Yep, sharing your trauma should be an exercise in trust and intimacy. One of my SO's parents is a hideously narcissistic person who would trauma dump all over my SO to invalidate any feelings or concerns my SO might have. I like to think that most people trauma dumping are victims who aren't creating another iteration of the victim/abuser cycle (based off of nothing but my own hopes), but there are definitely people who have weaponized it. I'm sorry to hear that you went through that :/ hopefully you're free from those toxic people. My SO did a whole lot of EMDR therapy and has managed to heal from the damage caused by their parent. Hopefully you can find a treatment, process, or mindstate to help you, since it sounds like you still have some wounds from what was done to you.

Having a frank and vulnerable discussion of your trauma with someone you have emotional intimacy and trust with us incredibly important and can help the healing process. I'd highly encourage people to do that.

However, I think the term "trauma dumping" often refers to the practice of sharing your trauma with people who you don't have a close relationship with, or with people who you haven't interacted with long enough to generate trust.

I am a former trauma dumper, and I dumped my trauma all over a person who I should not have. That person turned out to be a very untrustworthy person. Their knowledge of my wounds allowed them to do some incredibly harmful things to me over the course of an eleven months relationship. I managed to escape, but it was a bad move, and I learned to become more careful about who I shared that information with.

Plus, there is always more to you than your trauma. It certainly doesn't feel that way when you're really stuck in it. Hell, me saying that may have just made some people very, very angry. I got really angry when my therapist said that to me, because it felt like she was minimizing what I went through.

I came to understand that she meant I was an adult with passions and a whole life, and that adult is what I should share with people. My wounded inner child is precious and deserves care, and I share that with people who will appreciate that. The adult that I am also deserves to live and see the world, and deserves to be recognized by friends and family. Trauma dumping inverts that.

People stop getting to see the awesome person you grew into because humans are wired to pay attention to wounded children, be they physical or metaphorical. Some people will be tender, some will be dismissive, and a few people will take advantage.

So yeah, please share your trauma when it makes sense to, with people you love and trust. If there's a mutual understanding, then any sadness they feel will likely be offset by the warm knowledge that they've helped you make it through another day and maybe heal a bit more. Let your adult self live your life the rest of the time, and use that adult to give the kid the care they needed but didn't get.

(Wow, now that I'm rereading this post, I feel a strong sense of irony. Like, it's not a trauma dump, but also nobody asked for me to write a fucking essay on this 196 post.)

As others have said, the inner child is an incredibly useful metaphor for trauma/therapy. The way your brain reacts to trauma is to basically create a bookmark of you at that time. If you manage to live through the trauma, then clearly, the way you handled it worked perfectly!

Well, that was probably true in prehistory, but nowadays it's a big fucking stupid liability. Like, for example, say I'm doing my adult job at $company and my coworker Todd Fuckwit (esq.) says something shitty about suicide that reminds my brain of an old bookmark. All of the sudden, my emotional state is transported back to when Young Badabinski saw the results of a parental suicide attempt and thought it was entirely his fault and he deserved it (Important note, this is not regular PTSD with vivid hallucinations/flashbacks, this is more about emotions). Now I'm freaking out in the meeting room and abruptly leave because I feel like a 12 year old who has just had their world ended, and that's what I did back then.

The way you heal this is to try to create a connection with that bookmark of yourself and then give yourself what you needed back then. Over many therapy sessions, I was able to help young Badabinski realize that none of that was their fault, that they didn't deserve to see that, and that they should have had the warm and loving care of both of their parents. And you know what? It really fucking worked.

For more chronic cases (like a lot of emotional neglect), your inner child is just kinda... There? Like, the bookmark part of the metaphor breaks down a bit. Your inner child represents the tender emotions that were left I handled and childhood needs that were left unmet. A lot of my therapy nowadays is helping my inner child feel less deprived and more loved on a day-to-day basis, because if I don't take care of myself enough in the ways I need, then my brain will pull up the chronic inner child and I'll be miserable for days/weeks/months. In contrast, the parts of my life where I've permanently changed my day-to-day behavior feel so much more fulfilling and wonderful. It's not just about avoiding the negatives, you end up focusing more on achieving the positive.

