Thursday, March 5, 2009

The Vent Factor, 1 of 1 "Spinning Our Wheels"

Lots of people like to talk about needing to vent. Let's be honest, "venting" is a nice term for whining, bitching, and complaining. Venting, IMO, is a tool used for unrecognized anger.It has it's place, don't get me wrong. But I see SO MANY unchosen using the term "I need to vent" as a way to spin their collective wheels. The cycle of venting when you have a parent with a personality disorder is never ending. Seriously, the verbal attacks and phsychological assaults will never stop with an unrecovered parent.
So we turn to this thing called venting. We blow off our steam and clean out our filled to bursting psyches. We feel refreshed, lighter somehow. It's a heady feeling to get all that junk out in the open. Venting is almost always done with some sort of audience, be it a friend, a blog or a forum. Somehow this thing called venting just doesn't work as a single activity.
I have seen this again and again in real life-an unchosen vents over and over. It feels so good we just keep going....and going... and going. We beat the proverbial horse to death with ultimately the same topics. Sooner rather than later we realize that the same people who encouraged us to vent no longer return our calls or e mails. But hell, we don't care. In a way that almost mirrors our PD parent we just look for new people to listen to us.
What happens more often than not is that we end up chasing our tails. It's a vicious cycle, this venting. It's addicting, really. We get a high off of the release of our words.
But we get stuck. A lot of unchosen's can't seem to get out of "vent" mode and into talk mode. By talk mode, I mean having a "venting" session where we can hear the feedback of the person we talk to. So often, any feedback at all is considered to be worthless because the person we vent to has no idea what we are going thru (or so we seem to think). Because of the anger associated with venting, many unchosen (including myself at times) get extremely defensive when the person we vent to expresses anything but complete agreement with our thoughts.
I so wish I could just show my life as a movie. I want to alternately shake and hug the unchosens I see who spin their wheels with this venting. I want to scream "all it does is keep the cycle of crap going." I wish people could see how many people I have lost because of my need to "vent."
It doesn't have to be that way, and I promise that by Sunday I will have part 2 of venting.

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