People may disagree with me on this, and that is okay. I’m mostly just walking through the landscape of my thoughts.
I’ve struggled throughout my life with focusing on the negative side of things. It may have started when I worked for the federal government in the Park Service (there was a lot of griping at the park I worked at), or it may have started with the people I grew up with. I don’t really know. What I do know is that I’ve had a tendency throughout my life to spend a lot of time pontificating with others about things I don’t like, disagree with, or about my limited-view perceptions—and their limited-view perceptions—of the world and the people around us.
Most of the time we called this “venting” as a way to soften what it really was and make it sound like a necessary and healthy thing to do. But as I look back, I can tell you that very little good ever came from venting. What did come from me venting was the following:
I strengthened the negative perceptions or ideas floating around in my mind because the more I talked about them, the more I believed them—especially when the friends I was venting to agreed with me, even if they were just trying to be nice, which may have been the case. I mean, who wants to tell a negative person who vents a lot that you disagree with them and get on their bad side? That might put you on their venting list.
When I told myself, “venting helps me feel better,” it did, in that it helped me release the pressure building up in my mind to verbally express my negative perceptions. But my negative feelings toward that person or situation remained after I blabbered about it. And, not surprisingly, they continued to get worse because my belief in them got stronger every time I griped. Then, because my belief got stronger, my brain looked for ways to confirm those biases and beliefs by finding more reasons to feel upset over the things or people I vented about.
When I vented my frustrations, I ended up spreading my distorted negative beliefs to others, and when I did that, the following happened:
- I created a negative and stressful environment for everyone.
- I invited others to feel the negative feelings I was trying to get rid of, which was not very considerate of their well-being.
- I invited those who had a more balanced perspective about the situation to think less of me.
- I harmed those I was venting about because others—who before didn’t see a problem with that person or situation—may have started treating my victims differently as a result of what I was spreading.
So what, then, is a venter to do? I suppose the first thing would be to get to the root of the problem, which I think may not be the fact that an injustice has indeed been done to me, but instead dealing with the pressure to talk about the distorted thoughts that are afflicting me. The second thing would be to un-distort those distorted thoughts. The problem is most people don’t believe their thoughts are distorted. I had a friend who told me she wasn’t a pessimist or an optimist—she was a realist. The interesting thing is that her “realistic” thoughts and perspectives were mostly negative. Don’t fall into that trap.
There is an old adage that says, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Many would argue that if you suppress negative thoughts, they will only fester and make things worse. I think a better way to look at it is that if you stew over negative thoughts, they will get worse—but if you let them go and replace them with more positive and realistic thoughts, the feelings will go away, as well as the pressure to talk about it.
I have learned from experience that if I don’t have anyone to talk to, after a few hours—or a day or two—the feelings and the need to talk about it will eventually go away on their own, like a storm. But who wants to feel that nagging pressure and negative feelings for hours or days? No one.
I’ve also found that mindfulness meditation can be very effective, but it also takes some effort—especially when you are strongly emotionally charged—to get to the state where you can see the thought and just let it go. The more you practice, the easier it becomes, but that takes time and practice.
The best thing I’ve discovered so far is the various techniques that have been around for thousands of years and that are now frequently implemented in modern-day cognitive behavioral therapy. These are techniques that invite you to challenge your negative thoughts and see things from a different perspective, allowing you to transform your feelings and beliefs almost instantly.
The key is to identify new thoughts that are 100% true and that you 100% believe. Thoughts that well-meaning friends and family try and impart to you usually don’t meet those criteria, which is why they usually fail to change your mind and are mostly just annoying. To discover emotion-altering, perspective-changing thoughts you first have to be open to finding them and second have to use the right techniques that can help you see a perspective you are missing because you are blinded by your current thoughts and emotions. There are too many to list here, but if you are interested, a good starting point would be Dr. David Burns’ Feeling Great.
It’s a powerful and empowering thing to watch a negative thought—one that you believe 100% to be true—change in an instant to be 100% false, and for a more positive thought that removes a good portion of your stress and frustration to take its place. A thought that you now believe to be 100% true.
So enough with the venting. No good comes of it and you are only making things much worse for yourself and others.
There is nothing so bad that whining about it doesn’t make it worse.
— Jeffrey R. Holland