotions for so long, they can become tricky to process. “If a person has a difficult time identifying their feelings or they’re not in touch with their feelings because they’ve been taught to depersonalize emotions, eventually they can develop fawning or over-explaining behaviors,” Dr. Porter says. “If the person feels like they were brought up in a home where they were not allowed to be a leader and they never took that leadership role, they identify in a way that they become a follower and pleaser.”
https://www.wellandgood.com/over-explaining-trauma/
>6. Over or under-sharing and explaining.
Related to our use of stories to empathise is the way we often overshare information about ourselves and overexplain where we are coming from. Again, this can be a bonding exercise. It can also be connected to the above mentioned needing the ‘truth’ or the right facts all of the time. There have been many occasions when an autistic person may have told someone things about themselves that might seem inappropriate or ‘too much information’ to other people but to us, once the topic has arisen, we may feel not mentioning it would be like lying by omission…and lying makes many of us extremely uncomfortable. Many autistic people also like to make sure (probably because we are so often misconstrued) that we are being clear so will also overexplain things (the length of this article might be a good example of that – we really would like to make it an awful lot longer!). However, many autistic people have been stung by oversharing/overexplaining or simply aren’t confident enough to do it in the first place and then we often go to the other extreme and undershare or underexplain. All of these can end up making us look untrustworthy to non-autistic people as it can look like we’re justifying or lying when we go on too long or that we’re hiding something if we don’t say enough.
https://www.autismunderstanding.scot/information-hub/autistic-communication
Interesting. I have Autism and CPTSD and I “trauma dump” all the time. The Autism means that relating to someone means telling them a story about something similar that was shitty which happened to me. I am also excessively expressive so when people tell me about something bad which happened to them, I will make such an upset face because I am empathetic and feeling pain because of their pain that people start consoling ME, which is weird. Idk what to say to people’s trauma other than “that sucked” or some acknowledgement that it was probably shitty, but really I have no way of truly feeling their pain and experience as they did in the moment when whatever thing happened so it’s not like I could really know how truly horrible it is. I just know my own horrors and traumas.
I also have ADHD so I have all these backstories and tangential things and it will take 5 minutes to get to the point because I tell the story and then make the point that connects everything. This is probably a big part of why I have no friends. My life is also shitty as hell due to a lifetime of trauma, more abusers as hell, and constant discrimination and living my adult life in poverty and extreme control, so I have no idea how I am supposed to talk to people in a positive way when there is really nothing good to talk about on my end other than whatever thing has caught my interest that it’s a goal I want to do only for things to turn out horribly and even situations to come about that I crash and burn and have to ask for help.
Yup my ex did that. Telling me about all the guys, her household. Then acted like I was god.
Then it all changed. A year and a few months later, broken up and I don’t know up from down left from right. My brain is completely fucked up.
I have a strong feeling she was screwing all my friends, including my plug. She physically and emotionally abused me. I mean I mighta caused some of the arguments, but she made it seem like if she wasn’t with me, she wouldn’t be crazy. She gaslit me, called me insecure. I felt like I was picking up on things while I was with her, then she’d gaslight me call me crazy, and I felt like I was going crazy. Her fantasy trumped my reality and my gut feelings. Never have I had so many dreams and premonitions. Some of the stuff would happen in front of my face and she’d deny it all and make me question myself. Because then she’d pull up that sweet innocent helpless act and I’d be reeled back in.
I still look at her social media and some days says I’m wondering if I’m crazy, for thinking the stuff I do. No one buys what I say, and it makes me question myself. Not gonna go into too much detail but I believe she was bpd.
Craziest shit I’ve been in. It was like a movie, and I learned so much from living through that shit. But some days I wake up still thinking about her.
**If they’re sharing info with you like that, and it’s toxic info about their fucked up life, run away because they’re trying to make you the savior. You might actually be for a lil bit. You do one thing off and you’re the devil, and they will try to hurt you immensely. Don’t get me wrong when you’re the savior the moments are so good. That’s why I’m addicted**
I know several people like this in my workplace. When I started at this job I fell victim to trying to please them, sympathising and trying to justify any of their actions. Their lack of boundaries with their own personal matters and their manipulative invasive questioning has meant I’ve disclosed when I really didn’t want to. As a private person I’ve regretted ever giving these parasites gossip (because despite being supportive and even reluctantly confiding, this is how I was repaid).
Since I’ve kept my distance, remaining polite and civilised, but offering no more. Some people are really unworthy of your time, effort and thought. Put your energy where it’s valued.
(Edit: I know this isn’t the case for all over-sharers. Some at least are appreciative of you and don’t just talk to you about their problems. It’s when you’re just consistently talked over and talked at when you know that person is just dumping their problems on you for the sake of it)
I just want to caution you that sometimes a VERY recent trauma is hard to NOT share. People that just got hit with really bad news can be in shock and just blurt shit out. I mean by that they might have issues, and they might not, it’s just hard for some people during shock to keep it all bottled up.
That’s either Anxious Preoccupied attachment style or covert narcissism, or combination of those
the way i JUST cut off someone like this a few days ago and today i get this on my feed😭😭agree x1000
This is called “Trauma dump”
The condescending tone in this as if you’ve discovered fire is hilarious
I’ve had guys trying to date me do the info dump too many times. Tell someone all the reasons they shouldn’t want to date you, then act surprised and indignant when they reject you.
A little aestrik side note thing to keep in mind is ADHD people can overshare because ADHD is a constant chemical understimulation, so normal conversations can cause anxiety, which one can interpret as being anxiety from the social situation (it feels the same chemically).. so the person ends up oversharing or overtalking to relieve the anxiety.
So they arent doing it to please you, but rather, themselves.
I am used to do that somewhere in between. Like explain my origin story but for the right reason but unconciusly wrong intentions. I sought validation and empathy. And sometimes when i feel its neccesarily i still do. But nowadays i learn that as you get older every one is fucked up and has loads of luggage because thats what getting older mean. You gain experience and life is often hard. No need to explain that to others. We all are the same.
> There are levels of red flags of course, like when someone has stolen an egg from your fridge without your permission
Perhaps one of the most important red flags of them all. There is no place in polite society for these ovum offenders.
It’s a red flag to share too much and too little…apparently there “just right” but noone know what that is.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned that most people don’t want you to unload your personal shit onto them unless they’ve expressed that it is okay.
I mean…some people have a tendency to overshare..but that’s doesn’t neccesarily mean that they are bad or have some bad intentions.🤷♀️
I used to do this. I would skip over all small talk and initial phases of getting to know someone and trauma dump. I made my trauma my entire life and thought that’s who I was. Many uncomfortable silences and absolutely horrified looks on people’s faces made me realise it’s not okay to trauma dump. (Oh and I went to therapy.)
A variation of this I’ve found are the ones that can sniff out a troubled person and within seconds you are ALSO oversharing. They can pry truths from you that would normally stay hidden while they espouse about their difficult childhood.
As a person who has the face that tells people to tell me all their fucking problems…
I know way to much about people I’ll never meet again.
This isn’t strictly speaking a red flag. Yes, oversharers can be annoying and problematic but sometimes it’s just that they have someone to speak to who aren’t instantly dismissive and that resonates strongly with the social part of our brains. It truly becomes a problem when they want you to be involved as a solution to the problems. This is where the BPDs show up.