Instrumental complaining … THAT we can handle, when used appropriately, like complaining to your doctor about symptoms. Even the second kind of complaining--expressive complaining--is OK when it actually achieves the purpose of releasing the negative emotion that is building up inside of us.
The problem … the problem is when we grumble and complain and grumble and complain and never feel the release of emotion. In that case, we must be looking for something else. Something deeper.
What are we really looking for when we complain? We want to connect with someone else, to be heard by someone else, to be UNDERSTOOD by someone else.
That’s why we start out so many of our conversations with complaints --because when we complain, others respond to us. They sympathize with us. We connect with others through our complaining.
But if we never learn to move on from the complaining, we get stuck there. If we never learn another way to connect with others, eventually people will tune us out or change the subject, or even worse, avoid us altogether.
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