Go Ahead and Overshare. It Might Give You the Answers You're Looking For

One of the reasons it took me six months to publish my last post was its vulnerability: I described my own nervous system's responses to various situations, what some would call "triggers," of my personal traumas.

The post took six months to publish not because I feel I have anything to hide, but more because of the box I've been hiding behind for a good decade and a half at least: "professionalism." I was afraid that in between the (apparent) end of my journalism career and the (maybe) beginning of my emergency management career was a me who overshared and, to paraphrase a meme, bled all over people who hadn't – or had, but didn't realize it – cut me.

All of that, however, is exactly why I needed to share. Oversharing is a thing, but so is calling "oversharing" on people who need to get it all out there as part of a process of getting their arms around what happened so that they can begin to shape their own narrative.

In other words, our discomfort with people's messiness and truth – often a reflection of our own – prompts us to tell them to tone it down. In doing so, we tell people their whole selves aren't welcome. That they're unacceptable in polite society. That it's not safe for them to contribute anything but what someone else says is OK.

That's in everyday life. In the aftermath of disaster, the damage to a person's interrelational capacity, and thus their capacity to ask for and receive help, is already done.

When people can't overshare, they go silent instead

One of my favorite genres of LinkedIn post (yes, on the platform known for tone-policing professionalism) describes how these issues impact the delivery and receipt of services of any kind.

"Big tech often prioritizes 'scale' over individual safety, and developers are frequently trapped in a bubble, failing to realize that their product can be misused as a tool for coercive control," wrote Anna Czaplińska, an advocate for human rights and neurodiversity in a post about human trafficking.

"You cannot call yourself trauma-informed if the moment a traumatized person starts telling the truth, you punish the truth," wrote Linda Barnett, an author and researcher who is not at all shy about "over"sharing. She went on to note:

"Trauma-informed means... you know a human being under chronic strain may repeat themselves, may sound intense, may struggle to sequence events neatly, may appear “too much,” may have waves of fear, urgency, grief, anger, vigilance, exhaustion.

"And instead of using those signs as evidence against them, you slow down enough to ask what happened to make the body speak that way.... If your system only knows how to honor trauma when it is quiet, photogenic, and easy to manage, then you do not understand trauma."

Added Stella K., a consultant on how systems fail women:

The sector is highly fluent in the language of trauma-informed practice. The structural conditions required to deliver it consistently have not kept pace.... A service does not become trauma-informed through policy alignment, value statements, or training completion rates.

It becomes trauma-informed when its structure can sustain what the approach actually requires:

– continuity of relationship
– time for relational depth to develop
– enough operational and emotional capacity for staff to respond rather than react.

Without those conditions, what remains is intent.
And intent does not regulate experience....

For women whose histories are shaped by rupture, coercion, and chronic unpredictability, inconsistency does not register as a minor limitation.

It shapes trust.
It shapes safety.
It shapes whether a service feels containing or destabilising.

And finally, from Garrison Courtney, a litigation support consultant and mental health advocate:

When someone leaves prison, they are already carrying a tremendous amount of skepticism. They’re trying to find housing, employment, transportation, healthcare, and stability. The last thing they need is another promise that leads nowhere.

Over time, many returning citizens simply stop reaching out.

They don’t stop because they don’t need help. They stop because they’ve been disappointed too many times.

These posts deeply echo my own experience with various systems: family court. The criminal justice system. Health and human services. Financial empowerment and economic mobility services. At each turn, I found systems designed, it seemed, for everyone else but me.

I struggled to articulate where I was and what I needed, either because I didn't have the words to describe it or because I didn't know what options existed to help shape my request. In applying for aid following Hurricane Helene, in fact, confusing instructions and qualification criteria almost made me give up. In other cases I shut down and went silent, an old trauma response to the sense that not only wasn't I being heard, but also that the person assigned to help wasn't that interested in finding out why.

In other words, as psychologist Elliott Conklin wrote, also on LinkedIn, about why therapy is not about safety: "People come to therapy for reasons that don't fit on a single axis.... The inner life is various. To read all of it through the lens of threat and safety is to flatten the thing you were hired to understand."

Mass care is complicated. Community care doesn't have to be

It comes back to the "scale" issue Czaplińska identified. Systems, including those meant for disaster relief and recovery, are designed to help as many people as possible. Those delivering mass care don't have the time to sit and listen, to make room for individual stories; individual needs are deprioritized in the name of survival.

In the immediate aftermath of an earthquake or hurricane, this is reasonable: rescue and life support vs. death. Beyond the immediate aftermath, though, the line begins to blur.

The United States' National Response Framework (NRF)'s Emergency Support Function #6 (Mass Care) Annex acknowledges the need for, for example, "...hot or shelf-stable meals, infant formula, baby food, snacks, beverages, and food packages, as well as diverse dietary and culturally appropriate meals (e.g., low sodium, low fat, vegetarian/vegan, halal, kosher)."

Whether services can actually deliver, though, is the key question and probably one for a different post. Funding and political will drive decisions on care delivery, and as we've seen by now throughout too many disasters, systems fail during events no one expected.

To some extent, individual emergency preparedness can offset some of these issues. Medications and medical supplies kept in a "go bag" are a prime example, but the advice to keep them assumes people can financially afford to keep an emergency supply on hand. It also assumes the emergency supply isn't buried under earthquake rubble or submerged in floodwaters or blackened in a wildfire.

And these are just some of the physical issues individuals can have after disasters. As the above LinkedIn posts articulate, people's emotional and behavioral responses run a gamut, too. Fighting, fleeing, freezing, and fawning each comprise a range of responses that might shift from situation to situation, or depend on who else is around.

Or, as I wrote recently about my graduate studies:

It's apparent to me that the current system is built to manage people's immediate needs, the logistics and supplies that are a lot easier to procure and manage than, say, temporary shelter from your damaged home and your abusive family member and that's accessible for your lifelong – or newly diagnosed – disability, or therapy that can help you process the disaster, last month's layoff, last year's divorce, the previous year's job loss, and the deaths of loved ones the year before that.

We live in a complicated world made more complicated for our limited understanding of how human brains and relationships work. But just as individual and community preparedness can offset limitations in the delivery of systemic "mass care," our personal responses to questions like the ones posed in Love Rebels can supplement the kinds of scientific studies whose funding was recently cut.

Thus, in helping us better understand ourselves and how we show up, those responses can form the underpinning to the kind of community response that can help us and our neighbors get all our needs met.

Did you answer Love Rebels' questions? Drop a comment and describe how!