I am talking about “venting” as used to mean complaining/ranting about something that is on your nerves, in the hopes that having complained/ranted about it, it is now out of your system and you feel better.
In my experience, this very rarely works as advertised. Occasionally, especially if it’s just some petty or minor annoyance, I’ll feel better just having shared it with someone else. But more often what happens is that by talking about it, I start thinking about it more and more, and finding more aspects of it that totally irritate or enrage me, and then by the end of having “vented,” I’m feeling angrier than I did when I started. It resolves nothing. I think the “blowing off steam” model of getting over your anger is fundamentally flawed.
It depends on who you’re venting to – if you haven’t got friends who are sympathetic or have connections (e.g. ‘You hate your boss? I know someone who’s hiring!’) you will likely be worse off than when you started. Plus if you go on too much about it to coworkers or friends of friends, you may acquire a rep for being a whiner, even if you don’t deserve one.
Agreed. I do hang on to the anger when I vent “anonymously” online in comparison to venting to my real-life friends. OTOH, retaining that anger pushes me to make real decisions instead of just letting the same shit slide by time and again.
It can also depend on what you’re venting about. I found that venting to friends and my other miserable housemates helped me to tolerate my psycho housemate for the remaining couple months that we had to put up with her.
On the other hand, I could probably vent about my mom until I put everyone into a coma but since I know she’ll never change and the problems will always remain the same, it’s only a temporary relief. Soon the anger just replenishes itself and it feels like the venting was pointless which is why I try not to vent too much about things that I know won’t change (despite how good venting does feel at the time.)
I don’t know, sometimes it works like that for me. If you’ve got a friend who just parrots back to you with “oh my! that’s horrible! I can’t believe that!” sort of nonsense, then it will just make the situation worse.
on the other hand, I vented this morning to a couple of friends and it helped a lot. They didn’t just validate what I was saying and tell me I was completely right. They pointed out things that I had missed and helped me feel a lot better about the situation. They gave me some good advice. I’m really glad I talked to them about it.
Venting anger doesn’t work. In fact, it is clinically proven that it makes matters only worse. Freud used the metaphor of a steam engine, and the idea of “letting off steam” is still common, but it turns out that the mind is not a steam engine.
Everybody complains. I find myself saying “I’m just venting” not because it’s supposed to make me feel better but because the person I’m talking to 1) wants to help me solve the problem or 2) seems to think I’m directing my annoyance at them. I don’t want solutions or scapegoats – I just want people to know I’ve got crap to deal with so they won’t try to saddle me with more crap. For that, venting works just fine.
From personal experience - I gave up complaining for Lent, unless the complaining itself was meant to remedy the situation. (Such as, “OW! That hurts! Stop stabbing me!”) Sometimes it was VERY hard, and I really felt like venting to someone would take a little of the steam off. Instead, I focused on thinking if there was something I could do to remedy the situation, and if not, I tried to think of something I had to be thankful for. I can’t say whether or not it “worked,” but I found myself to be much more cheerful after about a week of it.
I’d totally recommend trying it for a few weeks, just to see how you feel.
Yeah, me too. Sometimes people even come up to me after a good venting, and our conversations go something like…
Person: Are you okay?
Me: Juh?
Person: You were mad and hollered about x,y,z.
Me: Oh. That was, like, five minutes ago. I yelled about it and now I’m fine.
Then again, I’m not sure if the venting has anything to do with it. I don’t really get mad too often, and when I do, it’s for two minutes tops. The venting is probably just for fun.
This is also my take on venting and it’s effectiveness, especially when I’m on the receiving end of it. Venting can rapidly downgrade into wallowing which is unproductive, irritating and boring.
I couldn’t care less about what they “proved” in a clinic, seeing as I live in the real world and sometimes find venting the only thing that keeps me from exploding with rage.
Venting gets my raw emotion out of the way. I then calm down and start to deal with the situation rationally. Venting by itself solves nothing, but I think it can be part of a process.
Venting doesn’t work for me. I don’t like to show my “unpleasant” emotions or give any semblance of losing control. I will discuss it with one or two people and then let it slowly trickle away. I did try venting once and it just made me more upset because it just enhanced those raw emotions I tried so hard to keep in check.
I think that kind of proves the point. The people who feel justified in venting are the very people who feel that they could “explode with rage”. Venting often is simply “exploding with rage” instead of dealing with the feeling in another way.
I want to clarify my OP somewhat; I am not saying that it doesn’t feel good to “vent”, or that there aren’t legit reasons that you might want to do so. I just disagree that it works to get rid of anger. In my experience, the anger is still there. I may feel somewhat less explosive about it temporarily, but the underlying issue remains. A lot of people seem to think that venting is this therapeutic thing that you can do to relieve tension, but I don’t think it really works that way at all. At least not in the long term.
