Episode 077 - Chronic Complaining

This Jungian Life Podcast

Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano

Jungian, Mental Health, Health & Fitness, Psychology, Dreams, Jung, Relationships, Selfhelp, Society & Culture, Psychoanalysis

4.8 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2019

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Complaining is universal, perhaps, like gossiping, one of the first uses to which developed language was put. Overall, a complaint can refer to a perceived legal injustice, medical symptom, or other personally painful matter. The chronic complainer feels a lack of agency, and implicitly pleads for emotional support and/or effective action from another. A complaint may therefore range from a request for empathic engagement to an effort to assign responsibility to others. Listeners have a felt sense of a complaint’s legitimacy; we resonate to injustice and its reparation in the tale of The Goose Girl. We feel exasperation with the heroine’s petulant entitlement in the tale of The Princess and the Pea, and take satisfaction in the punishment of greed in The Fisherman and His Wife. A chronic complaint is a call to identify and understand an underlying problem rather than externalizing it.

Dream

“There was a man (though he seemed not simply a man but some combination creature or child like or otherworldly -- maybe something that can turn into something else) and he was lying down and sort of whimpering. He was wearing a long light-colored robe. Then I realized that on his side he had a large gaping wound and rotting flesh and there were birds, many families of birds feeding on his flesh. He was in great pain but also kind of trance-like and internal. I had to help him. It was a grave situation. He couldn’t help himself. He was helpless. He seemed pathetic. It would be a really long painful death. I didn’t know what could help but thought maybe if I took a hose I could force the birds off with water. I did that and maybe someone was helping me, because as I hosed it seemed there was another set of hands “cleaning” or holding the birds that came off. It was arduous. I thought it was a great infection and how could I get him or it to a hospital. Then I woke up.”

References

Video: It’s Not About the Nail (YouTube). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg

Sieff, Daniela. Understanding and Healing Emotional Trauma (Amazon).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this Jungian life.
0:03.0	Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee,
0:09.0	invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
0:17.0	I'm Lisa Marciano and I'm a youngian analyst in Philadelphia.
0:22.0	I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a youngian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a youngian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
0:27.0	I'm Deborah Stewart, a youngian analyst on Cape Cod. Hello and welcome to this young life once again and today we're going to deal with an altogether human phenomenon that I would
0:46.7	certainly put my chips down on that everyone has engaged in and that is the issue of chronic complaining. Complaining
0:57.1	that is chronic is like having a squeaky door that never gets fixed but
1:02.3	continues to bother us.
1:05.0	It's not so serious often that it's really a disaster,
1:10.0	but it keeps on coming back and keeps on coming back.
1:14.3	And we seem to, in complaining chronically about the issue,
1:19.2	lack the power or the authority to actually do something about it. It goes into the
1:26.7	interpersonal realm. We need another person to listen to us. Complaining can range
1:32.3	from being a real complaint of the soul to something that other people
1:38.1	might consider pretty incidental.
1:40.6	I'm aware of how good it can feel to complain and that it can be this sort of oh I don't know you can just
1:50.8	really revel in it and it can kind of be a social sport
1:54.9	complaining with other people can be a way of bonding I'm thinking about maybe
2:00.4	being in a relatively new situation with people that you don't know very well,
2:05.0	it can be fairly simple to turn to the person next to you and complain about the weather
2:10.0	or some other deficiency in your environment.
	...

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