I personally like describing it as a metaphor. I was a bit of an angry skeptic when I was younger (due to the aforementioned parent moving to a bunch of new-age shit after their recovery and then trying to push it on me), so I didn't like how metaphysical and "touchy-feely" an inner child felt. I'm no longer that way and I often think of my inner child as if it were an active presence in my mind (it feels more effective to do so for me), but I believe that explaining it as a metaphor will get through to people who would otherwise spurn the concept.

I'm glad that my grumpy migraine ramblings brought someone some joy!

:( I'm sorry to hear that. Well, for Android there's MaterialFiles, which is fully FLOSS and supports FTP, SFTP, and SMB. Not sure about iOS, but I imagine there are options there.

I hope that your journey through life becomes a little less rocky.

There are definitely a lot of good options out there. What are you using right now for regular old FTP? The odds are actually pretty good that it already supports SFTP. A lot of file management applications do both and lump them together, even though they're completely different protocols (sftp is from the late nineties).

If it doesn't, then I don't know what OS you're using, so I'll just recommend options for the big 3. For Windows, there's WinSCP. For MacOS there's Cyberduck. Most file managers on Linux distros let you just type sftp://me@wherever in the navigation bar, meaning you get a totally seamless experience with the rest of your FS.

You should be able to just use ssh/sftp. There are lots of great clients, and you can absolutely still use usernames and passwords, no public/private key stuff required. You can even use ssh and scp right from powershell on Windows boxen if you're so inclined. There's winscp, and if you want filesystem mounting, there's this: https://github.com/winfsp/sshfs-win
For macos and Linux, the options are far more plentiful.

PART 4.

You expect a file transfer program to reliably and faithfully transfer your files, byte-for-byte, from one system to another. FTP spits in your face and shits on your chest. You know how Linux uses LF (i.e. \n) for newlines and Windows uses CRLF (i.e. \r\n) for newlines? Pretty annoying, right? Well, FTP's ASCII mode will automatically rip off those \r characters for you! Sounds pretty sweet, right? Fuck no it's not. All of the sudden, your file checksums have changed. If you pass the same file back to a Windows user with a different and more sane file transfer system, then they get a broken file because FTP didn't mind its own fucking business. If you have a CRLF file and need an LF file, just explicitly use dos2unix. Wanna go the other way? unix2dos. The tool has been around since 1989 and it's great.

Now, what if you're not transferring text, but instead are transferring a picture of a cute cat? What if your binary data happens to have 0x0D0x0A? Well, ASCII mode will happily translate that to 0x0A and fucking ruin your adorable cat picture that you were going to share with your depressed significant other in an attempt to cheer them up. Now the ruined JPEG will remind them of the futility of their situation and they'll slide even deeper into cold emptiness. Thanks, FTP.

Now, you can tell your client to use binary mode and this problem goes away! In fact, modern clients do this automatically so your SO gets to see the adorable fuzzy cat picture. But let's just stop and think about this. Why use a protocol that is dangerous by default? Why use a protocol that supports no form of security (unless you're using fucking godawful FTPS or FTP over SSH)? Why use a protocol that is so broken by design that small business hardware has been designed to try to unfuck it? Is it faster? I mean, not really. SFTP has encryption/decryption overhead, but your CPU is so fast that you'd need to transfer at 25+ Gb/s to notice it. Is it easier? Fuck no it's not easier, look at all of the stupid footguns I've just mentioned. Is it simpler? The line protocol is simple, but so is HTTP, and HTTP has a much simpler control flow path (merging the data and control planes is objectively the right thing to do in this context). And shit, you want a simple protocol for cases where you don't have a lot of CPU power? Use fucking TFTP. It's dogshit, but it was intentionally designed to be dogshit so that a fucking potato could receive data with it.

There is no task that is currently being done with FTP that couldn't be done more easily, more securely, and more quickly with some other protocol (like fucking SSH and SFTP, which is now built into fucking Windows for god's sake). Fuck FTP.

