Do You Want to be Taken Seriously? Or Do You Just Want to Have a Tantrum?

The fact that men and women have different styles of communication has been obvious for a long time. When I was working towards my Ph.D. in the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1990s, Deborah Tannen’s book You Just Don’t Understand Me was all the rage. In it, Tannen explains how women use language to establish rapport and connection, whereas men use language to convey information and solve problems. Tannen argues that these two different communication styles cause men and women to frequently mis-understand each other. Some of my colleagues (especially those who came from the Marxist literary-and-cultural-theory side) insisted that there was “patriarchal oppression” underlying men’s communication style, which in turn “silenced” women’s voices and/or devalued the status of female communication.

In my experience, the biggest barrier to women being taken seriously is not “systemic sexism” or “discrimination” or “patriarchy,” but the fact that many women sabotage their own effectiveness by allowing their emotions get in the way. Some women do an emotion-dump whenever they feel provoked, with their Insta-besties cheering them on. To top it off, these women have no constructive suggestions about what to do going forward. Social media urges women to just go off on a tantrum when they feel like it, but no further guidance is provided. It’s as if being a ranting harpy is going to magically solve the problem when there is no plan for actually solving the problem in the first place.

This is not a women-only phenomenon. A lot of men vent and yell, and are just as ineffective, annoying, and abusive. So, regardless of whether you’re XX or XY, you can learn something here.

Emotion Dumping from Out-of-the-Blue

Emotion-dumping is another way of saying “tantrum.” Small children have tantrums. It’s normal for them because they have not learned self-control. But adults who have tantrums need to learn self-control for the sake of their personal and professional relationships. Behaving like a 3-year-old when you are 35 is not effective, and it can become abusive (which I’ll talk about below).

I like the phrase “emotion-dumping” to describe adult tantrums because it is visual and it describes a bigger, messier aftermath than a child’s tantrum. Here’s what I mean. When an adult dumps their negative emotions all over someone else’s floor, and leaves it up to that someone else (the target) to clean up the mess, it’s a bigger problem than a 3-year-old stomping his feet about candy.

There are two things I’ve noticed about the kind of adult who does an emotion-dump:

1. There is often no warning that an emotion-dump is about to happen. Sure, there might be a bit of build-up, or some flimsy excuse for why that was the moment she chose to let loose, but to any halfway-rational observer, the preceding conditions and the excuse don’t justify the emotion-dump.

2. Regardless of what she says, she doesn’t want to avoid an emotion-dump in the future, because it feels good to discharge negative emotions onto someone else. Hence, she has no incentive for solving the problem she is emoting about.

Imagine this scenario: At a holiday office party, Mia and her marketing team are having a great time. Everything is festive and bright. One of the team members mentions that they are getting great response from a mass-email marketing campaign that they launched last week. Another team-member named Berta begins ranting that Mia stupidly delayed that very mass-email marketing campaign by a day. Mia is surprised that Berta is bringing this up now, in the middle of a holiday party. Berta’s rant appears to come out-of-the blue, and it wasn’t justified by the previous comment about how well the campaign is doing.

Mia suggests that they tackle it on Monday, in the office, when they can discuss it in detail.

Berta snaps: “I won’t let you tell me when and where I’m allowed to talk about certain things. Now is as good a time as any. You delayed that email campaign and made us miss a deadline. It was a bad decision.”

Mia explains: “That’s because the email had problems with formatting and layout. It needed to be corrected before it could be sent.”

Berta rolls her eyes. “You always have to be such a perfectionist. Nobody would have even noticed! I worked really hard on that campaign, and here you have to go and change it.” Berta lists all the reasons why Mia made the wrong decision. Then she launches into a tirade that gets personal. “That’s the thing I can’t stand about you, Mia, is that you never take into account my feelings, my perspective. You just do what you want to do, without any regard for me. I feel invisible. Well, I’ve had enough. I’m not going to be silent anymore!” Berta names all the things she hates about Mia: her politics, her whacky sense of humor, even her taste in shoes. Other co-workers look on with astonishment. Some of them glance at Mia’s shoes, but don’t find anything noteworthy.

When Mia says truthfully “I had no idea you felt this way about me,” Berta goes off again about how she’s been holding in her feelings for a long time, and how her friends on social media have encouraged her to speak her mind. She offers a flimsy excuse: “I know I’m ranting. I’ve had a lot of alcohol and sugar this evening, so I’m more outspoken than usual.”

Mia is annoyed, and she says sarcastically: “I’ll bet your hashtags on social media are spot on, Bertha, something along the lines of #Witch_With_a_Capital_B, #HarridansWon’tHush, #ShrewToo.”

A few of the co-workers chuckle at this, but Berta is peeved. “That’s not funny,” she snaps.

“My sense of humor is whackier than usual,” Mia says with a smile. “It must be all the alcohol and sugar.”

