If you got shut down in the past for complaining too much, how can you make sure you’re not complaining too much now?
Michelle writes:
I have a question about complaining. One of my biggest resistances is that there is something in me that doesn’t want to complain. This is VERY old and comes from growing up with parents that didn’t want to or didn’t know how to sit in presence with me when I was faced with some big emotions. They interpreted a good majority of what I had to tell them as “complaining.” To be honest, I’m not even sure if it was.
Regardless, as an adult many years later, I am hyper-vigilant to being “a complainer.” Rather than identify with the child who wants her parents to be happy and continue to avoid complaining altogether, or identify as the rebellious teenager who wants to complain ONLY to counteract her parents, how would you suggest I go about getting some clarity around this for myself and find my own truth?
Dear Michelle:
This is such a good example of how a concept that seems to be just a simple common word is actually implicated in a whole emotional Tangle.
You have a compassionate understanding that your parents didn’t have the resources to sit in presence with you when you were faced with big emotions. You see that they labelled what you were doing as “complaining” in order to shut you up, because they didn’t want or didn’t know how to actually help you with your feelings. I’m sad that happened to you.
But at least you do not have to continue to do it to yourself!
It’s time to re-claim and re-name the action you are doing when you tell someone else what you are feeling. To make that easier, imagine you are scrubbing the word “complaining” from your vocabulary. What will you call it now, when you invite someone to help you sit with a difficult feeling? “Sharing”? “Reporting”? “Asking for help and support”?
As you sense in your body for just the right word or phrase, you will be able to feel how innocent and genuine is your need for support and connection around tough issues. Then you can also sense into the part of you that doesn’t want to complain, and find out what it really doesn’t want, underneath all that.
I suspect this will all come together in a fresh ability to honor your own needs… something it sounds like was missing when your expression of your needs was called “complaining.”
