From various court hearings to the 12 hour long ban that sent half of the world into despair—2025 has been quite the year for the popular social media app, TikTok.

Aside from all the legal conflict, TikTok has produced some quite entertaining trends this year.

One of the latest trends includes the creator of the video starting off the video with someone hypothetically telling them “You’re so funny!” followed up by the creator saying “Thanks…(insert traumatic experience they’ve had).”

Some of the experiences shared include:

• “‘You’re so funny,’ Thanks. My sister-in-law has signed my unborn child up for adoption TWICE.”

• “‘You’re so funny,’ Thanks. In middle school my identical twin brother was voted most attractive in the yearbook, and I wasn’t nominated.”

• “‘You’re so funny,’ Thanks. In seventh grade I decided to stop talking for a year to prove to my sister’s therapist that I wasn’t the cause of all her problems.”

• “‘You’re so funny,’ Thanks. When I was in elementary school I watched my grandma fall off this exact stool I’m sitting on and have a stroke. I had no idea what was happening. The school bus came and I said bye, walked out, got on the bus and left her on the floor.”

Essentially the trend is a funnier way of trauma dumping, which means to tell someone about a traumatic experience with no warning or invitation. Trauma dumping has a bad connotation surrounding it, but why should talking about your feelings be bad?

Yes, there are definitely some situations or places where you need to keep your feelings to yourself for a moment but TikTok is not that place. Far worse things have been shared on the platform that people don’t think twice about, but the second people are showing emotional vulnerability, it’s a problem?

Many people have been upset by this trend saying that it shouldn’t be normalized to trauma dump to millions of strangers on the internet. However, no one is being forced to watch these videos. Like any other trend there’s going to be many people participating, but that never means someone has to take part in the trend or even watch the videos.

Through this “trauma dumping” trend people have been levitated to open up about hard topics. Since Elementary School it’s been taught that it’s better to express your feelings rather than keep them bottled up, and this trend is doing its part in allowing people to reveal hard experiences they have gone through. The trend may be silly but it is performing as sort of a form of therapy.

Yes, talking to strangers on the internet instead of a licensed therapist is obviously different. However, not everyone has access to therapy so turning to a personal social media platform can be a plausible alternative. It may not be ideal, but if trends like this one are helping people cope with their emotions, so be it.

Not only can this trend help the creators of these videos, it has helped the viewers by exposing them to people who have had the same experiences. One of the hardest parts of undergoing a traumatic event is how alone someone can feel. It’s hard to open up about these types of situations when there is no one that can share the hurt, but through this trend thousands of people are finding others who have gone through the same experiences. Looking at the comment sections of these videos you see people opening up about the fact that they have too experienced some of these events and bonding with people who they can relate to.

No one should be judged for having feelings and wanting to share them, and this trend is doing more good than harm. In allowing people to open up and relate to others, this trend is “So funny” and also extremely helpful in regards to getting people to share their feelings, even if it’s with strangers on the internet.