Why I Want to Stop Complaining About People

Pondering the next frontier of my spiritual and relational freedom and health

(A five-minute read.)

I woke up Saturday morning with a sudden and simple realization: I want to stop complaining about people because when I complain about people they maintain a certain level of control over me.

Perhaps everyone else figured this out a long time ago, but I’m a slower learner.

This all sprang up because I found myself complaining quite a bit about a number of people last week. I won’t go into all the details, but, suffice it to say, there were a few people who became the recipients of my complaining.

But Saturday morning, I suddenly realized that every time I complained about people, I felt this oppressive weight bearing down on me—like I was enslaved and not truly free.

And that’s when it hit me: complaining about people allows them to continue to exert a certain level of control over me. They exercise a certain type of tyranny.

Not that they’re even trying to control me, of course—but I’m basically handing over control to them by allowing them to inhabit my thoughts and affect my own emotional state and outlook.

When I complain about others, I just continue to rehearse my grievances and allow those people to keep re-wounding me, in many ways.

So I want to stop complaining about them. I want to take ownership of my own emotional reality, refusing to hand it over to anyone else.

This is not at all to say that I must never express discouragement or frustration.

There is, after all, a sense in which I can be “toxically positive” in a way that just bypasses, buries, and ignores my pain and emotional distress, which isn’t healthy at all.

However, when I do express my discouragements and frustrations, I want to transition from making the other person the object of my complaints (which is what psychologists describe as an external locus of control) to making myself and the emotions I feel the object of my reflections (an internal locus of control).

After all, another person’s behavior doesn’t truly have any bearing on how I feel. Their behavior is their behavior and has no true power or control over the way I feel (unless I willingly hand that power over to them). The only thing I truly have any influence over is the way I feel in response to their behavior.

Thus, to allow their behavior to determine the way I feel—or what I say about them—allows them to maintain control over me, which is not a life of freedom.

All this reminds me of something I read a long time ago by Ellen White, a woman I greatly respect and who was one of the most influential founders of my faith community. “Cultivate the habit of speaking well of others,” she first wrote in 1888.

What an amazing and counter-cultural idea!

Speaking well of others is a radical act of freedom! It’s an act of self-determination and self-government, declaring that my actions toward and words about others is not determined by their actions toward or words about me.

I am truly free.

I thus feel convicted that the next frontier of my own spiritual growth and emotional maturing—what Christians have traditionally called “sanctification”—is stepping into the freedom of not complaining about people.

In so doing, I will give myself permission to not expect perfection of course.

After all, it’s about progress, not perfection.

But, so far, I’m doing pretty good. There were a few times since Saturday morning when I wanted to complain about someone to Camille, my wife, but I stopped myself in my tracks and realized I didn’t want to.

And you know what? I felt free. I felt a lightness. I felt like I was not opening myself up to re-wounding but taking ownership of my own attitude and emotional reality.

I want to go the next step, of course, and not only refuse to complain about people, but actually learn to regularly “speak well” of them. But I’m a work in progress.

Two more quick reflections on this as well: learning to speak well of others also means I need to cultivate the habit of speaking well of myself. It means refusing to complain about myself to myself (and to others).

In some ways, complaining about others is a product of me complaining about myself. Complaining about and being critical of them is an attempt to help me feel better about myself. But I anticipate it’s a bit of a chicken/egg thing, and the two will play off each other: speaking well of myself will help me speak well of others; and speaking well of others will help me speak well of myself.

Secondly, complaining about people to other people really undermines the strength and integrity of a relationship. It lays siege to trust.

That is, if I complain to you about someone else, it really undermines your trust in me. After all, if I complain to you about that other person, it would be easy for you to assume that I complain to others about you.

I know I’ve certainly wondered about this when friends of mine complain to me about other people.

Thus, complaining is really, really detrimental to healthy and trusting relationships, for many different reasons.

The bottom line? I want to truly be free. I want to step into the full freedom of God’s love and pursue optimal relational, social, and spiritual health.

And complaining does nothing to aid that pursuit.

POSTSCRIPT: I must hasten to add and make clear that I will not shame or look down upon you if you find yourself complaining to me.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.