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Venting doesn’t work

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Re: Venting doesn’t work

#141

Post by Llamamoe »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #109

From my purely anecdotal experience with mentoring younger people, I've seen two main categories of venting: 1) Venting about frustrations by talking them through with someone who will listen. This forces people to put their frustrations into words and elucidate the narrative as they put it into words. This can not only help people identify their feelings and work through them, but it also forces people to decide wha…

I can't speak for everyone, but as a person with unmedicated ADHD and chronic fatigue, I feel pretty hostile to sentiments like this.

In my experience, people who engage in #2 aren't - as you seem to be implying - people who are immature and lazy.

A lot of the time they're people who struggle with the executive function necessary to actually change their life, who feel helpless and just want validation after having been made to feel insane by the #1 crowd - crowd who gives them obvious (non)solutions like "eat healthier", and "just exercise more!", and shits on them if they claim it doesn't work for them or can't do it.

People love to rationalize why and how those people are motivated to not solve their issues instead of acknowledging that, just maybe, they really can't do better, really need help, and just gravitate towards the only crowd that won't treat them like moral failures for it.

I have been disabled by overwhelmingly debilitating fatigue for a third of my life, and human tendency to treat every attempt to describe my struggles as excuses to debunk so I finally "stop feeling sorry for myself" has been dehumanizing. The victimization isn't made up. People who REALLY struggle are systematically gaslit and abused by the overwhelming majority of people. The moment people catch wind of your inability to take care of yourself, they treat you as less than human and make up one reason after another to blame you for your struggle and exclude you from deserving empathy.

Rant over.

Re: Venting doesn’t work

#142

Post by krinchan »

dvtrn wrote: post #140
PaulHoule wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this http://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/why-estrange... and example of type (2)?

Sheesh I was not ready to read that, nor get as hooked in as I did. Some of those bullet-points are things I've witnessed first hand in an 'IRL' parenting group from some now ex-members.

As an estranged child I was not ready to read that. Sent it to my other sibling (also recently estranged from the family) and we're both just...in shock.

Re: Venting doesn’t work

#143

Post by bittercynic »

Llamamoe wrote: post #141
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #109

From my purely anecdotal experience with mentoring younger people, I've seen two main categories of venting: 1) Venting about frustrations by talking them through with someone who will listen. This forces people to put their frustrations into words and elucidate the narrative as they put it into words. This can not only help people identify their feelings and work through them, but it also forces people to decide wha…

I can't speak for everyone, but as a person with unmedicated ADHD and chronic fatigue, I feel pretty hostile to sentiments like this. In my experience, people who engage in #2 aren't - as you seem to be implying - people who are immature and lazy. A lot of the time they're people who struggle with the executive function necessary to actually change their life, who feel helpless and just want validation after having b…

I do not want to diminish the importance of your perspective in any way, only to add that some in the #1 camp are teetering on the brink of "able to take care of self" and not withholding help to be cruel, but because they think helping might pull them over the cliff, too.

Wellness has big steps sometimes, and if you tumble down a step it may take a long time to get back up, and your ability to help yourself, and anyone else, will be diminished.

Re: Venting doesn’t work

#144

Post by slumpa »

kstenerud wrote: post #40

I think they've missed the point. Venting isn't for catharsis; It's for seeking validation. When you vent TO someone and they lend a sympathetic ear, it's a huge help. Venting is a social bonding ritual. You generally don't get this online because most of the audience is NOT sympathetic, so you'll get criticism after criticism, making things even worse.

Exactly, thank you! This article just read so bizarre to me - who thinks that venting is supposed to change your opinion about the matter? It felt like reading a headline like, "Researchers find that cardio vascular exercise doesn't help increase shoe size"

That's not what it's for. It's for getting thoughts out of your head, having the opportunity to articulate strong feelings that might otherwise be fuzzy, and for feeling heard and supported.

If changing your opinions is the goal, venting is pretty clearly not the way to get there.

Re: Venting doesn’t work

#145

Post by allmodelsRwrong »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #109

From my purely anecdotal experience with mentoring younger people, I've seen two main categories of venting: 1) Venting about frustrations by talking them through with someone who will listen. This forces people to put their frustrations into words and elucidate the narrative as they put it into words. This can not only help people identify their feelings and work through them, but it also forces people to decide wha…

I may not have read your post correctly but why do you think "seeking sympathy and confirmation" is mutually exclusive to a "mature response"?

There is a tendency I have seen in people in the tech industry to try to problem solve everything. Like debugging a bug. In my experience this creates unhealthy relationships. Sometimes all we can do is listen and say, "yeah that sucks, I'm sorry".

