This is my mother exactly. Yes, she does have significant disabilities. I have not forgotten them. I do not need her to whine at me when she needs something by saying “i’m bliiiind, you know.” I KNOW you are blind, Mom. She has always manipulated me and my sisters, just as lobotomyboy63 says and we have a low tolerance for it. It drives me crazy that she can’t just ask outright for help, but must always try to get a pity party started. I try to respond calmly and ignore the whining but I frequently fail. Habits of a lifetime are hard to break.
My Boss has a sister like this. She is mentally challenged and has diabetis. She definitely drew the short stick in the gene pool. She always smokes cigarettes, weed and crack and eats whatever she wants to, so she is significantly overweight. She survives on her family’s money, lives rent free, and has a hobby of picking up free loading, abusive men.
She had a stroke, was on dialysis, got a kidney transplant, and is now back on dialysis and waiting for another kidney transplant. How many people can fuck up three kidneys? While she was waiting for her first transplant, the Boss did suggest that everyone in the office be tested as a donor.Fortunately, I am not medically able to be an organ donor.
The woman whines about everything, and is always mooching off of people. If she sees you with a candy bar, she wants some and complains if you say no. I never give her anything. Sue me.
She has a daughter is intelligent and good looking, only she is her mother all over again. She did not graduate high school and basically hangs out all day, smoking stuff and doing nothing. When her boyfriend beat the shit out of her and she went back to him, I washed my hands of both of them.
Maybe you can look a little deeper at the self-pitying whiner and try to figure out what they are trying to accomplish with self-pitying whining. Do they need acknowledgement? Do they need attention? Do they need someone to sympathize/empathize? Do they need to feel special? Most behaviours are the result of someone trying to get something they think they need - if you can figure out what it is and are able to give it to them, it might resolve the behaviour. Or not. You might just have to limit contact until the sickness or the whining stops.
As for viva’s question, I have a rule about problems - I stop listening if you don’t make an effort to fix them. Giving occasional support and a sounding board to a friend is one thing, but I don’t tolerate people who try to constantly drain me.
What if what they really need is for the world to stop sucking? Like, I have a friend who has a small child with severe mental problems and a husband who is a sweet man but really not much help–he’s not evil, just unreliable. Her life is pretty much hell, but I don’t really, honestly, see how she can fix it. She can’t abandon her son, but as it is he eats up every minute of her life. Her husband is better than no husband (albeit barely), so it doesn’t really make sense to leave him. I don’t know how to fix her life. What she wants is someone to bitch to an hour or so a day about how how miserable she is. It is draining, but I can’t see blaming her for that: her life is so awful, I don’t have it in me to do much more than listen (but, I must admit, I also don’t have it in me to start dropping by her house every day an hour or two after work and help her manage things, which is really what she needs. I am just not that generous, or perhaps she isn’t that close of a friend. I would do that if my sister, say, were in her position.)
Thanks, everyone, for the tips. I just can’t listen anymore, and besides, the person in question seems to have found others who will, so that’s fine with me; let them have all they can stand.
I can say from personal experience that sometimes, when the world is a great big pile of Suck; all you want is someone to listen. Or even just be there. Nothing more than that. I don’t expect advice or help. Hell, you can even drift off through some of what I say, because at the bottom of it, what is being said isn’t for your benefit, it’s just to SAY IT. To speak it, to name it, to let it out.
Sometimes that’s the best gift you can give someone in that position.
There is a HUGE difference between a whining self-pity party, and a genuine need to unload about how horrible things are. Even if sometimes, that distinction isn’t clear to a third party.
The problem, though, is when someone’s life really sucks for years and years and years. And it does really suck, and it is beyond their control–you reach compassion fatigue, but you can’t hardly blame them.
Manda, even the situation you’ve described has fixes for it. There are all kinds of agencies to help someone with a mentally-handicapped child, and maybe she would be better off without a useless husband. Not that these are the fixes she needs, just examples that even for insurmountable problems, there are usually things that can be done. And at the end of the day, sometimes you just have to accept what life has given you and get on with it. Complaining has never made anyone’s problems better.
Well, yeah, actually, sometimes it does - if you can’t change something, and you’ve done all you can do, you can continue to complain or you can accept what is, and accepting what is will get you a lot better life than complaining about what you can’t change.
I disagree. While some people view complaining as something so negative that they instantly shut down and stop listening, they ultimately are not doing themselves any favors by ignoring the negative.
The key is generally to complain in the right way to the right person, who isn’t always the person in the position to do anything about the problem.
After all, if no one complains, no one knows anything is wrong. Silence implies consent, so “shutting up about it” implies that you are surrendering any possibility of change. Fatalistic Surrender is a soul killer, and a solution killer.
Why does shutting up about your problems imply acceptance of them? I think your statement about “Complaining has never made anyone’s problems better” is a meaningless platitude designed not to make the complainer’s life better, but to make it easier to ignore their pain. Out of sight, out of mind.
I got really sick and it completely messed up my ability to think and do stuff. It most certainly affected my personality. You will lose every last person that will listen if you don’t learn to shut up and socially lie about your condition. The attitude you have will affect how your personality develops over time, and the feed back from others will depend on what they hear. I decided to not be honest with the casual person I met, and just say I’m good. It’s all relative so even though I still have many problems I look at it as I don’t have certain problems so I’m good. I decided to only talk about positive things, so bit by bit it was easier to drop the negative as the feedback loop changed, and my personality shifted back to being nicer. As you must see I sometimes bring up my problems, but I try to leave them out of the conversation. I leave any specifics out of the conversation, unless it’s needed for a point to somebody else that is having problems or ignorant of how a condition is. Even if your life is miserable, people can’t listen about it continuously, no matter how much you feel you need to complain. Your life will suck less if you wake up and change your feedback to others. The feedback from others will help you reinforce the better you. Unfortunately not every complainer will do this, so you may have to break off contact for your mental health.
That wouldn’t work with one of my mother’s friends. If anything interrupts her rant, she just starts again. Both of them are perfectly able to tell you three times about their latest analytical results within a single 2h outing.
Why is Mom a friend of hers? Apparently it makes her feel good to know there’s someone who’s a worse bore than she is…
I had a friend who, during her husband-initiated divorce, started being nothing but a source of whine. If she asked for advice and I gave her some, she’d respond something that came down to “oh, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that, it’s so difficult” even if the advice was something as complicated as “there’s a branch of your local government which helps people with divorce procedures for free if they don’t want to call a lawyer, here’s their phone number.”
For several months I did my best to be supportive, but there came a day when she just kept on with the whine, it was way past my bedtime, and when the whine went from “I don’t see how things can get better” to “you say things got better for you when they were bad, but that’s a lie”… I just had to break the friendship up. It had gotten sorely ragged, but damnit, Thee Shalt Not Call Thy Friend A Liar While Interfering With Thine Friend’s Sleep!
I think this is an important point that puts the lie to the oft-given advice that you should “Just be yourself”. “Being yourself” is fine if you are by nature a cheerful, positive person. But if you are a negative, whiney, woe-is-me person, you better put a sock in it, because nobody wants to hear that. You must adopt the mask that people want to see, or risk being ostracized. Better to suffer in silence than burden anyone else with your pain.
Plus the fact that a stranger asking you how you are is just observing a social convention and isn’t really that interested in your current level of health. It’s just an icebreaker phrase to lead to more conversation.