There are already two posts about this but it bears repeating. I figured it would be better to share the ideas I have in a single post as opposed to fragmenting them in the form of comments. The text below consists of a few theoretical paragraphs, followed by a story and the lessons I learned from it. Feel free to skip to the last part if time is of the essence.

Confiding in others is burdening them with your own responsibilities. You'll notice it rarely ever is a one-way transaction. In the case of a therapist, it's financial in nature. But in most cases, the other person will attempt to dump their own problems onto you in return. At best, this will result in commiseration, a process that lures you in a misplaced sense of comfort that, in turn, encourages you both to stagnate in mediocrity. At worst, the weaknesses you shared will be used against you later on. Very few people will offer you a solution or lend you an ear while expecting nothing in return.

And even if the other person does take it all without expecting anything in return, your secrets will become a weight on their minds because from then on, they would have to resist the urge of sharing them during juicy gossip sessions that low-SMV folks refer to as "socializing". When you tell them "don't tell this to anyone", what they really hear is "don't tell this to anyone I've met". In their mind, as long as your anonymity is safe, they can relieve the itch by spilling the beans to whomever is within earshot. What they seem to forget, however, is that it can be traced back to you one way or another. For instance, the person to whom they told your secrets might become an acquaintance of yours in the future, or they can guess your identity from the context of the secret.

In my experience, this behavior is rampant among women, but men are also guilty of it, especially the older established men that TRP tends to glorify. This was a tough pill for me to swallow. When I shared a table with the men I looked up to, it was eye opening to see them resort to such lowly tactics to make themselves feel good. More often than not, you'll hear people say that you don't need to worry about how others perceive you because they're too concerned about how they themselves are being seen. In reality, people are rarely introspective enough to do that. Most will focus on your insecurities to take their minds off of theirs.

The perceptive readers among you will point out that I'm doing the same thing at this very moment, spreading people's weaknesses in an anonymous manner to take it off my chest and to make myself look better than them. They would be right in saying so. This, however, is something I had to do in order to drive the point home. This is also the first time I did it in a while. And, for what it's worth, I did confront the men I mentioned about this.

Now for the mini field report. This is a different kind of field report, but bear with me. As is the case for most of the field reports that get posted here, this one reads like a work of fiction. But this is exactly how how it happened.

I knew an innocent-looking woman who prided herself in being the person people went to when they needed to talk about their problems. She told me her """male friends""" would call her about their suicidal thoughts and she'd talk them out of it. Suicide carries a certain stigma in my culture, especially among men. In my mind she was a saint doing God's work. I later found out she spied on my purposely unlocked computer. I returned the favor.

You can tell a lot about someone from looking at their Facebook, especially from a first person perspective if you catch my drift. That's how I had the fortune, or rather the misfortune, of seeing what was really going on. I sipped my coffee as this woman's toxic personality revealed itself to me in real time. She was doing the same thing to her orbiters, dumping the weight of the secrets she'd accumulated on them, but the power balance was shifted in this case. They would ask her how she was doing and she'd proceed to write entire paragraphs about her life in a woe-is-me manner, complete with virtue signaling and fishing for compliments. She'd even tell them about her boy-related problems. And they ate it all up. Then she'd tell them so and so confided in me about this or that, copying their words verbatim from one chat window to another, sometimes even pasting a link to their FB profile while mocking them behind their backs.

I cut ties with her afterwards, but she had me fooled. Luckily not fooled enough to open up to her.

Lastly, apologies about the verbose and autistic writing style, it's a doxing countermeasure.

Lessons learned:

  • Think twice before venting to someone. If need be, pay a therapist. If you're religious, confess to a priest or pray to God.

  • If you do decide to vent to someone, at least do so while keeping in mind the consequences of such an act. Do it progressively. Test the waters by throwing them a bone and gauging their reaction. If they prove to be trustworthy, keep them close but don't develop dependence.

  • It is better to lure people into a honeypot than to keep them out completely, that way you learn their motive. If I'd kept my machine locked with a password, I would have never found out about any of this.

  • Be aware of stereotypes, but don't judge a book by its cover. Old men are often seen as wise and experienced, but don't assume that's always the case. Innocent-looking women project an aura that entices you to trust them, but they aren't always as innocent as they seem.