Before he became a dating coach and started dating with some finesse, Benjamin Camras would often make a serious mistake on first dates: Nervous to meet someone new, he’d make it weird by oversharing some insecurity or intimate detail about his life.

“I thought that if someone knew all of these things about me, if they had the totality of my story and could understand why I am the way I am, it would make it easier to love me,” said Camras, a North Carolina native and the host of the “Flirtations” podcast.

Dating requires vulnerability to build trust and an emotional connection, but as Camras learned firsthand, it’s easy to overdo it. More often than not, his habit of divulging only pushed new people away.

“I now recognize how unfair it is to shoulder difficult experiences onto someone we are just starting to date before determining if they even have the emotional availability to hold this information,” he told HuffPost.

“Often, our overshares aren’t about something lighthearted and fun but some difficult experiences,” he added. “It’s just too much too soon.”

What Camras was doing back then now has a buzzy, highly searched dating term: floodlighting.

Originally coined by Brené Brown, floodlighting refers to the tendency to overshare emotionally weighty content about your life in the hopes of fast-tracking intimacy between you and the other person. All too often, floodlighting backfires, especially when we’re dating.

“Oversharing? Not vulnerability; I call it floodlighting ... A lot of times we share too much information as a way to protect us from vulnerability,” Brown wrote in her 2012 book, “The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connections and Courage.”

If your overshare is met with an elongated pause or your date seems genuinely weirded out by what you’ve told them, you get confirmation that you’re just Too Much for them.

Brown writes that a floodlighter may then think, ”‘See? No one cares about me. No one gives a s*** that I’m hurting. I knew it.’ It’s how we protect ourselves from vulnerability. We just engage in a behavior that confirms our fear.”

Because sharing is such a slippery slope ― share the right amount, and you’re an emotionally aware, therapized person, share too much, and you’re an emotional wreck ― the phrase is hitting a nerve with many.

“Vulnerability is healthy, floodlighting isn’t,” said Brandon Gescheidle-Fein, a marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles.

If we divulge extremely vulnerable, personal details to a quasi stranger in a superficial way, we shouldn’t be surprised if met with confusion or discomfort, he said.

“You have to ask yourself: What are you actually trying to accomplish?” he said. “What would the various potential reactions mean to you? Are we just trauma-dumping without having built some semblance of rapport and trust?”

When she was actively dating, Lilia Hope Souri, a marketer and social media influencer in New York City, shot herself in the foot quite a few times by floodlighting.

On dates, she’d perform a heightened, hyper version of herself ― someone who was “loud, over-the-top and who’d spill every personal detail” ― and see how her date would respond: Were they entertained (which would feed her craving for attention and guarantee a second date) or bewildered by her (in which case, there was no use continuing with them)?

“I think in some twisted way, it made rejection feel like less of a blow,” Souri told HuffPost. “If people didn’t choose me, at least I knew they were rejecting the most exaggerated version of me, not the real me.”

“Over time, I’ve learned to find a sweet spot ― being genuinely vulnerable without floodlighting,” she said. “The goal is to make people feel safe, not overwhelmed.”

While it’s true that some of us are just oversharers by nature, there might be some cultural reasons floodlighting is on the rise, too: With more people in therapy ― or at least more people familiar with therapy-speak, for better or worse ― there are more people talking freely about their emotions, Gescheidle-Fein said.

Daters are keen to assess for emotional intelligence (as they should be) and want a partner who has “done the work” ― maybe even been in therapy themselves. Singles understandably want to be efficient daters, and floodlighting a person might seem like a way to do that, Gescheidle-Fein said, but people have got to slow down.

“There’s a difference between organically engaging with life’s discussions and immediately waterboarding a date with our deepest traumas,” he said.

Floodlighting doesn’t exist in a single-person vacuum, either. We can overshare with new acquaintances as well: Maybe you’ve moved to a brand new city and are hankering to find new friends because you miss your old ones and could really use a sounding board

“As we crave this immediate closeness, trying to emulate the longstanding trust and intimacy we once had, we might floodlight to accelerate the bond, which often backfires as people feel overwhelmed or pressured to reciprocate,” Gescheidle-Fein said.

How to cut back on your floodlighting

Recognize yourself as a floodlighter? It’s easy to do it in the haze of a first date, but we come bearing advice.

Pay attention to how your date responds when you share emotionally weighty stuff.

When someone is floodlighting, they tend to disregard any cues that the listener is overwhelmed or uncomfortable, said Saba Harouni Lurie, a marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles. If you think you’re floodlighting, try to observe your conversation in the moment, as if you were a fly on the wall or a nosy person eavesdropping at the table over.

“Pay attention to how you’re engaging and what is happening before you overshare, during and afterward,” Harouni Laurie said. “Really try to be aware of how the other person responds and how you feel after.”

Is your date at a loss for words or otherwise flustered now that you’ve let that slip? Are you asking them, “Do you know what I mean?” or “Does that sound crazy?” as a way to seek reassurance and validation that they don’t think you’re a total weirdo? Do you feel embarrassed, exposed or regret having said what you did? Those are all classic signs of an overshare.

Get comfortable asking your date questions instead of trauma-dumping.

If you tend to overshare because you feel ill at ease meeting new people, find ways to regulate and slow down in those moments, Harouni Laurie said.

“Learn to ask questions,” she said. “Take risks and share things about yourself while balancing that with active listening and paying attention to the other person’s cues and response.”

Remember: Those early dates should be fun, not a therapy session.

Dating should be fun, not a trawl through your latest therapy appointment, fascinating as that all may have been.

“Just as you want to ensure a partner’s emotional intelligence, you can’t forget to prioritize a sense of playfulness and enjoyment,” Gescheidle-Fein said.

A deep connection ― where you both feel comfortable sharing ― only comes with time and steady, mutual vulnerability.

You have to learn to start safeguarding your heart.

Camras, the dating coach, said he ultimately learned to stop oversharing by learning to trust himself and protect the more vulnerable sides of himself: Not everyone needs immediate access to your inner life or what you’ve gone through. Let them work for it.

“I now trust myself to demonstrate vulnerability in the early dating process without giving my whole heart away,” he said. “I believe that I am deserving of a love that is built on consistency and trust, which can only be developed over time.”

He doesn’t hold back in dating, but he’s more careful now. “I bring in other aspects of vulnerability, like letting someone know when I’m thinking about them, showing interest, and making time for someone I value and want to get to know,” he said. “But I safeguard parts of my story for when the time is right.”