Why Complaining Chokes Off Creative Insights

Recently, my widowed father treated me, my two brothers and our spouses to a two-week European cruise. The first couple of days, I was out of sorts, and the feeling was always worse after meals. Was it because I wasn’t drinking alcohol anymore and everyone else was? Or maybe I was losing my tolerance for small talk.

At first, I did what most people do in situations like mine. I complained to my husband about how unsettled I felt around my family.

But complaining is our way of resisting a problem, and resistance is an insight blocker.

People often justify their complaining saying, “I need to vent.” Venting implies that we’re hoping to get answers by talking it out.  

But, if we’re truthful with ourselves, we usually complain to get sympathy or validation. Sympathy and validation make us feel better in the short run, but they’re both a tradeoff for true insight.

Far better to switch from complaining to curiosity. Curiosity tosses the issue into the jurisdiction of your creative mind and that’s where it belongs. Why?

When you complain, you’re using the language-based left side of your brain which isn’t equipped to answer big-picture questions.   For those expansive questions we need the creative right side of the brain.  

Knowing this, I quit my complaining and kept myself alert and curious about possible answers. During the next dinner with my family, the insight finally came.         

  As I observed the situation and tuned into my own feelings, I noticed my brothers and father dominated every conversation. If I spoke, it always took a couple of tries before they’d listen. What’s more, when I had the floor, it was brief. They quickly regained control of the conversation.    

It’s as if I’m invisible, I thought.

But that wasn’t the insight.

It was this: These meals connected me with long-buried emotional pain I needed to be aware of.

As a child, I was often overlooked during family meals and, as a result, I developed an erroneous belief that what I had to say didn’t matter.  

That explained a lot of things about me, like my major teenage rebellion. But there was also an upside: Being mostly ignored at family gatherings also meant I’d developed a rich inner life that led me to being a writer.

My insight helped me unravel all kinds of leftover, unconscious resistance that still occasionally affected me. To justify my existence, I’ve always been a pleaser. Also, attention made me nervous because I felt like I didn’t deserve it.

 In adulthood, when I’m one-on-one with family members, I’m not ignored. But during the cruise, everyone reenacted old childhood patterns where the conversation mostly revolved around the males’ interests.    

Without this insight, I might have chalked the family vacation up as an unpleasant experience but instead I happily shed some old, ingrained resistance.

That’s how you can distinguish an insight from the false conclusions of the complaining conditioned minds. The latter ties you up in knots, the former liberates.