Against Venting

I do a lot of venting on this site. Part of the reason I started this blog, after all, involved putting into words some long-withheld feelings about the theologies practiced by the conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists I study. Some recent experiences, however, have led me to question the wisdom and ethics of that venting.

Some of these experiences?

1) Like any semi-enclosed community, the theatre department I work in occasionally encounters some internal dissent. So-and-so's direction of X play is bad. Such-and-such group of popular kids always get the choice roles. Professor Y is mean or incompetent. Again like most such communities, this dissent circulates and festers through streams and pools of gossip. We as a faculty have been trying to take steps to drain the venom out of our program, mainly by encouraging a culture of responsible communication. If you have a problem, don't stew about it; deal with it. It's the old kindergarten rule: don't gossip. Part of our new initiative, of course, involves recognizing the ways in which we as faculty participate in a gossip culture. To my chagrin, I recognize that sometimes I fall into this practice myself, generally under the guise of "stress relief."

2) Related to this conscious initiative, I realize, is a less conscious quasi-paranoia brought on by my job. The higher up the administrative ladder I climb, the more cautious I become about communication. I've learned from painful experience how e-mail messages I meant for only one person soon get circulated to everyone in creation--to maximum damage. I routinely counsel my students not to put anything into e-mail form that they do not want as part as public paper trail leading directly to them (and sometimes, I tell them, you do want a paper trail).

Nor is my paranoia merely about electronic or written communication. We've just moved back into a renovated office/theatre space. One of the first things I learned (and was told) about the space was that the walls between offices are quite thin. I had grown used to being able to close my office door and speak candidly; this is no longer possible. I'm trying to practice a standard polite-yet-firm "I have nothing to say about that."

Finally, on a more university-wide level, people in all departments are having to polish their best political poker faces. Finances are very tight (as they are in most universities), and the university is desperate to cut wasteful or problematic programs. In practice, this often translates into an excuse to clean house of troublemakers. Everyone is therefore doing their best not to seem like a whiner. Indeed, one administrator advised us to accompany every complaint or request to higher-ups with at least five positive reports.

It's just as well, then, that I'm trying not to gossip; even if I wanted to, it's become less wise to do so.

3) Finally, and most importantly, venting isn't just imprudent; it's counterproductive. I ran into this article from the American Psychological Association, which punctures the longstanding myth that "getting your anger out" through complaining or hitting something helps. The researchers in this study found, in fact, that such venting behavior makes anger worse. My sister, a mental health expert herself, has often said something similar.

I have no such expertise myself, but my guess is that neither the APA nor my sister mean that people should never speak about their anger or the reasons behind it. I suspect that repression and silence cost more than venting. And I can see a value in "reality checking"--seeking either the validation or correction of our reactions to a situation from someone with a fresher perspective. But I would also guess that a point comes wherein a healthy articulation of one's anger crosses over into an unhealthy obsession with it. I heard once (and I have no evidence to back this up) that our brain chemicals enable us to have a brief burst of anger--something like a minute or two. After that we have to make ourselves angry, feeding more fuel into the fire.

This rings true to me. Often I'll find myself rehearsing instances in which I perceived a slight against me (the "here's what I shoulda said" conversation). Of late, I've been trying to stop myself when I notice such mental patterns. I tend to get more frustrated that I didn't do anything in the moment, linking that one often trifling instance to other instances where I similarly didn't do anything--and the whole feeling snowballs.

The problem (and here I'm channeling my counselor sister) isn't so much with anger per se as it is what we do with that anger. There's a difference, I suppose, between expressing anger to someone who made us angry and venting, which implies that we're talking about our anger to someone not actually related to the problem situation. In such a case, we're complaining instead of acting. The rush of righteous indignation replaces rather than prompts constructive action.

All of these thoughts make me reconsider this blog. Am I not here venting--to audiences (myself, mainly) not directly related to the problem? Or, as my friend Sonja asked me after hearing about my research, "Do you ever envision telling all this to conservative evangelicals themselves?"

Good question...

More tomorrow,

JF