Doesn’t have to be about over traumatic-related things, but just in general, things you don’t like talking about. Whether it’ll bum you down, distract you or vice versa.
I don’t like talking about work, my job and how the week went. All it’ll do and has done, is make me dread of upcoming work weeks even during my time off. I hate being asked the typical question “how was your day at work?” any other time. Because the answer is just going to be unsatisfying and I get annoyed even having to answer that question. It’s not that I’m hiding anything, it’s just that it’s fucking work and it is the same damn thing every night. I put up with stupid fucking people, even dumber co-workers and I work in a system that is massively ungrateful for what you do for it.
That’s all you’ll ever need to know about it, so stop trying to get me to talk about that shit.
I can’t think of a subject that I categorically dislike talking about. My dislike for conversation usually has more to do with the attitudes of the people I’m having the conversations with. Conversation requires at least a minimal agreement to take what your conversational partner says into account, otherwise it’s more of a lecture. Lots of arguments are people who have already convinced themselves of their rightness lecturing at each other, and it tends to be a repetitive recycling of old points and counterpoints. Pretty boring, rhetorically.
It can be useful to deliver a lecture, especially if it’s invited. That’s basically what venting is. I grew up being taught that if I didn’t have anything constructive to say I should just keep it to myself, and that’s still a position I find myself defaulting to, but it can be helpful to try to frame the petty grievances of daily life into words, especially if you have a sympathetic and willing audience. I don’t have a specific example to share that doesn’t reveal too much about my personal life, but I’ll just say that the insights that come from venting were surprising. I think the act of putting thoughts into words can make it easier to think about those thoughts.
For example, I don’t think I’d ever considered venting as a form of verbal journaling, but that’s kind of what it is. At least, there are some interesting similarities. I don’t know if that would have occurred to me that way if I hadn’t written my thoughts on the matter out.