Venting, OR Adding Fuel to the Fire?

Last Saturday found me and six close friends on the floor around a low table, drinking mint tea and toasting a recent birthday. The subject matter of our conversation drifted like hookah smoke from the Moroccan restaurant’s menu to husbands, silly celebrity gossip, and – inevitably – our children. I made the comment that I really enjoyed cleaning up pages and pages of my daughter’s short stories, pencil sketches, and cartoons this fall, and how I had waited fifteen months to see her with enough free time to author such works. My daughter is in fourth grade this year, which is a breath of fresh air given that third grade is THE homework grade for many at our elementary school. Raising the issue of homework in a circle of mothers seems risky, I know, but my sense of gratitude at the new free time outweighed my negative emotions about last year’s homework, so I felt OK about putting that sentiment in play.

Let’s just say I erred. The dual threads of homework (especially mountains thereof) and lack of free time acted as tinder to our conversational fire. We jumped a few fire breaks and kept on going until the rhetoric got hotter than my lamb kebab on saffron rice. After lunch, I staggered into the house with an emotional hangover, feeling lower when I returned than when I left. I told my husband that I had started a firestorm of conversation and felt terrible, to which he offered the conciliatory (but ultimately unhelpful), “But you didn’t mean to.” I called to apologize to a few friends and later finished the job on email, and everyone kindly let me off of the hook. One friend talked about the importance of letting emotions out, how it is important to vent in a safe places so that you can ultimately return to a state of equilibrium to deal with the problems.

That is a Freudian take on emotions, and certainly has great validity in that you cannot suppress negative emotions (or any emotion, really) or it will leak out in unintended ways. I do agree with that, but when the ‘leaking” is replaced by full-throttled venting, I don’t think it works well. I turned to Google to do some quick research and found an interesting article on venting by David McRaney on a website called “You are Not So Smart,” a perfectly titled source in my situation. McRaney says the following: “Common sense says venting is an important way to ease tension, but common sense is wrong. Venting – catharsis – is pouring fuel into a fire.” http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/08/11/catharsis/. He cites research done by psychologist Brad Bushman at Iowa State in the 1990s where Bushman discovered that “belief in catharsis makes you more likely to seek it out” and that acting on feelings of rage by hitting a punching bag, for example, just added fuel to the emotional fire and prolonged the sense of anger and encouraged participants to act out angrily against their perceived aggressors.

I am not a psychologist, nor am I an expert in anything except my own behavior (and even that claim seems dubious). I do know that venting, at least prolonged and heightened venting, leaves me with a bitter aftertaste, a sense of exhaustion, and a somewhat darker outlook on life. Quick bursts of frustration made to an unbiased party (like my husband or sister) seems to work well – and I do that often enough. But starting a vent session with a group of people who agree violently will not be my MO in the future. As McRaney states, “The more effective approach is to just stop. Take your anger off of the stove. Let it go from a boil to a simmer to a lukewarm state where you no longer want to sink your teeth into the side of buffalo.” In my case it was lamb that received the brunt of my tooth marks, but I get his point. Next time I will move on to deep breaths and crossword puzzles rather than blister my friends with a sense of righteous indignation ( I promise to try, anyway!)