Why do people complain so much? Dr. Ray looks at the internal and external payoffs of complaining, why chronic complainers push people away, and what complaining says about gratitude.
The payoffs of complaining
In my most recent book, How to Get Along with Almost Everybody, there’s a chapter on something called conversation killers. Complaining is one of them. But there has to be some payoff for complaining, otherwise, no payoff, people wouldn’t do it. So there are internal and external payoffs.
The old country song says, “You can feel bad if it makes you feel better.” Is there something about complaining that is internally rewarding? Is it a rehearsal of, “Life hasn’t been good to me”? Is it a rehearsal of, “I’m not getting my fair shake”? Is it a rehearsal of, “I’ve got to voice this because I’m feeling emotionally so distressed that I’ve got to give words to it”? Something is internally rewarding about complaining.
Maybe, though, it’s easier to understand the external rewards. When you complain, especially to people who care a lot about you, their tolerance for listening is longer. They will listen to your complaints because they love you and they’re concerned about you and they care what’s happening in your life. When you complain to somebody who really doesn’t know you all that well, their tolerance is a lot less. Why would they want to listen to what’s going bad for you, especially if what’s going bad for them in their mind dwarfs what’s going bad for you? And we’ll get to that in a second. Some people, when you complain, will commiserate. They will pull alongside of you empathetically and talk about how bad that is or how sad that must make you or how frustrated you are by that. They’ll do something or say something that is considered affirming to you, shrink talk. So there’s a reward to that.
Why chronic complainers push people away
Chronic complainers push people away. We’ve had so many calls on this program, and I get it with my folks in the office, where they won’t pick up the phone with relatives or friends because they just don’t want to hear 29 minutes of complaining. Complaining is also particularly grating when it’s nothing but complaining. It’s not an attempt to solve any problem. Any advice given is usually batted away, ignored, or countered: “I can’t do that.” Why? “Because I have this problem and this problem you don’t understand.” So complaining is less tolerable when the person doing the complaining isn’t interested in any kind of resolution to their complaints.
But here is, I think, a much more subtle maleffect of complaining. In many cases, you don’t know who you’re complaining to, and you don’t know their circumstances. If this is a close friend or a relative, you may know some things about their life, but not everything. I had a client many, many years ago who came to me dealing with grief over her little nine-year-old daughter passing away from leukemia. One of the things she said was a revelation to herself is that her tolerance for other people’s complaining after her daughter’s death dropped dramatically, particularly if they were complaining about their kids. If she didn’t share with them the details, or even the death of her daughter, they had no idea. So they were complaining away to a woman who so desperately wanted to have her daughter back.
A friend of mine told me that he went to a job interview, and a fellow was leaning back in his chair, staring out the window with his back to my friend. My friend walked in and the fellow said, “Have you ever had a really bad day?” That was an odd way to start an interview, my friend thought. He said, “Well, I guess I have. A lot of people have had bad days.” And the fellow turned and said, “You know, I thought that I had a lot of really bad days until I had a really bad day.” He turned around and his face was completely disfigured. He had been either trapped in a fire or something exploded, and he was nothing but scar tissue as they attempted to put his face back together. Of course, it was a face that got a lot of stares. It was a face that maybe scared little kids. And he complained a lot less about the stuff of complaining.
Complaining and weak gratitude
Complaining also is a sign of weak gratitude. Why am I going to focus on telling you all about how I have a problem with my big toe when in fact I can walk, or I have shoes? I saw a young man today at the dealership, probably somewhere in his mid-twenties. He walked in with a prosthesis on his left leg. It was a more modern one, not the old type, with a spring. He walked with a noticeable wobble, because of course you can’t replace a natural limb. I looked at that young man and thought, in all likelihood, given his age, he was in the military. Probably an IED. And I’m sitting there doing some writing with two good legs, and I’m thinking, yeah, okay, so I’ve got some problems in my knee here. I bet that guy wished he had problems in his knee.
There’s got to be a payoff to complaining, both internally and externally. The key is to get rid of the payoff. To get rid of the payoff, you’re likely to complain less.
Dr. Ray covers conversation killers like this one in How to Get Along with Almost Everybody.
Transcript of Dr. Ray’s audio blog, lightly edited for reading.