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Complaining as affirming one's values and experience

8 tweets · November 2020 · 184 likes · 18 retweets · read on Twitter

hot take re complaining: it is how people affirm their values and the reality & legitimacy of their own experience

if someone is complaining, the best way you can care for them and for the overall situation is to find a way to dignify and support and welcome their values & experience, while not making anybody wrong (applies to self too, if you notice urge to complain)

turns out that once someone feels sufficiently authorized to have their own experience and values, they actually tend to have a fair bit of space to consider that the person they're frustrated with... has its own integrity!

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

An underappreciated implication of things like Core Transformation is that if you generalize it to other people, you realize… …the things your loved ones do that annoy you most are often precisely the ways in which they're most reliably able to care for themselves.

although invariably almost everyone forgets that step 😂

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

Turns out I'm pretty good at understanding people when I feel motivated to do so, and I'm pretty motivated to do so when it feels safe.

But tbh probably they actually don't manage to reach the step where the person feels deeply authorized to have their own experience and values, and to trust and distrust who we trust and distrust

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

Healing from trauma amounts to learning that it is okay to know what you know, and feel what you feel. — Bessel van der Kolk (quoted from my notes of an out-loud remark, so maybe slightly paraphrased, hence no " marks)

Years of institutionalized gaslighting are hard to unlearn. But possible! Emotional reconsolidation can actually do this and restore self-trust, in way less time than it took to undermine peoples' self-trust so hard in the first place.

QC @QiaochuYuan ·

hey remember how we went to school where we spent 8 hours a day for over a decade having what our bodies could do completely under the control of authority figures boy i wonder if that had any lasting effects

Beautiful lil story of the power of receiving someone's grievances:

Divia Eden 🔍 @diviacaroline ·

One very memorable parenting experience for me was my maybe 20m kid melting down at night, me trying to empathize with her, and not being able to keep up until I made a list of all her grievances. At that point she was enthralled and we read it together maybe 20x

oh and here's a side-thread where I convey this whole point in a different way to someone who was coming from a position similar to the one I used to hold on complaints pre-2020

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

@AbstractFairy So I'm very with you re commiserating. Literally "misery together". Doesn't help. But deeper under every complaint is something that's very *important* to someone. It might be something that consciously they can't even name. It also might be too big and obvious, like DIGNITY.