Venting to your people is healthy. Turning the group chat into a nightly trauma recap is something else entirely
The group chat is sacred. It’s where you send memes at 2 a.m., coordinate birthday dinners that never actually happen and occasionally say things you’d never put in an email. It is one of the last great joys of modern friendship, and nobody is here to take that away from you.
But somewhere between the funny videos and the “okay so what happened was—” messages, a lot of group chats quietly became something else. Less hangout, more debrief. Less laughing, more processing. The bad date recap turned into a nightly ritual. The job stress updates became a running thread. The family drama never really got resolved — it just got retold, with new details, to the same people, who are also dealing with their own versions of the same thing.
And everyone keeps typing. And nobody is actually okay.
Venting is not the same as healing
There is real value in telling your friends what’s going on. Being heard matters. Feeling less alone in something hard is genuinely useful and not a small thing. But there’s a version of venting that stops being relief and starts being a loop — where the same problems get aired in the same chat to the same people, and nothing changes except everyone’s stress levels go up together.
That’s not support. That’s synchronized suffering with read receipts.
At some point, the group chat becomes a place where stress gets shared but never actually addressed. Everyone nods, everyone sends the right emoji, everyone says “that’s so valid” — and then wakes up the next morning to do it all over again. The comfort is real, but so is the ceiling. You can talk about the same situation forty-seven times and still be exactly where you started, just with more people who know the details.
Bonding over struggle has a shelf life
There’s a kind of closeness that forms around shared pain, and it feels like community because it is — at first. But when the only thing holding a group together is the ongoing collection of everyone’s worst moments, that starts to calcify into something less like friendship and more like a mutual agreement to stay stuck together.
It’s comfortable, in the way that staying in bed when you should get up is comfortable. It’s warm and familiar and requires nothing from you. But growth tends to happen in the opposite direction of comfortable, and a group chat that only makes room for struggle quietly makes it harder to talk about anything else — like progress, like change, like the fact that things might actually be getting better.
Your friends love you and they are not equipped for this
This is not a criticism of your friends. They showed up. They read the long messages. They sent the voice notes. They care about you, which is exactly why it’s worth saying clearly: your friends, no matter how much they love you, are not trained to carry what a therapist is trained to carry. And asking them to do that job — repeatedly, for free, inside a group chat — is a lot.
It’s also a lot for you. Because if the only place you’re processing hard things is with people who are also struggling, you’re essentially asking a group of people without life jackets to keep each other afloat. The intention is everything. The math, though, is rough.
The goal is community that actually moves forward
None of this means stop talking to your friends. It means notice what the conversation is doing. Is the chat a place where people vent and then figure things out, or is it a place where venting is the whole activity? Is there room in it for good news, growth, lightness — or does joy feel slightly out of place there now?
The best group chats hold all of it. The mess and the wins. The hard weeks and the good ones. That balance is worth protecting, and sometimes protecting it means taking the heaviest stuff somewhere else — to a professional, to a journal, to something designed to actually help you move through it rather than just sit in it together.
Your people deserve that version of you. Honestly, so do you.
