"Last time I told someone it went badly"

You may have tried this before. You told someone and they made it about themselves, or gave advice you didn't want, or said "I'm sure it's nothing", or told someone else. The telling made it worse, and you learned not to.

Lepore's study has the answer to this one too. The students who talked to a dismissive listener, one who treated what they said as unimportant, got much less benefit than those who talked to a supportive one, and less than those who talked alone into a recorder. A bad listener is worse than no listener. Your experience was real and the research agrees with it.

But notice what that finding is about. It's about the listener, not about telling. The same students, with a supportive listener, got the full benefit. What went badly last time was the choice of person, or their day, or the moment, and none of those is a fact about disclosure. It's a fact about that conversation.

So the lesson from a bad telling isn't "don't tell". It's "choose better", and chapter 20 is about how. The person who said "I'm sure it's nothing" is not the only person you know. The one who made it about themselves has a sister who doesn't. The one who told someone else has taught you something about them, and the telling did its job, which was to find out who can be told, at the cost of one bad evening.

There's a version of this belief that generalises further, from one bad listener to all of them, and I'd ask you to notice the shape of that. One person responded badly, and you concluded that people respond badly, and stopped, and the worry has been carried alone since. That's a large conclusion from one data point, and it's the kind of conclusion people draw when the data point confirms something they wanted to believe anyway, which is that carrying it alone is the safe option. It isn't. Chapter 5 is about what it costs. The bad listener cost you an evening. The conclusion has cost you every worry since.