Dealing with info dump..???! !

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Hey all,

How do you deal with info dump? How does this affect you? Asking as I've no benchmark to really compare it with.. I've the worst case of info dump and the contents of if is making me suicidal. Intensively! no

I'm not able to prevent it from happening and wondering if you have ever felt so overwhelmed from this and been unable to process the information..?

Thanks all.

Dani.

I tend to dump a lot of information at once. I only slowly realized that while I would appreciate such an efficient transmission of information, many others do not.

It can be difficult to take a lot of information in, particularly if there is emotional content to it. The person who has the information may not appreciate the fact that he accumulated the information slowly with appropriate time to build context in which emotional aspects can be muted. If the sum of information is transmitted without allowing the other person to build an emotional safety net, it can be devastating.

The movie "Some Kind of Hero" had Richard Pryor as a returning Viet Nam war POW. He found out in short order his wife had married someone else, he had a kid, his business had been brankrupted, and his mother was ill. While just a fictional story, it represents how difficult it would be to deal with an avalanche of information with high emotional content.

In this situation time is the critical element. Whatever can be done to space out events, delay dealing with some, and distract attention can be beneficial to buy the time needed to begin to construct the mental elements that can hold things in perspective without being overwhelming.

~nods~ I believe I understand. Nov. 7th, 2020 - the info dump to end all info dumps - and I've had some big ones. And yes, there was some pretty challenging content. I've checked with my therapist on more than one occurrence, to verify that whatever you call 'full-bodied sobbing where it feels as if you're being torn apart' can't actually kill you - because it sure feels like I imagine dying would.

Your mileage may vary; this might have been successful for me because it was recommended by my therapist and I trust her, but here it is:

Whenever I'm hit with too much info, I write down everything I can - each on a small piece of paper, and dump the info into a basket. When I can, I take one out and work on it (i.e. process it etc.). The others keep until I can get to them.

Over the years I've come to accept that no one really cares. They'd just as soon not hear my comments.

So, sometimes I get them to ask me a question so that I can answer it.

I seem to have learned to temper it over the years. My posts on WP are often more than a few lines, but they're rarely terribly long. In "real life" I can't easily talk incessantly for long, because I have to keep pausing to think, and a lot of people manage to get a word in when I do pause, which often feels frustrating to me, because I hadn't really finished, but I'm well aware how tiring it can be to have to listen to somebody going on and on about some random subject, so I usually overlook their "rudeness" in jumping in - it's probably the only way they can avoid being made to feel very uncomfortable. And these days I usually bring what I'm saying to an end fairly quickly even when uninterrupted.