Venting Is Healthier Than Suppressing, but We Can Do Better
This is another one of those articles where I’m taking on a commonly accepted behavior and turning it on its head. Of course, this sometimes results in readers wanting to tar and feather me, but that’s the risk I have to take. What’s the behavior that everybody says is so healthy and fabulous?Let’s start with what I mean by venting. In brief, it’s when we get something off our chest. Something that’s bugging us, tormenting us, aggravating us. Like what? You’re passive-aggressive colleague at work weasels his way, yet again, into getting the better assignment. You get home from work and vent to your wife that you’d love nothing more than to knock his block off.A mom at your kid’s school acts as if she hasn’t met you when you’ve met her at least five times. You vent about this to another mom friend of yours at school pick up. Your mom blows off babysitting your kid, her grandkid, forcing you to cancel dinner plans at your favorite restaurant. You vent to your husband, for the 1,568th time, about how awful and selfish your mom is. You see an Instagram post with your ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend looking annoyingly happy, even though she broke up with you only three months ago. You call your buddy up and vent about what a shallow person she is, and was. There’s nothing wrong with any of these reactions. It’s just unloading a pile of frustration and tension. Great.Before moving further, though, let’s take a page from the Mickey Singer playbook on the three ways we can respond in a stressful situation. They are: Suppress, express and watch. (I wrote an entire article on this subject, link here.)I’ll explain using the grandma who blows off babysitting her grandson. Suppressing would be if the daughter tells her husband, “It’s alright. Maybe she just isn’t feeling well. I didn’t really want to go out for dinner anyway.” In other words, she’s taking her anger and pushing it back down.
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