I definitely think progress is always good! If you grew up in a household that involved complaining, or developed that habit for any reason, it is SO hard to break it.

Just to give an example, which is NOT related to you but which is about venting in general. I had a friend who would go out to dinner and complain the whole time. To her it was "fun venting". To the rest of us, it was emotionally wearying. We wanted to talk about doing well on projects we were undertaking, to get ideas how to have success with them. To us, to go through rehashes of bad things that had happened was not how we wanted to spend our time.

I'm not sure that it helped her much either - because at the end of the evening she had not made any forward progress. She had spent all that time with us and the net result was only that she had talked negatively for several hours. In comparison, when the rest of us talked without her, we ended the meal with tons of great idea, inspiration, and were fired up for what we could do.

So I think long term that to use venting as your way of dealing with problems is sort of like using anger as a way of dealing with people you dislike. It only hurts you in the long term because it is your time and emotions that are being affected. But I also know that venting is a habit some people learn from their parents - and from years and years of repetition. So it's *really* hard to give that up.

So I would definitely say that if you go from "harsh venting" to "productive venting" that that is a very good thing! That is a huge step and will be hard enough to achieve.

To me, that would be a step towards "productive action" (vs venting). So for example I didn't come home and tell Bob all about the bad dinner we had, and how the waiter was. I mentioned we had one bad dinner, and tons of fun, and left it at that. Then I spent 10 minutes writing a letter to the restaurant, expressing our concern about that waiter. So it's handled, the letter will go out, and I move on to other projects.

That's just my opinion!

Lisa Shea, Low Carb and Video Games Editor
Low Carb Forum