How to Complain

Almost everyday

with slightly dispiriting inevitability,

someone in our vicinity will hurt us in some way.

It could be a friend,

a colleague,

a child or, most likely,

a partner.

They'll be neglectful of something that matters

immensely to us.

They'll be, to a greater or lesser extent,

unkind, thoughtless, offensive or brusk.

We may never have given much thought to observing the way

we characteristically respond.

And yet, our style of reacting to maltreatment

goes right to the heart of who we are

and can make the difference between:

A life of constant frustration and bitterness

and one of tolerable coexistence.

A crucial part of the art of living

seems to lie in knowing how to

complain constructively and sanely to

those who do us wrong.

There are broadly 3 main ways in which one might complain.

The first is live fury.

Here, we explode, shout, insult, belittle and

attempted to crush our opponent.

What lies behind this response is it hard panic and agitation

and a catastrophic feeling of hurt and betrayal.

The slights to our dignity cuts us so deep,

unsettled us so much,

we attempt to ROAR our way out of humiliation.

Our bark may be loud but it

comes from a place of extreme vulnerability.

We're living without a psychological skin.

Unfortunately, of course,

live fury is guaranteed to

prevent our complaint from ever being heard.

In the face of our ranting,

those who've offended us, will themselves get offended,

begin to resent us,

refuse to listen and accuse us of a raft of things,

which entirely bury our original

complaint against them.

We achieve nothing.

There is a second option:

Cold fury.

Here one says very little but

hates very deeply and quietly.

We don't dare to complain directly from a despair

that the other would ever understand.

Fuelled with a feeling that we don't

deserve ever to be listened to.

A primitive self-hatred encases us in

cynicism and melancholy.

We become experts at withdrawal.

We've probably been like this from a young age.

The adults we grew up around were probably

too touchy, busy, domineering or absent to

give us much of a hearing.

So we learn to swallow our pain and while seething inside,

act with brittle courtesy and veiled aggression against those hated

characters who've done us wrong.

Then comes that far rarer achievement:

Mature complaint.

In order to master such a feat,

we must work with a background sense that

we don't fundamentally deserve meanness

and also that it won't on its own ever

be able to destroy us.

We are calm because we like ourselves well enough,

a legacy of being cared for by people who

liked us and refuse to endure

punishment quietly or with masochistic patience.

We have the confidence not to

be thrown into complete disarray by insult.

We can seek restitution and

tend to do so fairly fast while the incident

is still fresh in everyone's mind

but with a measured, strategic, calm manner

of people secure in their right to have their say.

We're careful not to insult or

belittle our opponents.

We always simply say: How we feel.

Rather than declaring: You're vindictive and selfish for doing X;

We say: I feel hurt :( by the way you do X.

We don't give others easy excuses to get

insulted and block their ears in turn.

We don't want to make it that simple for them.

Nevertheless we don't have

unlimited faith that people are always

going to understand and accept what

we're trying to tell them,

yet we want to speak out anyway.

Because we know it's not good for us to swallow our

complaints and we don't want ulcers.

We are at once realistic about the chances of

dialogue and determine to talk in any case.

We deserve a huge amount of

compassion for our failure to know how

to complain wisely.

Our inability is a snapshot into our past and into some

properly troublesome dynamics that occurred long ago.

But by sketching the ideal style of complaining,

we can start to imagine what we're not natively capable of

and to fill in through reason and reflection

what we haven't been able to achieve

through upbringing and love.

We can take our first stumbling steps

on the path

to mature compliant.

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