Re: Venting doesn’t work

#146

Post by wintermutestwin »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #109

From my purely anecdotal experience with mentoring younger people, I've seen two main categories of venting: 1) Venting about frustrations by talking them through with someone who will listen. This forces people to put their frustrations into words and elucidate the narrative as they put it into words. This can not only help people identify their feelings and work through them, but it also forces people to decide wha…

>It becomes an in-group thing where you need to adopt an outward appearance of being very frustrated to fit in with the other people in the group.

Very important point. Similarly, many self-help groups trend towards a culture of "wound worship."

Re: Venting doesn’t work

#147

Post by mike10921 »

krinchan wrote: post #125
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #109

From my purely anecdotal experience with mentoring younger people, I've seen two main categories of venting: 1) Venting about frustrations by talking them through with someone who will listen. This forces people to put their frustrations into words and elucidate the narrative as they put it into words. This can not only help people identify their feelings and work through them, but it also forces people to decide wha…

So is 1 basically rubber ducky debugging but for social situations? Because I do this pretty often by myself. I feel it does require a certain level of self-honesty and I've often used good friends (the ones who I know will call me on my BS) as sounding boards to double check my conclusions.

Rubber ducking for non-technical issues. Love the concept

Re: Venting doesn’t work

#148

Post by Blackstone4 »

Llamamoe wrote: post #141
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #109

From my purely anecdotal experience with mentoring younger people, I've seen two main categories of venting: 1) Venting about frustrations by talking them through with someone who will listen. This forces people to put their frustrations into words and elucidate the narrative as they put it into words. This can not only help people identify their feelings and work through them, but it also forces people to decide wha…

I can't speak for everyone, but as a person with unmedicated ADHD and chronic fatigue, I feel pretty hostile to sentiments like this. In my experience, people who engage in #2 aren't - as you seem to be implying - people who are immature and lazy. A lot of the time they're people who struggle with the executive function necessary to actually change their life, who feel helpless and just want validation after having b…

I can see where you are coming from. At my work for instance, we will take on those with good people skills and the intelligence to learn the technical skills they are missing. We are reluctant to do it the other way round. We avoid those who have the technical skills but not the people skills because common wisdom and experience indicates it is much harder to teach the people skills… I would add that we are not equipped to help them get up the curve. The thought process is that once you teach someone able a technical skill, it generally sticks. Soft skills tend to be harder to teach and problems recurring in nature…this results in time sinks. This might be perceived as unfair but it is a reflection of the world we live in…and generally they are practical observation. People and businesses need better tools/methods/education to help people but right now there is little incentive to do so…we, as a society, are more focused on gender and racial equality than mental health equality.

On a personal level, if I have to invest too much of my time or energy managing someone else’s emotional state on an ongoing basis…then I’m not interested in maintaining that relationship. Maybe because I was once in a toxic, draining relationship which almost destroyed me..I am maybe more alert or sensitive to these issues.

Re: Venting doesn’t work

#149

Post by XorNot »

krinchan wrote: post #125
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #109

From my purely anecdotal experience with mentoring younger people, I've seen two main categories of venting: 1) Venting about frustrations by talking them through with someone who will listen. This forces people to put their frustrations into words and elucidate the narrative as they put it into words. This can not only help people identify their feelings and work through them, but it also forces people to decide wha…

So is 1 basically rubber ducky debugging but for social situations? Because I do this pretty often by myself. I feel it does require a certain level of self-honesty and I've often used good friends (the ones who I know will call me on my BS) as sounding boards to double check my conclusions.

(2) is rubber duck debugging (written in a condescending way).

The point of rubber duck debugging is the duck isn't talking back, or questioning why the code exists, or why the project exists, or suggesting different programming approaches - it just sits there while you work through explaining it and listening to you.

Re: Venting doesn’t work

#150

Post by Delk »

antisthenes wrote: post #23
JAlexoid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know of a single study that supports catharsis? Because all studies I know of disprove or end up inconclusive.

I know catharsis was extremely helpful in my grieving process. Realistically, I'm not sure how you would even design a study to accurately measure the effects. Any sort of cathartic experience would necessarily be self-reported and we all know the accuracy of self-report studies.

I've seen someone close to me have some kind of a cathartic process and get a lot better. It also required finally facing (at least some of) their emotional blocks or trauma, so it's not like venting alone did much of anything. But I'm pretty sure that if they hadn't got the opportunity to air a lot of their previously suppressed feelings in emotional safety, the rest of it also wouldn't have happened.

I don't think aggressive venting alone is going to do much, but whenever I come across one of these studies that purport to show catharsis as not existing, I can't avoid feeling there must be more to the story.

Some people are also going to interpret "catharsis/venting does not work" as meaning it's perfectly wise to not listen with actual empathy and just slam solutions at people instead. But that also doesn't work.

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