The Cult of Oversharing

Have you ever been reading a sales page or scrolling through an email, and then—WHAM—a story hits you?

It’s a deeply personal story. Maybe it’s about childhood trauma. Or a devastating health diagnosis.

And you’re left thinking… “Wait, why do I know this about you?”

If you’ve ever felt weird, uncomfortable, or even guilty for not wanting to know the most intimate details of someone’s life as part of a marketing message, you’re not alone.

Welcome to the cult of oversharing.

Where vulnerability is currency, trauma sells, and you’re left wondering: Am I the asshole for not wanting to hear this?

Let’s get into it.

Online businesses have always had a penchant for personal storytelling. Back in the day, it was all rags-to-riches. “I was broke and living in my car—then I found [insert tactic here] and now I make $100K a month while journaling in Bali.”

But lately? The vibe has shifted. The stories have gotten realer. Rawer. More intimate. And somehow… way less relatable.

On today’s episode, we’re discussing how vulnerability has become a marketing strategy and how that creates ethical landmines for both the audience and the business owner.

Share Your Story: Advice Gone Awry

Somewhere along the way, “share your story” became the gold standard for online business marketing. Coaches and strategists shouted it from the rooftops: Be vulnerable. Be real. That’s how you connect. Storytelling sells.

While there’s truth to that as humans connect through storytelling, it’s gone seriously off the rails.

We’ve gone from sharing your “why” to dumping your deepest wounds into a sales funnel. And that’s not vulnerability—that’s emotional labor as lead gen.

When we share traumatic events as our marketing message, we are asking the reader to bear the weight of the emotional disclosure.

We’re not here to shame anyone for sharing hard stuff. However, there’s a significant distinction between genuine connection and exploiting empathy for conversion.

Why It Feels So Damn Weird

Let’s talk about why these overshares leave us feeling uncomfortable—or even guilty for feeling uncomfortable.

Enter: Social Penetration Theory. (I can hear my college boyfriend doing his Beavis and Butthead impression right now). .

This theory, proposed by Altman and Taylor in 1973, likens relationship development to peeling an onion. You start at the surface—hobbies, hometowns, weather, small talk. As trust builds, you go deeper.

Orientation Stage: Is the outer layer of the onion – we don’t know the other person, so we engage in surface-level small talk.
Exploratory Stage: We begin to reveal more about ourselves to gauge the reception and to determine if we can trust each other to move forward.
Affective Stage: We go deep, feeling safe enough to be vulnerable
Plateau Stage: We’re in a deep relationship

In online business? We’re skipping straight to the core of the onion—the affective stage, where we’re talking about trauma, addiction, divorce, and illness. And all of it is disclosed in a single Instagram caption to thousands of strangers.

But real intimacy requires mutual disclosure.

Social penetration theory assumes mutual self-disclosure. But parasocial relationships are one-sided. So the audience is left holding someone else’s pain, with no real relationship to anchor it.

When a friend reveals something deeply personal, our instinct is to support our friend. “How can I help?” When our parasocial relationship reveals something traumatic, the only way we can help is to buy what they are selling.

And that feels weird. Because it is weird.

Why They Do It (and Why It Works—Sometimes)

So why are people doing this? It’s not just for catharsis. It’s strategic.

These disclosures are designed to build trust and likability, two key ingredients in the buying process. It’s the “I trust her because she’s been through so much” effect.

Vulnerability has become performance. And once it’s rewarded with engagement, praise, and purchases? The incentive is to keep going.

But that can backfire. Because when you cross into sharing what should be private in a public space—especially with people who don’t know you—you trigger discomfort, pity, or worse: judgment.

Maggie voxed me the other day after seeing one of these posts. She said, “I don’t want to know this. But now I do know it. And I feel like the asshole for feeling weird about it.”

You’re not the asshole. You’re just having a normal reaction to an unnatural level of disclosure. It’s too much, too soon.

The Dark Side of Performative Vulnerability

Let’s name what this really is: the weaponization of vulnerability. When pain becomes a part of the pitch, they’re not just sharing—they’re leveraging trauma to influence behavior.

And once vulnerability becomes a performance, it’s nearly impossible to know what’s real. That erodes trust, rather than building it.Additionally, it places undue pressure on business owners to exploit their worst moments in the service of the brand.

That’s not healthy. That’s not healing. That’s content farming.

How to Protect Yourself (and Your Business)

So what do we do with this? Here’s what to look out for:

If someone’s story leaves you feeling emotionally hijacked, trust that instinct.
Ask yourself: Is this being shared to help or to sell?
Remember that real relationships require reciprocity. A one-way trauma dump isn’t a connection—it’s a content strategy.

And if you are a business owner, you don’t have to rip open your deepest wounds to be successful. Your expertise is enough. Your integrity is enough.