Social Sharing of Emotion
Social sharing of emotion is the near-universal habit of telling somebody what happened after something emotional happens to you. Bernard Rimé's research programme established that people do this after the overwhelming majority of emotional episodes, quickly, repeatedly, and largely regardless of education or culture. The finding people do not expect is that it does not reliably make the feeling smaller. What it reliably buys is closeness to the person listening.
What it is
You have a bad meeting and you tell three people about it by the end of the day. Each retelling puts you back inside the meeting: your pulse rises, the irritation returns, the listener's face registers it too. At the end of the day you are closer to those three people than you were in the morning, and the meeting has not shrunk.
That is the shape of Rimé's conclusion, and it runs against the folk model almost everybody carries, in which talking about a difficult thing lets some of the pressure out of it. The sharing is real, the closeness is real, and the deflation is the part that does not show up in the measurements.
This is a description of what sharing does, not guidance about what anyone should do with a difficult feeling. It would be a serious misreading to take it as a reason not to talk to anybody. Nothing here says that telling someone is a mistake, and this page makes no recommendation in either direction.