PART 3.
They made their STUPID MODEMS FUCK WITH THE FTP PACKETS. I have personally experienced this with Comcast Business. The stupid piece of shit DOCSIS modem they provide intercepts the FTP packet from your server saying "oh, connect to this address: x.x.x.x:44010" and they rewrite the fucking address to the public IP. There is no way to turn this horse piss off. Now, for average business customers, this probably saved Comcast a bunch of money in support calls. However, if you're using the so-called bridge mode on that degenerate piece of shit-wrapped-silicon (where rather than allowing the modem to give you a DHCP address, you just configure your system to have one of the addresses in the /29 space and the modem detects that and says oh okay don't NAT traffic when it's going to this address, just rewrite the MAC and shunt it over the right interface), then something funny happens. The modem still rewrites the contents of the packet, but it uses the wrong fucking IP address! Because the public IP that your server is running on is no longer available to the modem, the modem just chooses another fucking address. Then, the client tries to connect to 1.2.3.5 instead of 1.2.3.4, the modem says "hey I'm 1.2.3.5 and you can fuck off, I'm dropping your SYN for port 44010", and I get an angry call from the client asking why they can't download their files using this worthless protocol. I remember having a conversation like this:

Me: "Just use SFTP on port 22!"
Client: "No! FTP is faster/more secure/good enough for my grandfather good enough for me/corporate won't allow port 22."
Me: "Comcast is fucking me right now. What if we lied and served SFTP over port 21?"

we try it

Client: "It's not working! I can't even connect!"

I couldn't connect either. I couldn't connect to anything. Trying to do SFTP over port 21 caused the stupid fucking modem to CRASH.

Are you starting to see what the problem is? It's like Microsoft preserving bugs in Windows APIs so that shitty software doesn't break, and then they end up doing crazy gymnastics to accomodate old shit like the Windows 8 -> Windows 10 thing where they couldn't use "Windows 9" because that would confuse software into thinking it was running "Windows 95" or "Windows 98". FTP has some bugfuck crazy design decisions that we've collectively decided to just "work around," and it leads to fucking gymnastics.

Speaking of bugfuck crazy design decisions, FTP's default file transfer mode intentionally mangles data!

Continued in part 4.

PART 2.

NAT, much like the city of Phoenix, is a monument to man's arrogance. Fuck NAT, and fuck FTP. If your FTP server is listening directly on a public IP address, then none of this applies. If you're anything like me, the last company I worked for (a small startup), or my current company (many many thousands of employees making software you know and may or may not hate, making many billions of dollars a year), then the majority of your servers are living in RFC1918 space. Traffic from the internet is making it to them via NAT (or NAT with extra steps, e.g. L4 load balancers). A request comes in for $PUBLIC_IP TCP port 21 or TCP port 44000-44010 and is forwarded to your failure of a boxen. Your FTP server is a big stupid idiot and doesn't know this. It thinks that it's king shit and has its own public IP address. Therefore, when it's deciding what ADDR:PORT it's going to tell your stupid FTP client to connect to, it just looks at one of the adapters on the box and says "oh, I'll tell this client on the internet to connect to 10.0.54.187:44007" and then I fucking cry. Your FTP client is an idiot, but IP stack on your router is not and says "oh, that's an address living in RFC1918 space, I shouldn't send that out over the internet" and you don't get the results of your LIST.

So, how do you fix this? Well, you fix it by not using FTP. Use SFTP USE SFTP USE SFTP FOR GOD'S SAKE. But since this world is a shit fucking place, you have two options. The best option is to configure your FTP server to lie about its IP address. Rather than being honest about what a fool it is, you can tell it to connect to your public IP address. Does your public IP address change? Fuck you, you get to write a daemon that checks for that shit, rewrites your FTP server config, and HUPs the bastard (or SIGTERMs it if your server sucks and can't do a live config reload).

Let's say that you don't want to do that. Let's say you work at a small company with a small business internet plan that gives you static IPs but a shitty modem. Let's say that you don't know what FTP is or how it works and your boss told you to get it set up ASAP and it's not working and it surely must be your ISP's fault. So you call up Comcast Business/AT&T/Verizon/Whoeverthefuck and you complain at their technicians for hours and hours, and eventually you get connected to a human that knows what the problem is and tells you how to configure your stupid FTP server to lie like a little sinner. The big telco megacorps don't like that. They don't want to waste all those hours, and they don't want to hire too many people who can figure that shit out because it's expensive. You wanna know what those fucking asshole companies did?

Continued in part 3.