Venting doesn’t work

People do not vent anger. People vent frustration. Anger is usually a follow-up because the person does not have a motion forward or solution to the frustrating element.

In my experience people vent their frustration because they are stuck in their thinking and instinctively want to share it with others in hope the trusted person can give a way out, or comfort them.

Please do.

There's a possibility that I'm using the term catharsis completely wrong, so I'm not taking the study at face value.

I've never heard of people equating venting with catharsis or linking them logically.

To me, catharsis is something that occurs rarely, to some people, after a tragedy. It's sort of an emotional closure that lets you move on in peace.

This is an interesting one particularly when it comes to listening well in intimate relationships— the wisdom is that men are generally worse listeners and have a tendency to want fix things rather than just being present with their partner to understand how they are feeling and where they are at. And that learning to do this and learning to ask for it, are important pieces of long term relationship success.

All of which makes sense, but I do think some of the times when I've struggled with this was maybe tied into what your describing: a concern that while my partner's feelings of hurt or whatever were total valid, I found it hard to separate validating just the feelings while not also validating what I felt were unfair judgments/characterizations about the people or situations involved, and was nervous that letting those judgments go by unaddressed was indeed going to cement them as a future factual reference point.

There is likely no good medium- or long-term benefit to venting, especially when it's defined as physical violence directed at objects or verbal aggression directed at people. That's pretty clear.

But one of the best pieces of advice my therapist gave me was that under extreme stress, sometimes the only path to making it to the next minute intact is to do something where the long-term benefit isn't clear, or even negative. In those moments, the best we can do is focus on preventing harm to others and minimizing harm to ourselves. (This isn't just about venting, but other stress and trauma reactions.)

If a situation is so terrible that there's a chance of having a more brutal breakdown (or in my case, a suicide attempt) if we don't throw a plastic cup at a wall, or scream out the pain, or otherwise do something stupid for that short burst of peace with a relatively high cost, then we won't make it to a point where we can reflect on how we got there, and how to actually get to a better place in the medium- or long-term.

Cycles of venting are bad, because constantly venting means constantly being under stress, which means it's harder and harder to step away from it to recognize the sources of the stress and break that cycle. But as a response to a peak in stress, or a sudden trauma, it's a tool - not the best tool, not even a good tool, but if it's the _only_ tool I can reach in time, the advice I got (for myself, which I am not a therapist, and which may not be relevant to you) was to not second-guess whether to use it.