What's Keeping You Stuck? Complaining
My work as a therapist and coach gives me a lot of exposure to people trying, succeeding, and failing at change. Add in my own experience (and failures) with personal growth and I know a lot about what it takes to see real change in your life and what can hold us back.
I think it’s important to know what potential quagmires lie ahead as you continue on your journey to personal growth and self-actualization. This can help you to not only avoid the traps but get out of them faster if you do fall in. Insight doesn’t always produce change but it sure does help us on our way to finding it.
One of the biggest traps I see people fall into is complaining. Now, let me preface this with an acknowledgement that a certain amount of complaining is normal and healthy. All complaining actually is is expressing your dissatisfaction about something and sharing that with a friend or associate is normal. We are social creatures.
Like most things in emotional health, the question is about the frequency or intensity. Complaining relieves stress and can even garner us support when we need it the most. However, if you complain all the time or never take the additional step of actually doing something about the situation, then its very easy to get stuck.
Complaining can feel good. It’s a release of the issue or stressor, allowing us to vent about what we don’t like or what has hurt us. As I said earlier, complaining can even help to rally the troops, enlisting friends, family, or coworkers to help.
BUT complaining on its own never really solved a problem so while sharing your experiences and venting to trusted people about your stress is a very healthy thing, you can’t stop there. It’s so easy to get stuck on what other people are doing so you don’t have to look at yourself.
The truth is that most of the things we complain about, we could change in some way, even if its just changing how we respond to it. If we don’t take the time to identify the sources of stress in our life and find better ways to manage or mitigate it, then we are doing ourselves a real disservice.
If you’ve been complaining about someone or something for a long time, then I challenge you to take a look at your role in the situation. Is it time to find a new job? To leave that partner who treats you bad? To not let your mother emotionally manipulate you?
Whatever the issue might be, the question is how can you change so that situation doesn’t impact you this way anymore? We can’t always change situations or other people’s behavior but we can change how we participate, if we even participate at all.
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