Mia gets herself under control, and realizes it’s pointless to fight with Berta. So she takes a more constructive approach that focuses on the future. She validates Berta’s feelings. “It must be really frustrating for you to have someone go back and change something that you worked long and hard on. I totally understand that frustration.” Then Mia asks a key question that is also a test: “What are one or two things that I can do differently, going forward, to improve our working relationship so that we don’t have this problem again in the future?”

Berta rolls her eyes, and says in an exasperated tone: “I don’t know! I haven’t thought about it.”

“That’s fine,” Mia says. “I realize you might need time to think about it. Let me know when you’re ready to discuss it, and we can work out a way forward that’ll be beneficial for both of us. We can brainstorm together, or we can bring in an outside mediator. It’s up to you.” Notice that Mia is trying to figure out a way to avoid such an unpleasant scene in the future, and she is asking for Berta’s cooperation in a tactful way that brings Berta into the process as a partner.

The ball is now in Berta’s court. How she handles this will tell whether she should be taken seriously. That’s the test. If Berta comes back with some suggestions, and/or if she agrees to brainstorm solutions with Mia or with a mediator, then the two of them have a chance to mend the rift and work out a less contentious, more productive relationship going forward.

But if Berta ignores that request and doesn’t follow up with any suggestions about how to avoid an emotion-dump in the future, then she is not a serious person. She has just proven that her drama at the holiday party wasn’t about solving a problem, but about venting her feelings at other people’s expense. Going forward, her complaints will now be (rightly) viewed as self-serving, and her next tantrum will further alienate her co-workers and make them less likely to want to deal with her. This could jeopardize her job.

When Tantrums Become Abusive

What about Gordon Ramsay, the television chef who verbally abuses people? If he can do it, why shouldn’t other people? This is like saying that pro-wrestling is a good way to learn how to solve conflict. Ramsay’s show, like pro-wrestling, is scripted and performative. If you think TV entertainment is a good guideline for your life, if you think people are there to be your verbal or physical punching bags, you have major problems and you need to get help.

Everybody needs to vent from time to time. Sometimes a vent becomes an emotion-dump, and that can be acceptable under certain circumstances. For example, therapists are paid to listen to your emotion-dump. Friends and family members can be there for you, too, especially if something extraordinary has happened. But venting/emotion-dumping becomes abusive (in my opinion) when any of these applies:

1. You do it a lot.

2. You use it as a pressure-relief valve without regard to the personal capital that you are using up. There is only so much venting that other people can take (if they are not your therapist), especially if you re-hash the same old complaints without any progress.

3. You use it to manipulate, control, take down, or hurt the other person.

4. After chewing someone out, you don’t offer anything constructive, such as a way for them to redeem themselves or to make amends going forward.

“Abuse” is another word for “unjust punishment.” There is a point where people don’t want to be around your ranting because it feels like punishment, and it is. People will avoid punishment by avoiding you. And if they cannot avoid you, they will do other things to avoid the punishment, such as lie and manipulate to defend themselves. Do you want your intimate relationships to be built on lies just because you can’t control yourself?

I had a neighbor who would yell at her pre-teen kids for the better part of an hour. These tirades happened on a regular basis. She would list all the ways they had misbehaved and disobeyed her, and how ungrateful they were, despite all she did for them. I didn’t want to hear any of this, but she was so loud that it was hard to avoid, even though we were in separate apartments.

To my knowledge, she never explained to her children what they could do to correct their behavior to avoid this kind of punishment in the future. They were not stupid kids, and I suspect that she didn’t have that conversation with them. Looking back, my guess is that her yelling wasn’t about helping them, it was about a pressure-relief valve for her. Her children were her verbal punching bags. I’m sure she didn’t regard it as abusive.

This doesn’t just happen in parent-child relationships. I’ve seen this is romantic relationships. The tantrum-partner will use the target partner as a pressure-release valve. He’ll complain bitterly to the target about whatever is annoying him, including the behavior of others (something that the target has no control over). The complaining partner is so unpleasant and verbally abusive, that the target will take proactive steps just to avoid having to endure yet another emotion-dump from the partner. By “proactive steps,” I mean that the target-partner might call ahead to warn others to do or not do certain things so that she doesn’t have to deal with his emotion-dump later on. (“Be sure to ask about his mother, otherwise he’ll think you don’t care. Don’t talk to him about whether he plans to look another job, it’ll just annoy him.”) Having to manage others just to avoid punishment is, to put it mildly, a stressful and sub-optimal relationship to be in.

Here’s the bottom line: It’s okay to vent to a partner or friend, but don’t cross the line into being abusive. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that you are another Gordon Ramsay, and that your emotion-dumps are acceptable. They’re not. If you have complaints, then also have a plan for finding a solution. If all you want to do is an emotion-dump on someone’s floor with no strategy for avoiding that in the future, then you are not a serious person. In that case, it’s not the fault of “sexism” or “patriarchy” that people learn to avoid you and ignore your complaints. They just don’t want to put up with your abuse, and they shouldn’t have to.